ALP scores rate rise first blood.

The latest Morgan face-to-face poll is in, the first measuring the affect of the interest rate rise on voting intentions.

http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2007/4197/

Leading up to the polling, the question I was concerned about was whether the benefit the Coalition may receive out of higher interest rates (the economic management in tough times argument) would be greater than the cost to them of the broken promise (keeping interest rates low).

The first poll off the rank seems to answer that question – a 3.5 to 4% movement to the ALP in 2PP terms. The impact of telling fibs seems to outweigh the impact of the Coalitions economic management argument. If this result starts turning up in the polling more broadly, one of the key themes in the Coalitions re-election strategy would become worthless. That will be quite the conundrum for a government that seems to be running out of electoral bullets.

The Coalitions primary vote is 36.5%, a drop of 4% since the previous poll. The Nats are up 0.5% from 2.5 to 3%, the Libs are down 4.5% from 38 to 33.5%.The ALP primary is up 2.5% to 49.5% since the last poll.

The above graph shows the two party preferred estimates from Morgan derived from both the 2004 preference distribution and how the survey respondents stated they would allocate preferences.

On this point about preference distributions, both the 2004 election distribution and the voters own allocation of preferences are pretty close to one another. Below is a graph that measures the TPP estimates from Morgan of both parties starting at Oct/Nov 2004 right through every Morgan poll to the current one. Attached on the left of the graph are histograms of each of the four measures.

 

 

There’s a few periods where the two preference distribution mechanisms get out of whack with each other, but they have been surprisingly close over the last 6 months.