The final Galaxy poll of the campaign, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, lands bang on trend in having the Coalition with a two-party preferred lead of 55-45, up from 54-46 in its last poll a week earlier. The primary votes are 45% for the Coalition (steady), 34% for Labor (down two) and 11% for the Greens (up one), and Mike Baird’s lead as preferred premier has widened from 49-24 to 53-25. The poll was conducted Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from a sample of 1300. The results have been added to the poll tracker on the sidebar and it’s made a slight addition to the late-campaign Coalition uptick, boosting them by one on the previous-election preferences seat projection and two on respondent-allocated preferences.
Today’s news reports point to two dark horses coming down the home strait:
• James Robertson of the Sydney Morning Herald reports a claim by Labor that “new polling shows it within a whisker of defeating Planning Minister Pru Goward in the seat of Goulburn”. The source is quoted saying: “We’re on [a two-party-preferred vote of] between 48 and 52. It’s 50-50 depending on preference flow.” The margin in the electorate is 26.8%, but Labor believes that to be a distortion caused by the redistribution. The western end of the heavily redrawn electorate is drawn from the abolished seat of Burrinjuck, where the Coalition stands to lose the substantial personal vote of long-serving Nationals member Katrina Hodgkinson. Unlikely as the prospect may nonetheless sound, Labor has enough belief in it to have sent Luke Foley to the electorate yesterday to promise $270 million in funding for a new hospital.
• Andrew Clennell of The Daily Telegraph reports that Labor sources say the party “did not even expect to win East Hills, which is held by the Liberals by just 0.2 per cent”.
@49 – well it depends what the expected margin is. Going by the narratives over the past week, anything short of a healthy win, would be considered disappointing.
But anything more than that would be a disaster for Labor, but would be a win for Baird personally and considering Abbott’s only appearance in his home state was his non-speaking campaign launch sit and they used Turnbull in robo-calls and not him… probably suggests that Abbott is already old-news. Also why the attempt to tie Abbott to Baird hasn’t worked (also since Baird is popular).
Happiness – yes, Morgan seems out. I think ReachTEL & Galaxy have been the most reliable over the last year or so. Primary votes at least will probably be close to whatever they had.
As a non-ALP member, a little gratuitous advice:
Chosing John Robertson was an unmitigated disaster…..chosing Foley was not much better.
Why is it that the ALP can’t bring itself to chose someone like Linda Burney or Andrew McDonald? I would almost certainly vote for the latter if I was in his electorate and would give Linda deep consideration.
Foley is just NSW ALP backroom boy from central casting.
As a party member, albeit in the ACT – I wasn’t enthused by Foley (that’s putting it mildly). I wanted Whan.
Yes agree happ, poor candidate selection has hurt the NSW alp.
New thread.
Yep, I haven’t really seen or heard from him much, but he seems sensible and reasonable from the short snippets I have seen…..perhaps that doesn’t carry any weight in Sussex st?
Foley has certainly failed. The bar for success was pretty low – all he had to do was bank the solid swing they should have been able to expect in the aftermath of the wipeout they suffered last time.
But no.
I actually quite like Foley’s manner, and at times he has come across well, but … I suspect he has failed in this campaign due to ongoing bad advice from the ALP campaign/PR/strategy team.
Foley is no superstar, but I think he could have made a go of doing the dorky earnest thing provided he stayed positive. He wouldn’t have won this election regardless, I think, but he could have ended up with a solid base for making a real go of it next time.
Now, though, he has failed and will be booted post election.
Oh well.
Full ReachTEL
https://www.reachtel.com.au/blog/7-news-newsouthwales-poll-26march2015
[27 March 2015
7 News – New South Wales poll – 26 March 2015
ReachTEL conducted a survey of 1,549 residents across New South Wales during the evening of 26th March 2015.]