Good news and bad news for both sides this evening courtesy of the latest ReachTEL polls for the Seven Network, which have Labor opening up a 52-48 lead on two-party preferred nationally, but trailing 54-46 in the fairly crucial Liberal-held Victorian marginal of Corangamite. The national poll has the Coalition down 1.5% to 41.1%, Labor down 0.1% to 36.5%, the Greens down 0.3% to 9.6% and the Nick Xenophon Team back up to 4.3% after an anomalous drop from 4.2% to 2.7% last time. This gives Labor a two-party lead of 52-48 after three successive results of 50-50. It should be noted that this was achieved from a heavy flow of respondent-allocated preferences to Labor: using preference flows from 2013, and folding the Nick Xenophon Team into a generic “others” category, the result would be around 50.6-49.4. Malcolm Turnbull’s personal ratings are stable: combined very good and good is up 0.8% to 29.4%, combined poor plus very poor is up 1.7% to 36.8%. Bill Shorten’s improving trend continues, with very good plus good up 1.2% to 29.1% and poor plus very poor down 1.5% to 36.9%. Preferred prime minister continues a slow narrowing trend, now at 54.9-45.1 in favour of Turnbull compared with 55.6-44.4 last time. The automated phone poll was conducted last night from a sample of 2700.
The Corangamite poll is quite a different matter, with Liberal member Sarah Henderson credited with 54-46 lead on two-party preferred, and 48.3% of the primary vote when a forced preference question for the 7.7% undecided is included with the result. Both numbers are exactly identical to the result in 2013, when she unseated Labor’s Darren Cheeseman with a 4.2% swing. The primary votes also record Labor losing ground to the Greens, with Labor on 27.1% and the Greens on 15.0%, compared with 32.0% and 11.9% at the election. This poll was also conducted last night, from a sample of 770.
From the Liberal Party campaign bulletin tweeted by Eliza Borrello:
“Export trade deals to generate 19,000 new export opportunities”.
What’s an export opportunity? Are they hoping people will think it means 19,000 new jobs.
William
You looked pretty chirpy on 7:30
Moralscum will be burying cats for a living soon.
William
I don’t know if you saw the post I addressed to you a week or so ago regarding allocated preferences.
I suggested that under Abbott they soared in favour of Labor – well above the previous election preferences. Then when Turnbull took over, the situation was reversed. The allocated preferences favoured the Liberals for a few months. But as Turnbull’s popularity has evaporated they have gone back to favouring Labor again.
That’s been my perception anyway. Is there any evidence to back it up?
abc730: End of WA mining boom could help Labor as voters turn away from the Liberals https://t.co/5gsPYL4ouE #auspol https://t.co/2uIBZw2dnO
K17
The word from the Libs is that they are purely running a marginal seat campaign. They have thrown the base under the bus and don’t care wht the 2pp is. It’s a Textor strategy.
I saw that ReachTEL will have have a “marginal seat of the week” .
Imagine if we had the UK system where there is no preferences. Its just first past the post there wins.
If the 2PP vote does come in at 52/48, allowing for sophomore influences, Labor will win 82 seats, most likely plus at least Burt and Hasluck and Swan also in play. So Labor would win 84-85 seats and be in the hunt for another 6. Excellent prospects.
The must be cursing. They talked themselves into a DD…into a long campaign, into an election to be fought over a budget that contains nothing much, into an election for which they are completely unready.
Of course, the G’s will also be wringing their hands. The last thing they want is a great Labor victory.
Cheers Cameron Gardiner and Work to Rule.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynton_Crosby
Basically everyone is sitting around the table talking about things you don’t want them to talk about. So you throw a dead cat on the table. Everyone’s so surprised/disgusted/whatever that they start talking about the dead cat.
Diogenes,
So if labor get over 53% they could still lose?
This is Bill Shorten’s best Reachtel netsat ever.
He is now on -7.8. His previous best was his first result back in Jan 2014 when he was on -9.
tpof @ #48 Friday, May 27, 2016 at 7:49 pm
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Well morrison being the great hope of the tory future is being put to rest.
All he’s got is shouting at anyone who stands in his way. And being obnoxious.
Talking of obnoxious – Michaelina Cash has disappeared from the media as has mesma.
William, are you intending to add Xenophon to the BludgerTrack graphs before the election at all?
DIOG – Doesn’t every party at every election just run a marginal seat campaign? If Textor has just discovered that strategy, he’s definitely overpaid. You can be pretty sure the libs will keep telling everyone to ignore the national polls and claim they’re holding up in the marginals.
diogenes @ #56 Friday, May 27, 2016 at 7:55 pm
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Sounds like something both sides do every election ?
Off to watch the Swans N Melb game. Swans in front so far.
Sportsbet odds update:
Labor almost favourites now in Page, Robertson and Reid
Seat of Burt – Labor 1.50, Coaliton 2.50
On the other hand, Sportsbet has Turnball favourite to get about 80 seats.
diogenes @ #56 Friday, May 27, 2016 at 7:55 pm
Copying the SA Labor Party? 🙂
Anyway, in this marginal I haven’t seen a blitz from the Liberals. I dove pretty much up and down the entire Central Coast today between the seats of Robertson and Dobell right through the back streets and the major thoroughfares and I didn’t see one Blue t-shirt and only a few scattered corflutes.
Maybe that $4Million the AEC is witholding from the Liberal Party is hurting them? Plus the Go Slow on Malcolm from the Abbottistas.
Reading about the Economic debate, it occurs to me that Morrison and the Liberals are setting themselves up to sit pretty inside a massive trap that Labor is waiting to pull.
Every time that Morrison and the Liberals go on about Senate obstruction and the billions of dollars of cuts that Labor is blocking there, they ask the question as to what these cuts involve. Labor is opposing them for a reason, which is that they are highly unpopular and, generally, bad cuts. If the Liberals had any brains they would go quiet on them. But they don’t.
Put another way, the Coalition is going into this election promising $18 billion of highly unpopular spending cuts that will hurt millions of people, many of them uncommitted voters still desperate to make ends meet. And the detail of those cuts are hiding in plain site in the budget papers of the last three budgets.
My thinking is that Labor will start to point them out in very large advertisements three weeks, maybe less, before the election and is carefully holding back until then to maximise the impact – and to let the Coalition do all the prep work of keeping those billions of dollars of cuts in the voters minds. I suspect that Bowen, who is really smart, must have bitten his tongue through at the Press Club holding back on the obvious retorts.
The uncommitted are soft. More than in any election in my lifetime, this is a first term government with an unequalled record of non-achievement. And it knifed a Government winning PM under 2 years in – another record in post WW1 Australian politics, creating all sorts of internal bitterness. And the replacement leader, put in solely because of his voter popularity and in spite of the fact that a large part of the party room and the party membership range from dislike to detestation of him, is confounding every positive expectation the voters ever had of him.
Forget history. It’s based on first term governments burning large amounts of political capital doing things they believe are important for the nation, though unpopular. This is so unlike any other that history is irrelevant.
The only thing keeping their polling where it is is residual hope that Malcolm may meet even a minuscule iota of public expectations and a lack of like or confidence in the Bill Shorten caricature that was delivered via the TURC.
Both will continue to move away from existing pre-conceptions as we get closer to 2 July.
WA – according to Sportsbet – Labor favourites to pick up Burt and Hasluck, essentially 50-50 with the Libs in Swan, not far behind the Libs in Cowan and Stirling.
Leaked video of Libs campaign strategy
http://bit.ly/1Wp7kEo
Thanks Monica – there will be a seat-by-seat guide sooner or later, I promise.
Turnbull is becoming a bit of a turd in a swimming pool.
cupidstunt @ #46 Friday, May 27, 2016 at 7:46 pm
It does seem the throwing a dead cat on the table metaphor is getting conflated with the stock market’s “dead cat bounce” which refers to a stock that is falling rapidly, is overvalued but may bounce (like a dead cat falling).
Both apply to Turnball at the moment so the conflation is reasonable.
b.c. @ #51 Friday, May 27, 2016 at 7:51 pm
It’s like the only time I have ever sold a house and found the wrong Real Estate agent to do it. They promised me all these people were lining up to see our house, but once we signed they disappeared in a puff of smoke or, rather, they were everyone on their books as looking for a house regardless of whether ours had anything in common with what they were looking for.
It’s spiv-speak and well-spotted.
Mr Bowe, very nice work on 7.30.
I think that collar and tie were what some of your fans were calling out for when your avatar first went up. Hope you don’t get too much heat for calling WA Labor a sinking ship
Tasteless as it is talking about dead moggies, but it was explained to me that the ‘Dead Cat Bounce’ is a named for some kind of short-term, ineffective improvement in a poll position or similar (share price?). I guess the idea comes from the fact? that if the body of a cat is dumped on the floor, even though it is dead, it still appears to bounce up a bit. The other dead cat thing seems to refer to some kind of crude means of distracting someone’s attention from a pressing matter. As was pointed out earlier, if Labor is winning the debate on say education or health, someone throws in from the conservative side something along the lines of Dutton’s effort a few days ago – a nasty and distracting aside. All things considered, insulting to all cats!
Damn that respondent allocated business!
Work to Rule.
Yes it might go down in history as the DEAD CAT election.
One thing is for sure. If the Wentworth Gelding loses, there will be lots of dead cats found in bushes around his electorate.
Tricot:
We did the dead cat thing the other night and I’ve decided the term is over-rated as far as terminology goes. 🙂
This must be worrying for Mr Nutt.
Looks like Scrot’s cunning plan backfired.
Interesting observation TPOF. I actually thought Bowen was holding back today, too. I expect they are reticent to spell out any of the major announcements and costings until they’ve been rigorously tested by the PBO.
Morrison, on the other hand, has little to work with except that budget line about unallocated spending. There’ll be nothing to capture the electorate’s imagination. The things they thought would, like the PATH jobs announcement, has basically gone down like a lead balloon. So have the tax cuts. The brains trust obviously thought that that big announcement would be a bit of ‘believe in us because we know better than you’ but after the debacle of Abbott’s ‘trust us’ campaign … that kind of expectation of blind trust just doesn’t cut it.
I have a strong feeling if Turnbull loses he will call its quits with politics as there will probably be no point hanging around.He would never be PM again and imagine the knives that would be out if he didnt quit.
William? You said WA Labor was a sinking ship?
Diogenes:
Cupidstunt:
I’m hardly an authority on these sorts of things, but I think that this is a strategy that can only go too far. No matter how much resources and campaigners and pork you throw into the marginals, if you’re losing the debate nationally, its going to flow on into the marginals to some extent. Electorates don’t exist inside a bubble, and the issues influencing people outside the marginals to change their votes will surely also have influence on those inside the marginals.
Sure, it worked for Howard in 1998 (and the last few SA elections too, I suppose), but at 49-51, that was still a very close result. If things get to 47-53 or 46-54, somethings got to give. Even if the Coalition holds much of the marginals, that swing has got to come from somewhere – quite possibly from moderately safer Coalition seats that have been ignored in a marginal-only campaign and thus fall to Labor.
TPOF –
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The tories have shown over and over – that cuts will be borne basically by those who do not vote tory.
Those not aware or engaged in the political debate and issues or going to shafted – *IF* the tory are returned and can get their Bills passed by the Senate.
Thankfully if turnbull does get back he is probably in for a very frustrating 3 years – and he may not even get back of course.
kevin-one-seven @ #65 Friday, May 27, 2016 at 8:01 pm
I may have the wrong person, but Textor actually applied that strategy in 1998 to deliver re-election to Howard despite him losing the TPP. He is a past master. I think the difference here could be the proportion of resources that would be put into the marginal seat effort as a sign of desperation that this is increasingly not a stroll in the park election.
That said, it doesn’t compare with 1998 where Howard tried to do things that were, despite being highly unpopular, still conforming to what we want a government to do. He also took the high political risk of proposing a GST. Again, this was unpopular but at least showed some conviction and commitment and thus leadership.
What we have this time is a government that has done one thing – stop the boats (Carbon tax is and always was ‘meh’) – and then constantly bleated because the other parties wouldn’t get out of its way while it tried to break promise after promise.
And now led by someone who, day after day, is demonstrating that he is the very antithesis of leadership.
The tactics may be great, but if they don’t fit the terrain and conditions they are useless. I can see Malcolm in the last week starring in any number of Downfall mash-ups.
The dead cat explained. Its about distraction when the debate is about something that’s not good for your side. It can be effective.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/20/lynton-crosby-and-dead-cat-won-election-conservatives-labour-intellectually-lazy
It was Crosby who had been behind Michael Fallon’s attack on Miliband. In order to counter the apparent upturn in Labour’s campaign, Crosby had deployed his signature “dead cat” manoeuvre. Boris Johnson (who had previously employed Crosby as his campaign manager during the 2008 and 2012 London mayoral elections) had once described the strategy like this: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”
And that is exactly what happened. For the next 24 hours, media attention switched away from Labour’s clampdown on tax loopholes and towards Fallon’s outburst. The veterans at M&C Saatchi, the Conservative party’s primary ad agency, were increasingly impressed by their new campaign boss: “He lent a tremendous discipline and focus to the campaign,” says Jeremy Sinclair. “He could be blunt, but he kept everyone on track.”
All Morrison said when asked what his plan was he just brought his budget book out and said this is it.No more,no less.
Throwing a dead cat on a the dinner table where everyone is discussing, for example, health and education, immediately changes the conversation. It is completely beside the point that people are offended and outraged. Now they’re talking about the cat.
I feel sorry for the cats.
The boyfriend of one of my oldest friends is the Campaign Manager for Janelle Saffin in Page. 🙂
He said they are in Woolgoolga tonight setting up a stall for the markets tomorrow.
Is WA labor going tits up?
Diesn’t our PM have a history with cats?
Even though she said she regretted it, I still think the greatest dead cat move I ever saw was Julia Gillard announcing in the 2010 campaign that the Real Julia had arrived. At that time Labor was being devastated by leaks and, much worse, by the fear that more leaks were going to come again at any time. Labor was completely unable to get any policy messages out at all such was the distraction.
Announcing the Real Julia was so bizarre that it actually distracted attention away from the distraction of waiting for more leaks. It caused her much pain later, but at the time it was a highly effective high risk master stroke that could well have saved her government.
I have a strong feeling if Turnbull loses he will call its quits with politics as there will probably be no point hanging around.He would never be PM again and imagine the knives that would be out if he didnt quit.
Turnbull will be lucky to get out of the election night function alive. Unless he hand picks the guest list his concession speech could be roundly jeered.
I’m expecting tears actually. “History will remember Australia for one thing. It was the nation who broke this prime minister’s heart.”
Hard to believe WA Labor is going tits up.Ahead in the polls 54-46 and a popular leader.Barnett is a dead duck at the moment.
Preferred PM: 54.9 (-0.7) Shorten 45.1 (+0.7)
Doesn’t this really put Shorten well inside the usual incumbency advantage of a PM. Shorten has the whip out and he’s got a rails run.