Coalition support sinks

Today’s Newspoll via The Oz comes in with the primaries running 46 (up 3)/ 35 (down 3) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 58/42 the same way – a 3 point increase to the ALP since the last Newspoll. The Greens are on 10 (down 1), while the broad “Others” are on 9 (up 1). This comes from a sample of 1147 people, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

To start off, there’s a couple of things worth mentioning. Firstly, this Newspoll wasn’t taken over the weekend just passed as is usually the case, it was taken over the period between the Monday and Thursday of last week – simply to avoid polling over the long weekend period (because, as a rule of thumb, holidays make life absolutely miserable for pollsters seeking accuracy).

Secondly, for the last few Newspolls we’ve been talking about how a gap has opened up between the net satisfaction rating of Rudd (his satisfaction level minus his dissatisfaction level) and the size of the ALP two party preferred on one of our tracking charts, and how if history is any guide, that gap will eventually close – probably sooner rather than later, and probably with a lift in the vote rather than a decline in the satisfaction ratings.

Well, today it did that very thing.

Rudd is now into the fifth month of his personal satisfaction rating drive – where he continues to incrementally improve his personal standings point by grinding point –having notched up a 20 point improvement on net over the period. While the vote estimates may be shocking for the Coalition, Turnbull is actually improving his satisfaction ratings in a fairly strong way since the Utegate fiasco has washed out of the system, having pulled back from -31 up to -15 over the last 8 weeks. You can see all of this in the usual charts at the bottom of the post.

Newspoll also asked additional question on economic management and the stimpack. First up with the notorious “who is better at handling the Australian economy?” question:

After Turnbull’s strong start, Rudd has pretty much wiped the floor with him on this question – to the point where even 25% of Coalition voters believe that Rudd is the most capable economic manager, which is rather unusual all things being equal.

Some of this would have been driven by Rudd’s handling of the GFC, which creates a nice segue to the next question.

A plurality in every cohort – including among Coalition voters – believe that their own financial position will be better off in 12 months, at least in part, because of the stimulus package. As we usually see with these sorts of questions, the older one is, the more skeptical one becomes.

On the size of the stimulus package, it’s pretty much the same story.

Things get a little more partisan in the figures, but a majority of the population believe believe the stimpack was about right with only 37% believing it was too big. Another thing with these questions is the way male voters are slightly more likely to believe that the stimulus was too big.

Finally, the national debt question:

While a majority of the population are concerned about the national debt, interestingly a majority of the 18-34’s are not. Again, the older one get’s, the more likely one is to be concerned. Also interesting is how males are far more likely to have no concerns over the debt than female.

Meanwhile, the usual charts come in like this: