How popular is Kevin Rudd? It’s the question on the tips of the lips of political commentators everywhere. The exciting answer is that he’s on the nose, he’s doomed, the honeymoon is over, his popularity is plunging to new lows — add exclamation marks for effect.

But the boring — boring and correct — answer is, “about as popular as he was last time there was an Opposition leadership change”.

If we combine Rudd’s approval and satisfaction ratings from the three pollsters that regularly measure these things — Essential Media Communications via their Essential Report, Newspoll and Nielsen — we can chart the numbers and run a trend through them.

3pollsterapprovals

Where Rudd is today, about a 55-35 generic approval-disapproval split, is about the same as his 57-33 split he enjoyed back when Malcolm Turnbull took over the leadership of the Opposition in September 2008.

As you can see, Rudd’s satisfaction dynamics ebb and flow gently over time and so far, at least, wander around a fairly consistent average of about 60-25. The excitement has come from the shorter term changes in the dynamics.

Yet, we need to cautious about applying any sort of juvenile Boltemetric analysis to the data here, where people feel inclined to pick some arbitrary starting point and make grand — and silly — proclamations about what ever it is that has happened in the very short time period since.

As we saw with the Turnbull leadership, these kinds of metrics are a much more nuanced beast — which we can also see by looking at John Howard’s Newspoll satisfaction ratings over his entire term:

howardsats

Events come and go, leadership metrics ebb and flow and short-term political noise washes out of the system. What’s important isn’t the day-to-day political horse trading, but the longer-term trends.

What we’ve seen so far is that Rudd’s current levels of satisfaction and approval in the Australian community aren’t significantly different to what he has previously experienced this term, and certainly don’t contain the strong rollercoaster movement that Howard had experienced in several of his terms of office.