Bring Out Your Dead

Today we have the quarterly Newspoll you have when you aren’t having a quarterly Newspoll – a sample of 3413 voters taken over the last fortnight, broken down into States, city type and demographics.

The State breakdowns have an MoE of around 4%, the age breakdown around 3% and the capital city vs non-capital city 2 and a bit %.

So let’s take the longer view first, looking at the behaviour of the States since the lead up to the last election, and where the entry for the 4th Quarter of 2007 is todays Newspoll results.

Since the last quarterly breakdown we’ve seen Victoria come back to the fold a bit for the Coalition, Qld moving solidly to the ALP and WA moving a tad to the ALP. But considering the MoE on these things, it looks like we have 4 states bunched up around an ALP primary of near 40 50 (bloody hell, how’d I do that), and WA down around the very low 40s.

The Coalition though is stuck down around the high 30’s and low 40s everywhere except WA. No election is going to be won with those low primaries.

Next up we’ll look at the demographics over time:

Slight movement to the both parties on the primary vote here is the name of the game, with the 18-34 demographic being the biggest mover, with a 4 point jump to the ALP. Maybe noise, maybe not.

Now for the swings.

First up, primary vote swings by State:

Qld – Yikes!

Not that NSW or SA are particularly pleasant for the Coalition either. I reckon the Qld number is a bit too big and the Vic number a bit too small considering what I’m hearing on the ground in both places.

On the demographic front we have:

There’s two big movements here of interest. Firstly the 6 point decrease in the minor party vote that’s gone to the ALP in the 35-49 age group. The other is the 8 point decrease in the minor party vote in the non-capital cities that has flowed to the ALP primary. If that holds, that would have to be a lot of the hippy green and rural/regional independent vote moving across, net, to the ALP.

And finally the big one – the TPP swing by State:

If this were repeated on election night, it would lead to around a 42 seat gain to the ALP and 102 ALP members in Parliament.

Qld alone would, should these state swings be uniform, deliver the ALP government with 17 seats falling up here. NSW is next on 14, then SA on 5, WA on 2, Tassie on 2, NT on 1 and Vic on 1.

Elsewhere the exceptional Mr Meganomics has a great article on some Newspoll data in terms of actual numbers of people over HERE

UPDATE:

You can see the results of this in terms of which seats would go by visiting Antony Greens spiffy election calculator, with the results pre-linked in HERE