With the current Coalition leadership shenanigans dominating the media space today, it might be worth having a look at the recent history of Liberal Party leadership polling – especially since we’ll inevitably get a new round of such polling pretty soon.
We have two pollsters that have asked questions about the Liberal leadership recently, Essential Report and Newspoll. Starting off with Essential which asked the questions in both July and August of this year:
The cross tabs for July said:
Only 28% of Coalition voters thought Malcolm Turnbull is best person to be Leader of the Opposition while 56% nominated someone other than Malcolm Turnbull. 23% of Coalition voters favoured Joe Hockey, 9% Tony Abbott and 8% Julie Bishop.
Meanwhile, the cross-tabs for August said:
Malcolm Turnbull has the most support amongst Coalition voters – 26% of these voters think Turnbull is the best leader of the Liberal Party. 22% of these same voters prefer Hockey and 11% prefer Abbott.
Unfortunately, no cross-tabs on support levels of Labor voters were provided. However, considering that Coalition voters favoured Turnbull over Hockey while the broad public preferred Hockey over Turnbull – we can deduce that ALP voters more likely than not favoured Hockey over Turnbull by a fairly substantial margin for the “total” results to end up where they were.
Newspoll also asked this question, and we can go back a fair way here:
What’s interesting here is that Turnbull had nearly always been trumped in support by Costello, but when Hockey was thrown into the mix Turnbull came in as 3rd most preferred Liberal Party leader. The big question is where those Costello supporters in the public fall when reduced to a Hockey/Turnbull head to head.
Newspoll also broke their July 2009 question by demographics:
While Turnbull and Hockey were roughly the same in terms of their Liberal Party voter support level in the latest Newspoll on the leadership, Hockey was far more likely to be preferred by Labor Party voters. Before we get some folks chiming in here saying how they vote Labor and they’d answer this question by naming whatever Liberal Party leader they believe the ALP would find it easiest to beat – not everyone is as politically Machiavellian as you lot!
So saying though, there could well be a few percent of that sort of sneakiness in the answers – but either way it appears that from all the polling we do have, that Hockey is a more preferred leader of the Liberal Party than Turnbull by Labor voters, while for Coalition voters, Turnbull is probably slightly ahead (and their could be incumbency effects there as well). However, when looking at the broad public, Hockey has the edge in popularity over the current leader of the Opposition.
14 Comments
ABC Newsradio ran a poll recently.
http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/supp/poll/past.htm
I’ve never considered myself particularly Machiavellian, Possum, but if I were asked if I approved of the way Malcolm Turnbull is performing as opposition leader, I would have to say yes. The sooner he gets bored, or tired of the struggle and moves on to some other field that takes his fancy, the better for the country.
“Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” (Dr Johnson)
In order to remove the Machiavellian component of that response, they could rephrase the question to “Which one of the following as leader of the LNP would make you most likely to vote for that party?”
Or is that a crap question?
When can we have a poll on the most popular candidate for the labour party leadership – surely by now there are many people sharing my concerns in regard to Kevin Rudd and his slightly megalomaniac-like behaviour traits.
Lets put the choice up – K Rudd, J Gillard, L Tanner (who else?)
elei, that might be six years or so premature.
Poss. It all kinda begs the question. Which is the better thing to judge politics, the mind or the head?
Being a bit left-wing myself I would almost be prepared to take a punt and the the job to Tony Abbott. He is repulsive, another bloody Catholic Jesuit wanting to turn Oz into a Satrapy of Rome. And I think Australia is finally coming to understand this. He could be done like the proverbial dinner.
Sigh!
There you go elei. Gary Morgan has something to quench your thirst.
http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2009/4423/
Why on earth would people aged fifty and over be in favour of Joe Hockey? (21%) Same thing with Peter Costello (38%), (ret: Olé) Both men also had/have the female vote, in a world full of old ladies this must be important. It wouldn’t seem to bode well for Christopher Pyne, would it? Same comment for Malcolm Turnbull. Nothing like an under-shot jaw to turn people off.
Could it be, could it really be that the Liberals sort of thought Malcolm might have sex appeal? On the other hand look at how much sex appeal John Winston Howard didn’t have.
I’m sorry Poss I was just penning some meandering thoughts.
Cheers
When are “Someone Else” and “Dont Know” going to stand up and take their rightfull places at the head of the Liberals.
Its just luverly that that the sum of the support for the Libs “Top 4″ leadership candidates is considerably less than 50%.
In the Liberal Party they take turns in pouring petrol over their leader and tossing matches, and if they miss, the leader will usually finish the job himself.
TP: Good one!