This week’s Essential Report has the primaries running 45/39 to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 55/45 – no change on the major party figures from last week. The Greens are down 2 to 7, while the broad Others are up 2 to 9. This comes from a two week rolling sample of 1892, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.3% mark.

Additional questions this week focus on the differing perceptions of soft vs hard party voters – they come from a sample of 1084, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark.

The first question up estimates the strong party vote vs the soft party vote for the ALP and the Coalition – a result which comes into play in a number of questions later on.

Would you say your choice is very firm, pretty firm but you might change your mind, or might you very well consider another party closer to the election?

voterstrength1

If the “Very Firm” is taken as the strong vote, the sum of the “Pretty firm but I might change my mind” and “Might well consider another party closer to the election” responses become an estimate of the soft vote. That gives us:

totalstrongsoft

The breakdowns here suggest that the minor party vote is much softer than the major party vote.

On the cross-tabs we get:

Firmness of voting intention increased with age – 56% of those aged 55‐64 and 65% of those 65+ said their vote was very firm compared to 43% of those aged under 35.

How satisfied are you with each of the following

issuesats1

Breaking down into satisfaction strength we get:

issuesats2

Breaking the results down into hard/soft voters and looking at the net satisfaction we get:

issuesats3

Which of the following issues currently has the most impact on your voting preference?

issueimportancenov

On the cross-tabs we have:

Labor voters nominated the most important issues as the economy (40%) and Kevin Rudd’s performance (22%). Liberal/National voters nominated the economy (44%) and asylum seekers (20%). 61% of Greens voters said climate change had the most impact on their vote.

45% of both Labor and Coalition “soft voters” nominated the economy – which was a little higher than the “firm” voters (40%). The asylum seeker issue impacted most on the voting intention of “soft” Coalition voters (21%).

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Regardless of which party, if any, you currently prefer or lean towards for the next election, which party do you normally feel closest to?

partyIDnov

The cross tabs here were relatively short, reinforcing what we already know: “The only age group which identified most with the Coalition was aged 65+ (35% Labor, 42% Coalition).“