The Polls Have It

Two bits of polling to chew through today, an ACN phone poll and a cumulative Newspoll breakdown.

First up we have a new ACNielsen, with the ALP primary down 1 to 47%, the Coalition primary up 2 to 43%, with the minors and others down 1 to 10%.

The headline two-party preferred results have the Coalition up 1 point to 46 for a 54/46 TPP lead to the ALP.

Not much going on there in terms of movement, with 1465 survey respondents giving an MoE of about 2.6%.

Tracking the primary votes over the longer haul we get this (Ta George):

And a TPP history of this:

ACN since August has had 55/45 being the name of the game, coming down from a 57/43 split in the first half of the year.

There’s not much to look at there, so moving right along to the Newspoll breakdown over at The Oz which was taken either side of the rate rise, but before the campaign launches.

The Newspoll cumulative is based on the last two big Newspolls to give a combined sample of 3402 respondents, giving a MoE on the state breakdowns at about 4%. Here I’ll take the first two Newspolls and combine them into one result, then take the last two Newspolls and do the same to get two different polls that don’t overlap (Newspoll is running a two poll rolling average, but I’d rather distinct pieces of polling data here).

Tracking the primary votes over time we get (where week 2 and week 4 refer to the campaign):

Interesting here is that the WA primary has been on an increasing trend for both parties over the last few months at the expense of the minors vote. The other states are showing a fair bit of volatility with that 4% MoE making it hard to tell what’s really going on if anything. But what is probably certain is that the Primary vote for the ALP in NSW didn’t drop by 5% in 3 weeks (nor increase in Vic by 5% over 3 weeks) – that sort of movement just doesn’t happen that dramatically without something like a leadership change, so there’s a fair bit of noise in the series.

Looking at how this transfers across to the TPP:

This would deliver 99 seats to the ALP in a new parliament according to Antony’s spiffy calculator, which is 9 seats more than the number that a national 6.8% swing would deliver using just the national pendulum.

Qld delivers 13, NSW 7, Vic 9, SA 5, WA 2, Tassie 2 and the NT 1.

Higgins would fall in such a uniform state swing and Goldstein would become the most marginal electorate in the country, being retained by the Coalition by 0.03%.

That would be Howard, Turnbull, Costello and Brough all sacked by the electorate leaving an interesting decision for the Libs in terms of who would be leader.

It’s interesting to see the non-capital city blow out from the capital city swings over the last few months – that’s probably an artifact of the Qld swing on the one hand with Qld being rich in regional seats, and the 35-49 females in NSW city seats on the other, which we better explain with the demographic data.

What stands out here is the movement in the female vote back to the Coalition.

Taking this into account with the state swings, we can probably say that Newspoll was picking up a change in 35-49 year old female voters primarily living in NSW city seats (If I were to make a guess). If there is a bit of sampling error in the polls to explain the big jump in NSW, this looks to be the demographic where it occurred. The 35-49 group has moved 7% back to the Coalition over the last few months, with females moving 5% over the period (males only 1%) and NSW moving 5% over the period as well – all back to the Coalition primary. When you take account of the capital city vs non capital city swings from earlier, it seems to be a metropolitan phenomenon.

In terms of primary vote swing since the last election, as close as we can tell, they look like this:

	Male	Female	18-34	35-49	50+
Coalition Primary Swing	-4%	-4%	-6%	-1%	-6%
ALP Primary Swing	8%	8%	12%	5%	8%

So you can get a bit of an idea of the demographics where the minor parties are taking a hit.

If this female NSW swing is happening (which it may be, just not as much as the data is probably suggesting) it will be interesting to see if the bank notices arriving about increasing mortgage payments makes an impact (especially as surveys suggest it is the female in the family that does the home budget), as well as how the childcare and education policies from each party play out.

As for what’s going on in Victoria – your guess is as good as mine. Those Mexicans have been confusing all year and don’t look like stopping any time soon.