This week’s Morgan face-to-face poll comes in with the primaries running 44.5 (down 0.5)/ 37 (down 1.5) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 56.5/43.5 the same way – a one point gain to Labor since the last poll. The Greens are on 11 (up 2.5) while the broad “Others” are on 8 (up 0.5). This comes from a sample of 1793 spread across the two weekends of March 13/14 & March 20/12 – before this week’s debate and fallout – giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.3% mark.

In the comments on previous threads, I mentioned that the long negative trend that’s been running against Labor since October 09 (an example of which you can see with the Pollytrend on the right in the sidebar) seemed to bottom out about three weeks ago. With this Morgan, we now have enough public polling data to visualise it in a chart.

The Pollytrend metric that we use is what you might call “moderate” in its sensitivity – it really requires some pretty obvious movement before the trend changes direction. However, we can easily up the aggressiveness of the algorithm to make it more sensitive to poll changes. To start with, if we run a high sensitivity trend line that is twice as sensitive as our usual Pollytrend when it comes to measuring changes in polls, this is what it looks like compared to Pollytrend and the individual ALP two party preferred poll results.

sensitivitytrendsmar26

As you can see from the chart, the high sensitivity trend suggests that there was a bottoming out of the long running ALP downward trend a few weeks ago, with a mild uptick since. The last two observations of Pollytrend have flattened out too, but it’s actually hard to tell from the chart.

Looking at the data that is used to calculate the trend – where we convert all the poll results into a rolling, all pollster, pooled average, weighted by sample size – and running the high sensitivity trend through it, the uptick becomes a little more obvious:

sensitivity2

The reason it’s worth posting today isn’t because of some “OMG TEH ALP IS COMING BACK!!!!” nonsense – but because of the next Newspoll.

If Newspoll moves towards the ALP – it will be consistent with a trend that’s been running for around 3 weeks now. So if we get an improvement in the ALP two party preferred, sections of the commentariat will no doubt try to explain it (or explain it away when it comes to some of the usual suspects) by the health debate fallout and Abbott’s reshuffle. Now while there certainly may be a component of that in the mix when it comes to whatever Newspoll result we get – it’s worth keeping in your thought orbit that up to last weekend, we’ve been in a slight upward trend for the ALP anyway.

On something completely different, Rodney Tiffen at Inside Story has the best article by far on whole epic fail that been the media reporting of the insulation saga.