July aggregated polling
To get a sense of the underlying movements in the polls, I aggregate the four main polls out each month: the Morgan face-to-face series, ACNielsen, Newspoll and Galaxy. Around 9300 people were polled in July.
The weighted aggregation yielded primary vote predictions for July of 47 per cent for Labor, 40.1 per cent for the Coalition, 6.4 per cent for the Greens and 6.5 per cent for others. The aggregated two-party preferred vote predictions for July were 55.5 per cent for Labor and 44.5 per cent for the Coalition. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.
Aggregated, the polling data tells three stories.
First, Labor is currently well ahead and would win in a landslide if an election were called now.
Second, the gap is closing as the Coalition claws its way back for a possibly tight election contest in November or December 2007. Since Howard’s nadir in March 2007, the Coalition’s primary vote has improved 5.2 percentage points, the Labor primary vote is down 3.0 points and the Coalition’s TPP prediction is up 4.5 points. However, a couple of caveats are needed on this second story. There is no guarantee that the Coalition’s March to July trend will maintain its current pace until the end of the year. And for Howard to continue the trend, he will need to wind back the Labor primary vote, which has been remarkably resilient to date.
Third, the Greens and the minor parties are suffering a big squeeze. Since November 2006, the “anyone else” primary vote has dropped from almost 20 per cent to 13 per cent. If it continues to drop at the current rate, it will be around 12 per cent come the election. This drift in the “anyone else” primary vote means the Coalition and Labor require higher primary vote thresholds if they are to win government. The Coalition would need at least 45 per cent of the primary vote and Labor at least 42 per cent if it were to win government (assuming a 60-40 split in preference vote flows in Labor’s favour).
Note: for aggregation purposes I typically place a poll in the month for the last day of polling. However, because Morgan typically polls over two weekends, I seek to place its results in the month with the most days polled. I included the Morgan poll for 23, 24 and 30 June and 1 July in the June period.