Newspoll: 51 to 49 in Labor’s favour
Today’s Australian has the results from the Newspoll conducted last weekend.
The headline result was a predicted national two-party preferred vote of 51 per cent for Labor compared with 49 per cent for the Coalition, had an election had been held last weekend. This was a significant improvement for the Coalition over the previous Newspoll (54 to 46 per cent in Labor’s favour), but a slight decline over recent months. The latest poll combined with the longer term trend suggests the previous Newspoll was anomalous.
The predicted primary votes were 41 per cent for the Coalition and 39 per cent for Labor. The Australian did not report the primary votes for the Greens or other minor parties on its web site.
The big story from the poll was the jump in Howard’s dissatisfaction rating, up from 45 to 50 per cent over the last fortnight. However, this movement came from the ‘undecideds’: Howard’s satisfaction rating at 44 per cent was up one point from the previous Newspoll. The Australian noted that Howard’s dissatisfaction rating was much higher when he was pushing through the GST legislation in 2000.
Howard’s slump in the attitudinal polling was not a fillip for Beazley. Beazley’s satisfaction rating was 32 per cent (up one point); while his dissatisfaction rating was 53 per cent (up three points). This is a poorer performance than Howard in both.
According to the Australian, ‘The number of voters who believe that Mr Beazley would make a better prime minister rose from 26 per cent to 28 per cent, up five points on a month ago, while Mr Howard was steady on 50 per cent.’
Perhaps the funniest piece was Dennis Shanahan’s, which linked Howard’s poll slump to the poll slumps that Blair and Bush are experiencing, These slumps are somehow connected to their collective engagement in Iraq, or perhaps because each is in their last term in office, or maybe they are the result of unrelated domestic factors. Who said three random factoids do not make a story?
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