Reuters Poll Trend: 57.4 to 42.6 in Labor’s favour
The latest Reuters Poll Trend just arrived in my inbox. The TPP trends are 57.4 to 42.6 per cent in Labor’s favour. The primary vote trends are 48.4 to 37.9 per cent in Labor’s favour.
According to Reuters …
Australia’s conservative government has fallen further behind the centre-left Labor Party opposition as Prime Minister John Howard considers when to call national elections and whether he should remain leader, the latest Reuters Poll Trend has found.
Howard can call an election any time from Wednesday after hosting the weekend Asia-Pacific leaders summit and hosting Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper on a state visit on Tuesday.
But after 11 years in office, Howard’s government trailed Labor by 14.7 points in September on a two-party basis, where minority votes are distributed to the two main parties to decide an election.
Liberal/National Party coalition government support was down by three points over the month to 42.6 percent, compared with 57.4 percent for Labor, up three points.
If the result was carried through to polling day, the government would overwhelmingly lose office and Howard and several ministers could lose their seats.
The results came as Howard, 68, promised to stay leader to fight the election, despite growing concern from his lawmakers that he should contemplate retirement and hand power to his deputy and Treasurer, Peter Costello, 50.
Howard has won four consecutive elections since 1996. He must call the election before mid November. Labor needs to win 16 more seats to win power.
The Reuters Poll Trend is not a poll; it is an analysis of the three main polls — Newspoll, published in The Australian newspaper, ACNielsen, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, and the Morgan Poll, published on line. The Trend aims to summarise the polls by compiling them and removing their volatility. It starts by rolling the published data from the major polls into a fortnightly three-poll average, weighting them equally and the smoothing volatility by using a five-term Henderson moving average. The Henderson process dampens short-term up-and-down movement but aims to leave untouched the underlying drift in the data.