In making my judgment that Labor again gets the nod in The Daily Verdict on campaigning yesterday I am assuming that all the talk about Me-Tooism is doing Labor more good than harm. If I am wrong about that then the scoring for the day should be quite different.

People can make their own adjustments but I fail to see how it is an attack on opponents to say that on very important matters they agree with you. But that was the principal line of government spruikers yesterday and the newspaper commentators this morning. To my way of thinking all that this kind of talk and writing does is give people who previously voted Coalition but who are thinking of voting Labor this time, a reason not to be scared about doing so

So headlines like those in the Herald Sun and the  Daily Telegraph probably have done Labor a lot of good as did last night’s television coverage which had a similar theme running through it. And Labor will be happy enough with its contribution yesterday to the gravy train which gave it banner headlines in the Hobart Mercury .

Prime Minister John Howard clearly sees things differently because again this morning he was talking about his opponent having no ideas of his own. “I am very dedicated and I believe we can win this election because we do have a plan for the future and have great experience, and the alternative (Labor leader Kevin Rudd) has no ideas of his own”, Mr Howard told the press this morning.

Yet when he outlined what he actually wanted to achieve from another term Mr Howard sounded every bit the same as the Mr Rudd he was supposedly attacking.

The battle of tweedle dee and tweedle dum continues with only one significant difference between them – industrial relations policy. It is there that the Labor team clearly thinks there is enough of a separation to keep them in front until 24 November.

Coalition ALP
Television 1.22 1.85
Newspapers 0.15 0.29
Radio 0.42 0.38
Internet 0.11 0.14
TOTAL 1.90 2.66

You will find details of the way the Daily Verdict is compiled, with the help of raw material provided by our friends at Media Monitors, on the Crikey website.

Mumble poll-mix:

Peter Brent from Mumble Politics writes:

Today’s poll-mix, of surveys over the week to Wednesday evening – including most recently the Nielsen and Morgan released today – comes to 54.5 to 45.5 in Labor’s favour. The graph below shows weekly data for the month of October.

With the two party preferred gap still hovering around the ten or eleven percent mark, time is running out for the PM to stage that campaign revival.