So just how bad is 9% for Brendan Nelson?

This was me earlier today in Crikey.

It’s days like these when you wonder whether the fine folks over at Newspoll have a full compliment of keys on their keypads. The poll released overnight has the ALP ahead 46 to 36 on primaries and 57 to 43 on two party preferred – a level of political support for the ALP which has been consistent for 12 months, only interrupted by an inconvenient election result.

While this latest voting intention is hardly newsworthy, even to the poor poll junkies among us, it is the Preferred Prime Minister figure that really grabs the attention.

Way back yonder the commentariat was aghast at John Howard becoming Mr 22% (See Note 1.) in those years before his political triple bypass – a positively respectable result considering what was to follow in the years ahead. We had the Downer Months where Lord Alex delivered us a Preferred Prime Minister rating of 21% before Simon Crean conquered all before him with his outstanding 14% (See Note 2) mark achieved in November of 2003.

While records are meant to be broken, this one was obviously meant to be smashed.

Brendan Nelson has stormed into the worse Preferred Prime Minister result in the history of Newspoll with an astonishing 9%. Not 29%, not 19% — there be no typos here, it really says 9%.

So just how bad is 9%, I hear you ask?

Think of every left handed person you know in the country, not of voting age, just in the country. You would, on average, know more left handed people than you would know people that preferred Brendan Nelson to be the Prime Minister. This is not so bad that you could actually list the names of Brendan Nelson supporters on a moderately sized pamphlet – but it’s getting awfully close.

This result really highlights the big problem that the Coalition faces. Its twin support bases of affluent inner metro seats and the less affluent, more socially conservative regional and rural seats have irreconcilable views on a large number of issues, the latest being the apology to the Stolen Generation.

Newspoll conveniently polled on the support levels for the apology and the results speak for themselves – while 69% of the public overall is in favour of the apology, when it comes to Coalition voters, the stats split evenly with 46% of Coalition voters supporting the apology and 50% being against.

With Nelson trying to walk the tight rope between these two camps, he was always going to alienate a chunk of his voting base. His apology wasn’t good enough for some of those 46% of his supporters, but went way too far for some of that 50% block that was against the apology to begin with.

Nelson had better hope that this Preferred Prime Minister rating has a lot of short term feedback caused from the Stolen Generation apology he made on behalf of the Opposition in Parliament, for if it is actually representative in large part of what is playing out on the ground with these twin Coalition support bases – the problem may not be Nelsons alone, but could simply be a sign of things to come for any opposition member that takes on the Leadership position.

It really adds food for thought to the debate over merger proposals between the Nationals and the Liberals. Is it really worth bringing these two irreconcilable groups under one centralised political banner?

If the mergers eventually go ahead, the new party better pray that the two party preferred vote doesn’t start heading the way of the preferred PM rating as a consequence of being unable to unify its twin support bases that have less in common than they do things that divide them.

Note 1: Although Howard scored 18% in a Morgan/Gallup poll published in the Bulletin , leading to the “Mr 18% – Why does he bother” quip, using Newspoll for the record to maintain consistency, Howard’s lowest Preferred PM score was a slightly higher 22% .

Note 2: Simon Crean’s lowest preferred PM score is registered in the Newspoll database as being 14%. It has since been pointed out that the particular Newspoll where Crean scored 14% was taken on the 28th to the 30th November 2003, even though Crean had announced his decision to stand down from the ALP leadership on the 28th of November. In the interests of accuracy and fairness, we probably shouldn’t burden Simon Crean with a paltry score of 14%. Instead, the 16% he scored during April, May and September of 2003 would be a more fair dinkum appraisal.

UPDATE:

This leads us onto something I’d like your help with. Brendan Nelson lacks a good nickname – Spanky doesnt quite cut it even though that’s what some have been calling him for years. Aquaman does Tunrbull well, Mezmerelda is perfect for Julie Bishop and we cannot forget The Google Assasin for one Andrew Robb.

But Brendan – he’s lacking. All suggestions would be much appreciated.