New Trends and Gender Shifts
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Plugging all the new polling data of late into our trend system, we find that the medium term deterioration in the Labor government’s two party preferred vote has stabilised out around the 46% mark over the last 6 weeks. A lot of day to day stuff came and went, from budgets to boat people, from carbon pricing to the usual day to day gibberish – none of it made a jot of difference.
An interesting pattern that has developed this year is how the Coalition has increased their lead over the ALP in relatively short bursts, followed by a small contraction or consolidation in the Coalition vote, before going on to enjoy another burst of support. It’s almost as if each time the government loses some political “event”, a chunk of their support moves across to the Coalition – but without the opposite ever occurring – where government “wins” fail to achieve any growth in their political standing.
In one respect, it’s as if the government has been saddled with all downside risk in the electorate and no corresponding upside. Lose an event and their support shrinks – win an event and their support doesn’t move in any significantly beneficial manner for them.
On the primary vote trends, the same basic pattern has been occurring as with the two party preferred, but with the added component of a slightly fading Greens vote (click to expand the charts).
Finally, the net approval ratings of Gillard and Abbott by gender make for some interesting food for thought. Here we’ll use Nielsen data.
Back when Gillard became PM, she held high approval ratings and high voting intention numbers among women, while Abbott held moderate approval ratings among men and enjoyed a relatively small but significant lead on voting intention among men. Over the last year, Abbott has increased his male voting intention figures while his male net approval rates split fairly evenly. However, Gillard’s support among women has dropped significantly in both voting intention and net approval – effectively creating the difference between the ~53/47 two party preferred lead to Labor we saw back in July last year vs. the 54/46 results favouring the Coalition we see today. If we compare the aggregate poll results between July 2010 and May of this year, they tell the story.
Gillard lost her strong gender advantage among women while Abbott’s gender advantage among men grew significantly.
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Awesome! Been waiting for this. Anyone else find it interesting that the Greens aren’t picking up more votes? I would’ve thought with the Labor party not selling the Carbon message very well and… well… Malaysia, that the Greens would’ve picked up more of the “lefty Labor” voters. Yet it seems people are just swapping from Labor to Liberal?
I suspect if you took out the rogue newspoll (favouring labor 51v49) and added the recent morgan poll and made the curve less sensitive it would show a clear ongoing move in the coalitions favour.
Labor is not gain because their credability is shot.
No one expect on certian internet site believes labor anymore and how could they.
They are all about the politics and not the policy,everything that is done is in response to politics… trying to win the short game.. ie carbon tax forgeting their own promises and credability
Actually if you were going to start excluding rogue polls from the sample there would be just as much case for excluding that recent Morgan (the 42-58 one or 41-59 as headlined by Morgan). They are both about as far away from the trend line as each other. In terms of judging whether either is rogue there arises the question of whether you should include or exclude the poll itself in the trend when judging its rogueness. I suspect that if you exclude both from their own trend comparisons they’re both rogue; if you include both they might both just scrape in as mere outliers.
I don’t doubt that Labor has massive credibility and saleability problems at the moment. I think the Opposition’s leadership issues are the main reason we are not seeing 43s, 42s, 41s for Labor more routinely at this stage of the cycle.
Poss, would you be a darl and switch one of the bottom two tables around so that the “men” and “women” columns are on the same side for both? Ta.
How odd that women seem to getting turned off by the whole political spectrum (well, the middle bits), but Abbott manages to maintain his rating amongst males.
See, if they were interested in the “short game” as you claim, they’d dump the carbon tax. There is nothing to gain politically or financially in the short-term with any form of carbon price (be it a tax or a market-based mechanism); all of the upside is to be long-term.
Labor has some major issues getting people to support them, not debating that at all, but that doesn’t mean they are playing short-term politics. In fact, I think one of the reasons they are failing as badly as they are (besides their woeful inability to communicate anything) is that they are not playing short-term whereas the Opposition is. Populism & demagoguery are easy, it is making most people look beyond the here & now for their long-term interests that is hard.
B.Tolputt: The Carbon Tax is entirely short-term politics. It was part of the deal for the Greens to support Labor – without which we would’ve had another election last year. Labor has been consistent in blaming the Greens for the carbon tax and repeatedly stating that they would prefer an ETS.
If they were playing long-term politics, they’d be laying out details for that ETS – or they would’ve called a double-dissolution election themselves to fight for an ETS back when Rudd was in charge.
I think Poss’ “interesting pattern that has developed this year” is merely a country no longer listening to their government.
Bowen, until recently the last credible person on the front-bench, is now sadly, also cast in the same pissant CarbonCate ‘ring of incompetence’ with his latest lickspittle retreat in his bewilderingly incompetent mismanagement of the Malaysian solution.
Of course, it’s purely another cowardly homage to the ALP’s beloved inane inner city leftists.
At every juncture, I think surely now it couldn’t get any worse.
But like NSW before ‘em, the absurd have overtaken the savvy.
In one respect, it’s as if the government has been saddled with all downside risk in the electorate and no corresponding upside. Lose an event and their support shrinks – win an event and their support doesn’t move in any significantly beneficial manner for them.
I believe that this is the main tenet of Mumble’s “Governments get turfed out mostly because they’re too old” theory. Every decision the Government makes necessarily has winners and losers, and the winners tend to have short memories and the losers long. Over time, the Government accumulates more and more offended voters in the electorate (often referred to as “baggage”), until they finally sink under the electoral weight – as long as the Opposition is inoffensively electable enough, anyway.
Actually that last post was not fair on Mar’n Ferg’sn
Politics has just become a stupid game in this country.
Check this out – Tony Abbott denies climate change and advocates carbon tax in the same breath
No wonder winning messages don’t get through.
Seems to me that the Govt’s messages aren’t getting through. Doesn’t really surprise me that:
The negatives of EVERY policy they have implemented have been relentlessly played up my the MSM, even if the MSM has had to make stuff up to make it look bad.
HIP, and BER are the two biggest examples of this. The negatives are getting FAR more airtime and column inches than positives. And, those messages are getting dumped on an electorate that is pretty disengaged as they always are when there is no election in the offing. My understanding is most people don’t follow politics much until an election is actually called.
As the NSW election recedes into memory, O’Barrel pisses more people off, and the game changing Greens BoP in the Senate as of July becomes a reality, mid 2011 to Oct 2013 could be quite different, politically, than the last few months.
that said the situation is not good for the ALP, but they are staking 2013 on long term policy positions in the countries interest (and their own) rather than winning short term circus type events (which they regularly do anyhow because the OOppo are so lame, it just doesnt get reported).
NBN, Carbon, MRRT getting through will be the milestones they need to have a shot in 2013.
I suppose it remains to be seen whether Australians like their bread or their circuses better??
I am looking at some figures I have for both House of Reps and Senate asked as separate questions and collected over the last four weeks. If I focus on voter drift since the last election, based on what respondents said they did in the last election and what they are planning to do should there be an election any time soon, then I find for House of Reps data, a 17% drift to the Coalition and a 13.8% drift away from Labor/Green. (This latter amalgamation assumes a 100% cross pollination which is a slight overestimate).
I wish to emphasize that this is not comparing a poll result with an election result but rather comparing what respondents say they voted last time with what they say they are planning to vote next time. This poll is based on a representative national sample of 2600 odd.
On that basis, I have to say that given the two party preferred for House of Reps ran 50/50 at the last election, then applying these drifts suggests current figures are running around 42% Labor 58% Coalition.
The Senate was canvassed separately and I appreciate it is much more complicated. I lack the depth of knowledge of the inner workings of electoral apportionment to extrapolate these numbers, but again applying the drift percentages for the Senate questions, I come up with:
Greens 13.1% last election less 1.8% drift away i.e. 12.9% next time
Labor 35.1% last election less 17% drift away i.e. 29.2% next time
Coalition 38.3% last election plus 14% drift to i.e. 43.7% next time
I can’t be certain, but I will stick my neck out and say this result has been at least partly influenced by carbon tax and asylum seeker issues; although there are likely to be many other factors that affect it at a regional or local level. However you wish to criticise the pollsters, they are reporting pretty much the reality in the electorate (although clearly not the reality, if reality were possible) in Canberra!
Maybe there just aren’t any government “wins” to push it back.
I get the feeling that as Labor focuses on the 24 hour news cycle, they win the day with an announcement and lose the week on the detail. It is a bit like a parent saying “what did you think was going to happen?” It goes back to the election as Julia’s winning lead was lost
-announce East Timor
-announce peoples assembly
-announce cash for clunkers
-announce carbon tax
-announce Manus Island
-announce Malaysia
-announce a blanket ban on live cattle
come to think of it, you could even go back to
-announce grocery watch
-announce petrol watch
-announce health reforms
-announce mining tax
etc
Peter Costello will be Liberal leader for the 2013 federal election. He will do the same as Campbell Newman. Costello will seek federal Liberal preselection for a marginal ALP seat. Just imagine the Newspoll preferred PM rating between Gillard-Costello! It would be like Gillard 20% Costello 80%. My House of Reps seat count prediction for the 2013 election: Liberal/National Coalition – 115 seats ALP – 31 seats Others – 4 seats.
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