BludgerTrack finds Labor’s tailspin continuing as the trend catches up with the slump that has followed last fortnight’s leadership fiasco, with two new polls (both conducted despite the interruption of Easter) adding further fuel to the fire. Labor sheds a further 1.6% on the primary vote and 1.1% on two-party preferred, with the seat projection putting the Coalition shy of a century that would be achieved with the gain of just one independent seat.

The new poll results are from Essential Research and Morgan’s new multi-mode series, which supplements their much-maligned face-to-face polling with online surveying, and which I am now introducing to BludgerTrack for the first time. The results are being adjusted with bias measures obtained against the poll trend itself, so adding it will not introduce any bias to the model that isn’t there already. So far, the move looks to be producing results more typical of phone polling than the notoriously Labor-leaning face-to-face series. This year Morgan has published five face-to-face followed by five multi-mode polls, and the average deviations from the trend have been as follows:

Face-to-face: Labor +1.0%, Coalition -3.9%, Greens +0.7%.
Multi-mode: Labor -1.4%, Coalition -0.9%, Greens +1.5%.

The latter set of numbers are the ones I am currently using for the bias adjustment (I will recalculate this each week), and they’re very similar to those I’m using for Galaxy.

The other development in BludgerTrack is that Newspoll’s quarterly aggregate has been added to the state differentials calculation, which again puts Victoria’s anti-Labor swing ahead of New South Wales. One possibly unfortunate consequence of the new numbers being added is that any post-leadership crisis effect in Queensland is being further obscured by a result that was four-fifths derived from before the event.