There’s three polls to report on today, the “bombshell” Galaxy poll run on the Nine News last night (bit of a fizzer), today’s Newspoll (via The Oz — tables here) and an Essential Report we’ll have this afternoon.
The big shock is Newspoll, coming in with the primaries running 42 (steady), 38 (down two) to Labor, washing out into a two-party preferred of 55/45 the same way — a two-point gain to the Labor party since the last Newspoll on June 27. The Greens are up two to 12 while the broad Others are steady on eight. This comes from a sample of 1140, giving us a margin of error that maxes out about the 2.9% mark.
Before anyone gets too excited, while this result is consistent with the medium-term trend increase that the ALP has been experiencing in its vote for about eight weeks or so now, it is probably slightly overcooked for Labor by a point or two.
The compositional movements within the primary votes were also a little unusual with the Coalition losing two points and the Greens gaining them. There’s sampling error swings and roundabouts here, so neither movement is statistically significant (although the Greens primary change nearly is — remembering that MoE is not only dependent on sample size, but also inversely dependent on the size of the estimated proportion being measured).
It would be highly unusual to see a straight Coalition-to-Greens shift, so if these changes are actually approximately true, we would have most likely seen some compositional shift in the population along the lines of Coalition-to-Green and Coalition-to-Labor, with a Labor-to-Green movement balancing it all out at the back end. But the numbers are pretty uncertain, so don’t lose too much sleep over it.
On the personal ratings, Gillard debuts on the Newspoll satisfaction charts (they left these out for the first Gillard poll) with a satisfied rating of 48, a dissatisfied rating of 29, a still relatively high Uncommitted of 23 — giving us a net satisfaction of +19.
Ordinarily, we’d say that was a pretty low debut figure for a leader — but we don’t really have anything to compare it to apart from Keating replacing Hawke. Keating’s debut in the polls at the beginning of 1992 (for Newspoll) had his Satisfaction 21, Dissatisfaction 42, Uncommitted at a surprisingly high 37, giving us a net satisfaction of -21. So, by the Keating yardstick Gillard is pretty popular — but then, by the Keating yardstick of raw public opinion approval, so is a dose of clap.
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