Troy Bramston on Sky News reports Labor has drawn level on two-party preferred in Victoria, after the Coalition held on to a 51-49 lead in March-April (the last time we had a result from Newspoll, which usually goes bi-monthly in New South Wales and Victoria). This is the first time Labor has been even with the Coalition on two-party preferred in any poll, state or federal, since the federal poll of March 18-20 last year. The primary votes are 41% for the Coalition (down one), 35% for Labor (up three) and 13% for the Greens. The Greens are down four points, and while this follows a three-point spike in their favour last time, it’s still their lowest Newspoll rating since July-August 2009. Their actual election result in November 2010 was only 11.2%, so it may be that Newspoll has a problem with overstating their support. The results for the major parties at the 2010 election were 44.8% for the Coalition and 36.2% for Labor. Since the two-party preferred result in 2010 was 51.5-48.5 in the Coalition’s favour, the implied 1.5% swing in this poll can be interpreted as an election-winning lead for Labor, since it is greater than the Liberal margins in two seats (0.8% in Bentleigh and 1.2% in Seymour) and the current numbers in the Legislative Assembly are 45 Coalition and 43 Labor. Furthermore, there will be a long-overdue redistribution before the next election, and Antony Green contends it is likely to exacerbate the bias to Labor which evidently already exists.
Ted Baillieu’s lead over Daniel Andrews as preferred premier is down from 46-23 to 40-26, and he has also suffered a four-point drop in approval to 32% and a five point rise in disapproval to 50%. Andrews however has not budged from his mediocre ratings last time, his approval steady on 28% and disapproval up one to 36%. Below is a chart showing the progress of the net approval ratings of the four conservative premiers over their time in office. Newspoll has not published results from Queensland since the March election, but presumably will very shortly (ditto for Western Australia and South Australia), so the figures shown for Campbell Newman are from the two Galaxy polls conducted since that time. All other results are from Newspoll.
Well Ted is cutting funding to TAFE and building more prisons – he’s policies are, at least, internally consistant.
I hereby re-post this from the main thread.
http://poliquant.com/victoria-state-polling-overview-and-seat-projection/
I have made the point that the redistribution will effect the outcome of the next election.