This week’s Essential Report has the primaries running 45/39 to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 55/45 – no change on the major party figures from last week. The Greens are down 2 to 7, while the broad Others are up 2 to 9. This comes from a two week rolling sample of 1892, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.3% mark.
Additional questions this week focus on the differing perceptions of soft vs hard party voters – they come from a sample of 1084, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark.
The first question up estimates the strong party vote vs the soft party vote for the ALP and the Coalition – a result which comes into play in a number of questions later on.
Would you say your choice is very firm, pretty firm but you might change your mind, or might you very well consider another party closer to the election?
If the “Very Firm” is taken as the strong vote, the sum of the “Pretty firm but I might change my mind” and “Might well consider another party closer to the election” responses become an estimate of the soft vote. That gives us:
The breakdowns here suggest that the minor party vote is much softer than the major party vote.
On the cross-tabs we get:
Firmness of voting intention increased with age – 56% of those aged 55‐64 and 65% of those 65+ said their vote was very firm compared to 43% of those aged under 35.
How satisfied are you with each of the following
Breaking down into satisfaction strength we get:
Breaking the results down into hard/soft voters and looking at the net satisfaction we get:
Which of the following issues currently has the most impact on your voting preference?
On the cross-tabs we have:
Labor voters nominated the most important issues as the economy (40%) and Kevin Rudd’s performance (22%). Liberal/National voters nominated the economy (44%) and asylum seekers (20%). 61% of Greens voters said climate change had the most impact on their vote.
45% of both Labor and Coalition “soft voters” nominated the economy – which was a little higher than the “firm” voters (40%). The asylum seeker issue impacted most on the voting intention of “soft” Coalition voters (21%).
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Regardless of which party, if any, you currently prefer or lean towards for the next election, which party do you normally feel closest to?
The cross tabs here were relatively short, reinforcing what we already know: “The only age group which identified most with the Coalition was aged 65+ (35% Labor, 42% Coalition).“
9 Comments
Poss, I am looking forward to yesterday and today’s instalments on the lead up to the election – or were there no posts on those days in 2007?
Not much actually happened in the last couple of days of the campaign. Both sides had pretty much realised what was going to happen and the Kelly Gang incident ate up the remaining media space. The only thing I wrote about at the time were the polls as they came out.
Ordinarily you’d think that the pace of the campaign would be fastest at the end, but it actually slowed down considerably compared to what happened over the previous 6 weeks.
It’s not surprising that the coalition has more strong support – any body who wasn’t a rusted on supporter would have given up on them months ago
That last table is interesting.
Only 36% of people feel naturally affiliated with the conservative side (thats being generous by giving all FF and Independents to the conservative side).
If you consider Labor/Greens/Democrats as a block thats 47%.
I think that’s got to be an over estimate or a lot of people are picking Labor because KRudd is popular right now. If that 47% was baseline support it would be just about impossible for the left to lose.
Also other than the economy it seems more people are dissatisfied than happy.
I think Australians always vote primarily on competenence as opposed to policy or ideology.
On policy, it is always the economy first. But parties work hard to eliminate any difference in this regard. Therefore the so-called ’secondary issues’ such as climate change or asylum seekers become critical in people decision making.
I think the 36/47 split EnergyPedant refers to is related to the situation where Labor has the benefit on incumbency without being in power for long enough to have put off large groups of voters. It would be interested to see similar figures from ‘96 – ‘98
Watching a doco on ABC on happiness. It seems that the left side of the brain is the happy side, the right side of the brain is the depression side.
Left=Happy
Right=Depressed
So go left, young man.
Ha! You’re funny David