Newspoll Tuesday via The Oz rolls around again, this time with the primaries running 48 (up 1) / 34 (down 2) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 59/41 the same way – a one point gain over last week’s special Newspoll. The Greens are steady on 10, while the broad “Others” are up 1 to 8. This comes from a sample of 1144, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.
Oh dear.
With the phone poll average in the sidebar now showing 109 seats going to Labor were the latest round of phone polls repeated at an election, there must be some pretty nervous Coalition marginal and not so marginal seat holders.
Look back at the tactics of the Opposition over the last few months where every card from the Howard era was played. Rising Interest Rates…. tick. Labor’s debt…. tick. Boat People….. tick.
It’s like that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tests the difference in learning capability between a hamster and Bart. Sure the cupcake is electrified, sure every time he tries to grab it he gets shocked – after a few tries even a hamster would learn – but Bart keeps grabbing away time and time again, hoping that this time he won’t be zapped. Hoping this time it will be different.
When you change governments you change the country – as Keating said, but the national zeitgeist also changes with it and pulling these old cards out from the Oppo benches is a roadmap to failure.
I was surprised by the absence of additional questions today measuring the public perception of asylum seeker issues. Something has been influencing the metrics and it’s a good bet that might be it. In the usual charts below, you might notice that Rudd’s slow incremental increase in his personal satisfaction level has hit a big bump, with sats going down 4 and the dissatisfaction going up 4. This is pretty unusual when you also get an increase in the primary vote.
Turnbull’s satisfaction rating only fell by a point, but his dissatisfaction rating leapt 6 – with 5 of those points coming from his undecideds. For Turnbull that’s a bit dangerous since the recovery in his personal ratings involved shifting people on net from dissatisfaction into undecided… then into the satisfaction territory – from what we can tell. In one respect he’s lost 8 weeks worth of recovery in his personal standings.
UPDATE:
Arsehattery of the Day
Over in the Op-Ed section of the Oz, John Pasquarelli dreams a little dream.
As Christmas Island readies to put up the no-vacancy sign, the hitherto silent Libs have broken out, led by Philip Ruddock and Kevin Andrews, and already the polls have spiked substantially in their favour, no doubt creating more grief for Malcolm Turnbull, who is handcuffed to the usual suspects in Wentworth and whose only comment to date has been a limp-wristed call for an independent inquiry.
Something has spiked – I’d be checking my drink.
The usual charts come in like this:
9 Comments
Possum
“Newspoll Tuesday – More pain for Malcolm but worse to come” would be my take especially as it is being reported that a significant number of coalition Senators will cross the floor to vote against the CPRS.
“For whom the Newspoll tolls” however would be my suggestion for the headline of Newspoll taken after the coalition debacle over the CPRS.
So according to the net satisfaction rating you would expect the 2PP to go down in the next few polls… which would be a big statement except they’re already at 59, and anything higher would be just plain nutty.
That’s right Grog! That relationship is really a handy little chart. I might pull the same thing up for the Howard years later this week and do a bit of a comparison.
Your reference to The Simpsons and the title of this post had me thinking of the episode where Homer eats Pinchy his pet lobster, while saying “Oh Pinchy, no more pain where you are going”. For some reason I have a vision of Joe Hockey saying the same to Turnbull. (possibly while eating lobster)
Grog’s comment has shown up an aberration in the turning points (indicated by crossing lines) of the PM Net Satisfaction/ALP 2PP series.
20 May 08 downward turning point
1 July08 upward turning point
29 July 08 downward turning point
7 Oct 08 upward turning point
19 May 09 upward turning point
20 Oct 09 downward turning point
It is very unusual for charts like this to kick out two upward turning points (7 Oct 08 and 19 May 09) in succession. Obviously the downturn that was being foreshadowed by the lines crossing on the 7 October 08 but didn’t happen, was overtaken by events surrounding the GFC taking a grip on sharemarkets, credit markets freezing, banking in disarray etc.
Also interesting that following the May Federal Budget this year the 2PP trend began a turnaround. Was this the budget bounce like Howard and Costello as well as they Oz were desperately searching for in the budget prior to the 2007 election?
It would just be too funny if the GST robbed the Coalition of a gain they were due last year and infighting and squabbling over the ETS rob them of any traction in October this year. For sheer incompetence and exhibition of the anti-midas touch, they have no peers.
The Satisfaction Rate-Prime Minister, graph right down to the figures for the Undecideds from 1 Jan ‘08-22 April ‘08 is almost a mirror image of each other. I know why it is so. It’s still eerie.
A big, big puzzle for me are the Undecideds. Are there degrees of being undecided as in well I hate him today, and hated him yesterday, but I haven’t yet decided how undecided I will be tomorrow?