Anthony Albanese (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)

The news that Anthony Albanese is neck-and-neck with Scott Morrison as the nation’s preferred prime minister would have earned a few smiles from Labor hopefuls. But polling experts warn against focusing too much on this over other measures. 

On Sunday night The Australian released the results of its latest Newspoll that found 42% of respondents thought the opposition leader would make a better PM than Morrison, with 16% uncommitted. 

The poll, conducted by YouGov between Wednesday and Saturday last week with a sample of 1520 people, also had Labor maintaining its previous lead with a 6% primary vote advantage over the Coalition.

Much of the coverage of the fortnightly poll led with the “better prime minister” result, with news.com.au calling it “ScoMo’s huge pre-election blow”. But is it? 

Beyond obvious warnings that any single polling result should be taken with a grain of salt due to natural sampling error (although Albanese’s improvement on this rating is part of a longer trend), psephologists have questioned how well the rating correlates with electoral outcomes long before the most recent result. 

The issue with the “preferred prime minister” rating is that it’s a false equivalence between two individuals in different positions, Essential’s executive director Peter Lewis tells Crikey.

“We think it’s a fairly crude measure,” he said. “When you say preferred prime minister, you compare with someone who hasn’t done the job.”

In this case, Albanese is competing against Morrison for a position that only one of them has held.

Similarly, executive director of Utting Research John Utting says his staff’s analysis on 20 years of polling results found there was no correlation between vote outcome and preferred prime minister.

“To give you an example, the highest preferred prime minister scores were gotten by Alexander Downer and Mark Latham,” Utting said on the Fourth Estate podcast in February. 

But Lewis says there is still good news in these results for Labor supporters. Typically, preferred prime minister is weighed towards the incumbent and a handicap for the challenger. That Albanese is even with Morrison is a good sign, he says. 

“There are a number of data points that you can look at and the fact that the opposition leader is ahead of the prime minister is a positive sign,” he said.