Galaxy: 53 to 47 in Labor’s favour
The Telegraph, the Courier Mail, the Herald Sun and the Tiser reported on a Galaxy poll of over 1000 people from last weekend. The headline prediction was a national two-party preferred vote share of 53 per cent for Labor and 47 per cent for the Coalition.
This looks like a significant movement in the Government’s favour. However, those of you familiar with my rules of thumb for interpreting polls, will know that I typically reject as noise any significant poll movement that can not be attributed to an event that one would reasonably expect to change voting intention. Even if I can point to a plausible explanatory variable, I usually suspend judgment on a single poll result that could mark a discontinuity.
To put it another way: don’t read too much into a single poll result. While it is entirely possible the encore kid is staging another win from behind, I would want just a little bit more data before coming to that conclusion. Furthermore, I would want the story confirmed by more than one pollster.
Just for the fun of it, the next two graphs are my highly speculative chicken entrails analysis, which were designed to identify whether John Howard has a chance of winning from behind in 2007 as he did in 2001 and 2004.
One of these trend lines is not like the others!
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