Newspoll: Turnbull’s popularity plummets

Coming a day earlier in The Oz off the back of rampant weekend speculation among the political classes, Newspoll has the primaries running 45 (down 1) / 37 (down 1) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 57/43 the same way – steady since last fortnight.The Greens come in at 10 (up 1), while the broad “Others” are running at 8 (also up 1). This comes from a sample of 1149, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

The movement this poll was over Turnbull’s personal ratings where his satisfaction dropped 7 points to 26, his dissatisfaction increased 7 to 50 for a netsatisfaction plummet of 14 points – taking it from -17 to -31. Worth noting is that Turnbull’s net satisfaction rating is now only 2 points higher than it was in the nasty Newspoll immediately after Godwin Gretch blew up in the Coalition’s collective face.

There’s a couple of extra charts worth looking at this Newspoll. Firstly the history of Newspoll primary and two party preferred estimates going back to January 2008.

If you look at what’s been going on over the last 12 months, the Coalition primary vote and the two party preferreds have remained static – with only the ALP primary vote showing any real volatility as votes have shifted, on net, between the Greens, the ALP and the Others.

If we take the Coalition primary and the Coalition two party preferred and run a simple linear regression line through the polling results of the last 12 months, this is what we get:

Turnbull has been pulling primary votes steadily averaging 37.5 for 12 months, while the two party preferred is 56/44 to Labor.

And these numbers have barely moved, certainly not outside of the range of ordinary sampling error if these numbers were, in fact, the true underlying level of voter support.

The real concern here for the Coalition must be how much, if any, is Turnbull’s poor personal ratings rusting this pattern on?

The usual charts come in like this – worth pondering is whether Turnbulls satisfaction dynamics have reached a new structural level which they’ll now bounce around as time goes on?