The first Newspoll survey for the Queensland election campaign confirms the impression of other recent polls and all available anecdotal evidence: that Labor has surged ahead after the first week. Labor is up to 45 per cent on the primary vote from 41 per cent in the previous April-June survey, while the Coalition is down from 39 per cent to 38 per cent. The two-party preferred split, which was stuck on 50-50 for a full year prior to the previous survey, has widened from 52-48 to 54-46.
Interesting. Can we expect an actual larger Greens vote similar to how One Nation went in 1998. No one says they will vote for them but almost 22% did?
Part of Beattie’s rationale for going early was to catch the minor parties unawares. Family First for instance have not been able to field the promised full range of 89 candidates. The Greens will probably get close to their 2004 vote, which was inflated by very good performances in Mt Cootha and South Brisbane (both over 20%) where they had high profile candidates (both are safe inner city Labor seats – South Brisbane is Deputy Premier Anna Bligh’s electorate). But there’s no similar well known candidates this time around.
How much sense does a 2PP figure make in the context of optional preferential? I remember Antony Green saying that he did some other sort of calculation. I’m sure it shows the trend, but doesn’t the methodology need some discussion?
A 2PP figure would make sense if respondents were given the option of exhausting. Newspoll’s question “to which party would you give your second preference” should be “will you give a second preference and if so to which party”. It would then become a measure of votes that make the final round of the count, which are the only ones that matter. Roy Morgan doesn’t do this either. The TNS poll the other day demanded a “second preference” (“refused – less than 1%”) but left it at that if you nominated a second minor party, which kind of misses the point. I’m not sure how Galaxy does it, but you’d hope one outfit could get it right.
Juanita Wheeler, who was the Greens candidate for Sth Bris in 2004 is running in Mt Cootha this time, so hopefully that’s one ‘well known’ candidate.