Via Mumbles (early bird off the back of a truck edition), Newspoll comes in with primaries running 46 (up 4) / 37 (down 1) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 56/44 the same way, up 1 from a fortnight ago. This comes from a sample of 1155 giving an MoE around the 2.9% mark.
Oh dear – well this hasn’t been pretty for the press gallery and political commentators today, has it?
Monday morning we were assured that Rudd’s “Walk with the gods is over”, that “It seems more likely that the last year and a half [of polling results] has been the aberration, that we have now entered normalcy” declared Peter Hartcher, with the sort of biblical authority usually reserved for Paul Kelly on a gravitas bender.
“ Back to real life after the honeymoon” went the SMH – the end of the Rudd era was upon us, driven, apparently, by pensions or something or other plucked from the vagaries of political columnist nullspace.
For half an hour Sky News Agenda banged on and on and on about how politics was once again close – how it had changed (they even had serious looking people in suits saying serious sounding things to prove it) – not because it necessarily had changed or not, but simply because they seemingly wanted it to have changed…. more exciting news and all that. Organisations as diverse as the ABC, right through to those talkback radio muppets couldn’t have pulled it any harder if they tried.
And it was all over sampling variance.
Let’s repeat that – these folks went drifting off into political la la land, getting their knickers in right knots, all over sampling variance.
Yes, well done folks – marvellous effort really. As we said on Monday – put that in your narrative and smoke it.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth where budgets rarely make a rats arse of difference to public opinion vote estimates, the usual charts for Newspoll come in like this:
We’ll go over all this in far more detail tomorrow, including having a squiz at the Newspoll budget questions.
16 Comments
Its been fun though. I’ve been playing with RWDB’s all day…
Can’t wait for the morn
Shame on you AA, have you no mercy
I like ‘gravitas bender’ Possum. Very nice. 9/10
So what was the swing, if there was one, using Pollytrend? Or is that for tomorrow.
That’s tomorrow Oz – I’ve read far too much silliness today to stay awake any longer I think.
Awesome work Possum, you’re the only politiccal commentator I care about these days…
RE your comments on the Budget change; ever run an analysis on the poll results, say 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after a budget? I wonder if a change would show up? I suspect that no one is really listening, as evidenced by the large numbers of ‘don’t know’.
EB
Sure have, over here Evan
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/04/24/budget-effect/
And a big thanks to Grog for the cognitive dissonance line – touche Grog.
Poss
In what sense are you using the term “cognitive dissonance”?
Cheers Possum, but it was actually thewetmale who came up with the line.
I merely quoted him:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/05/18/essential-report-turnbull-boost-lasts-16-hours/comment-page-1/#comment-13006
“I just want to see all the MSM work through the cognitive dissonance.”
The ABC’s approach (News Radio) was to simply, and completely, ignore the Essential Research poll… as if it never existed at all.
Oh, and to lead with the PPM figure and only mention the Newspoll TPP in passing, at the end.
Quote: “A second poll has seen the Prime Minister take a knock”…
They also mentioned that “his party (i.e. THE GOVERNMENT) did a bit better” than he did.
Weak.
Yeah, i like the “gravitas bender” line too. And cheers to Grog as well.
I was listening to ABC radio this morning, and if i remember correctly, Michael Brissenden described the combined poll results as ‘confusing’ or something similar. I really wish someone could teach the MSM about margin of error. If the true underlying public opinion is 54-46 then both Nielsen and Newspoll are correct. It is not confusing at all. Especially when you look at the additional questions from all polls, the state of politics in Aus today seems as clear as it ever is to me.
Yes, Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast this morning was sprouting headlines about good news for Turnbull in the polls. I didn’t stick around to listen at the time. But catching up with it on line, we get stuff about Turnbull being on a ‘on a roll’ ‘with a rise(as ppm) two polls in a row’. Even Michelle Grattan seems to think that Turnbull ‘appears’ to have come out of the polls well.
RE Diogenes:
I guess Poss is implying that the MSM knew that this sort of poll was likely (and that the Nielsen poll was likely an outlier), but were happy to engage in a bit of cognitive dissonance and pretend that the last poll was conclusive evidence of Rudd’s downfall.
Now it will be interesting to see whether the MSM engage in even more cognitive dissonance by somehow pretending this poll doesn’t exist, or spinning the line that this poll is actually the outlier.
Given the way Labor played the last poll, I suspect they knew the reality of the situation. While insiders weren’t worried, Rudd went out of his way to look unconcerned and say that he didn’t care about popularity, his only worry was doing what was right. It was well played.
Poss, thanks.
If you didn’t exist, you would have to be invented.
Why don’t you get a possie in the SMH and get proper recognition for your (uncommon) common sense and (superior) ability with numbers?
They’ve got Ross Gittens for economics, (Ross for El Supremo Presidente!), surely a possum who understands polls isn’t too much to ask?
Personally when i used it thus: i was referring to how the MSM jumped on the Nielsen poll to declare that Labor was coming back to the pack. I was then hoping that Newspoll would demonstrate movement the other way, thus producing cognitive dissonance in the MSM.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/05/18/essential-report-turnbull-boost-lasts-16-hours/comment-page-1/#comment-13006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance