Newspoll: 52-48

Sky News reports tomorrow’s Newspoll at 52-48. The Australian reports a sample size of 2614, but no primary votes. Normally you wouldn’t doubt the result with four polls telling you 52-48, 52-48, 54.5-45.5 and 57-43, but surely there’s some significance to the fact that the two closest polls of the year have come in the day before polling day.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,500 comments on “Newspoll: 52-48”

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  1. Are we to believe that campaign has had no effect whatsoever??

    Pretty much.

    Or more precisely the minutiae of the campaign and their analysis are of low importance to most voters.

  2. At least we know now there are no other polls to worry about. The worst polls for the year came out as 52/48 for the ALP.

    I’m still a little surprised they didn’t poll Bennelong for publication this morning.

  3. So, in sum, all polls point to Ruddster.

    I can get back to work!

    Enjoy, bludgers. May drop in tonight – last night of the Howard regime.

  5. Gary Bruce, personally I think Labor will get over the line by a couple of seats. But let’s be very clear – the Coalition can win if they get 48%. As I showed on this site a few days ago…. they could actually do it with less, though obviously it becomes less likely.

    The thing people are not factoring in is that the Liberals have not campaigned in any Labor seats, so there are big swings to the ALP in seats it already holds. There are also some bigger swings in Lib safe seats…

    So the swing in the marginals could be such that the Govt holds on, just. Now as I say, I think Labor will get over the line, but don’t think 52-48 is safe for Labor. If it is 52-48 tomorrow it will be a coin toss. Remember, in 1987 Hawke would have won with 47.9% (though he got more)

  11. Accept it. It looks as though 52 48 is where we are sitting at the moment.

    57 for Labor is so out of the ballpark for Labor that its not funny. This is the outlier and it should be forgotton.

    I have got the gut feeling that this election is going to be very very close.

    Either side can win at this stage.

  14. The problem with just dismissing this (and the Galaxy poll which is unfavourable) as MOE is that you’re dismissing all incremental movements. Surely you have to look at the totality of campaign Newspolls. Effectively you have seen the gap close from 16% at the start of the campaign to 4% on Election Eve. It may comfort people to dismiss that 12% close as all MOE. For mine though, it represents a genuine narrowing. Having said that, I still expect Labor to win 53/47. ACN is dreaming, just quietly.

  18. It beggers belief that after the campaign week the coalition had they’d pull back so much. . . And with Howard campaigning in seats with a 10% buffer

    The devil will be in to detail ( and the rounding which we wont see)

    There’ll be an anomaly in the national vote and negligible movement on primary.

    Is there any reason to suspect this is any more than NO CHANGE from a week ago ?

  19. It’s likely this was taken Wed/Thur nights; this is normal for Newspoll’s final. Newspoll uses aggregate minor party prefs flows from 2004. That means it doesn’t matter what the Greens got, it just gives 61% of prefs to Labor automatically. If Labor support has gone to the Greens, the 2PP will not reflect any increase in Greens; it’ll only reflect a decrease in Labor’s primary.

  23. If we take the five polls released in the last 24 hours (ACN did phone and online, both with the same results, hmm), and throw out the highest and lowest, we still have 57-43, 54-46 and 52-48.

    Which seems to point to something in the 54-46 range.

  24. Ruawake, i agree 48% is not good, but the simple math of this shows they can win with 48% …. it is not open to dispute, it is a matter of simple maths… .whether they do is entirely a matter of where the swings are…

    that said, i think Labor will get there

  25. Labor can get 51% and still lose.
    Newspoll says Labor has 52%
    Can the lefties at least acknowledge that the election might be close?
    Talk of a landslide is now clearly hubris.

    We knew the final polls would show a narrowing. This is no longer in dispute.
    I expect there will be a continuing move back to the coalition until polls close.

    Forget the pollsters (we always knew these were nothing more than a rough guide). The real ‘egg on face’ brigade will be the bookies.

  26. Greg

    True, to go from 16% to 4% is a narrowing, but such a movement against such anionept government especially with the campaigning is not right, there are errors in there.

    probably the 16% is too high and the 4% is too low and the final result is somehwere in between.

  27. God let this be over. I’ve done bugger all work this week. If my boss has been tracking my web use I’m out. I wonder if i can get a job as a pollster. After Saturday some of them will be losing there jobs.

  29. Now Now. Leave the Liberals be. So far they’ve enjoyed believing their own spin, don’t deny them their last moments of delusion. “We caught them napping”

  30. 10pse you can say that ’til you’re blue in the face and they won’t agree with you.

    Jim I doubt the bookies are going to care if Labor lose… they’ll pocket heaps.

  32. If the preferences are being allocated 60/40 then the primary votes are 46/44.
    If the preferences are being allocated 70/30 then the primary votes are 45/45. I bet they did 60/40 and that is underestimating.
    So , I reckon Labor are on at least a 46% primary and that the we can’t but win with that.

  35. POLL ANALYSIS

    Lets accept 3 pollsters drop Labor’s vote by 2% in a week
    and maybe the ‘Lindsay’ Muslim rort DID FAVOR the Liberals in thurs nite polling

    1/ What does 52% mean ???? 52% can be anywhere from 51.51% to 52.44%

    2/ 52% to 48%….but we do NOT know now WHICH STATES have the swing

    OPTIMISTIC
    eg. if it is 52 to 48 in Q’LD vs 2004 ACTUAL Labor 2 PP vote of 42.91%
    then that is a state (but NOT seat swing of 9.09%)

    PESSIMISTIC
    5% in Vic and 8% in SA is useless
    Labor needs the big swing in Q’ld OR a bigger swing again in NSW

    I am shattered to see 2% primary disappear in a week

  36. Without seeing the primary votes, I’d suggest that preference flows aren’t factored in correctly (as some have noted above). Higher Greens primaries, as they’ve only started to advertise in the last two weeks, and bad preference allocation depress what should be 53/47 to 52/48.

    As a Labor supporter, yes, there has been a tightening in the polls, but only because the 60/40 stuff was outrageous and never going to happen. Remember, the most popular Labor PM ever, Hawke, got 53.7% of the TPP in ’83. And Rudd ain’t Hawkie (neither is Howard’s Government as unpopular or as economically beset as Fraser’s was). So Rudd was never going to get 55% at the ballot box.

    My prediction? 53-47 tomorrow, and ultimately 82-84 seats for the ALP. Along with a lot of big swings in safe seats, and a couple of potential upsets, eg North Sydney. Some margins cut down to become low-hanging fruit for the ALP in their first tilt at re-election come 2010.

  37. Effectively you have seen the gap close from 16% at the start of the campaign to 4% on Election Eve.

    Doesn’t look a narrowing to me. The sequence makes this poll look like an outlier.

    Only the Galaxy has shown a genuine narrowing of sorts.

  40. incidentally, in case Ruddites were hoping that the 52 was rounded down from 52.4 for instance, i am reliably informed from party sources that it was in fact rounded up…. just trying to get exact number… sounds like 51.7 – 48.3

  41. Hahahahahaha….look at the lib backers…..like a 13 y/o boy who has found dads stash of porn………in the end still not the real thing 🙂

  43. It is funny how happy some of the Labor supporters are at the prospect that John Howard will lose this election. And they are so happy that Kevin Rudd will win this election, so who is Kevin?

    He is a fiscal conservative, whose wife is one of the most successful entrepreneur in Australia. He is from a business background and his whole campaign has been “that we will do everything that Howard has done”. The policy of the 2 is so similar, that it is almost impossible to differentiate between them ….. yes Kevin will agree to Kyoto, no target in the near future, but Australia will reduce emmition by 50% by 2050 (ie when Kevin is dead)

    He wants to be the next John Howard, the nerd his own party didn’t like, but was at the right place and the right time to win an election. Rudd’s policy is so far to the right that he might have won the Liberal leadership challenge if there was one.

    There is really no choice on Saturday, we can vote for the Liberals or the Liberals under Rudd. And people here are so happy. LOL

  45. Accept it, we are probably at lowest ALP 53% at highest ALP 55% but most likely close to 54% This will be a landslide or at worst a comfortable win.

    The real worry for Howard is if the AC Nielsen did pick up a trebd of a lot of dissafected voters because of his disasterous campaign and the interest rate rise and were on exodus.

  49. Jim @ 125

    Forget the pollsters (we always knew these were nothing more than a rough guide). The real ‘egg on face’ brigade will be the bookies.

    It might be you that has egg on your face tomorrow Jim. If the polls are only a rough guide, how can you say there is a narrowing based on one or two polls? There’ve been over 100 polls averaging 55/45 yet you choose the two lowest in the set to demonstrate that the rest are wrong?

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