Polling Update

Primary votes

While it looks like Labor and the Coalition have each fallen a similar amount in the polls, around 7 and 7.3 percentage points respectively, this comparison uses each party's mid-2025 polling level as the starting point. A fairer benchmark is the 2025 election result, which is what each party actually achieved at the ballot box. Measured this way, the picture changes sharply. Labor won 34.6 percent in 2025 and now sits at 29.5 percent, a loss of about 5 points. The Coalition won 31.8 percent and has fallen to 22.4 percent, a collapse of more than 9 points. The reason for the difference is that Labor was polling above its election result through mid-2025 (a post-Election honeymoon) and only later sank below it. The Coalition, by contrast, was already polling below its 31.8 percent election result from the outset and kept falling from there. So although the two parties have shed a similar amount in the polls since mid-2025, the Coalition's decline relative to its actual electoral support is nearly double Labor's, and One Nation has absorbed almost all of the combined loss, rising from 6.4 percent at the election to 25.3 percent today.

The Slow Death of 2pp

For decades, Australian political watchers have leaned on one figure above all others. Not the primary vote share. Not preferred prime minister. The two-party-preferred number, the 2pp, the share each major bloc ends up with once preferences are distributed. It is two things at once: the headline number pollsters publish, and the figure the electoral commission reports on the night. In most elections it has been the number that decides who governs. That dual role is why pundits reach for it (with exceptions in the top left and bottom right quadrants of the next chart).

A Deep-Dive on One Nation Polling

One Nation's primary vote has surged from ~9% in mid-2025 to 23.5% in my latest poll aggregation. That's nearly 4x their 2025 federal election result of 6.4%.

The trajectory is remarkable. Steady climb through late 2025, accelerating from October onward, then plateauing around 23% from February 2026. The leadership changes (Taylor for the Libs, Canavan for the Nats) coincide with the plateau rather than the surge itself.

Attitudinal Polling

 Preferred Prime Minister

Aggregated Polling

 Two Party Preferred

Primary votes

Aggregated polling

Aggregated Attitudinal Polling

I am now applying the same Bayesian aggregation techniques I use to the opinion polling. I wrote extensively about those techniques here. The results are as follows:

Albanese - preferred leader

Bayesian aggregation

Now that we have enough data (around 40 national polls since the last election), we can start looking at a Bayesian aggregation using a Gaussian random walk to estimate voting intention from day to day.  I will tease with the chart that intrigues me the most: the rise of the One Nation Party since the 2025 election.

Some movement on the betting market

Polling Update

It's time for another polling update. We will start with the primary voting intention polls. Of note, there is a substantial divergence between polling firms. In the last couple of weeks we can see one pollster with the Coalition primary vote share at 24 per cent and another at 33. On the other side of the fence one pollster had Labor's primary vote share at 33 per cent and another over 38 per cent. 

Overall, the Greens and Others are little changed since the election. Labor's post election honeymoon may be coming to an end. The Coalition's post-election decline may be stalling. One Nation's post-election renaissance may be slowing. However all of these observations are couched in the context of very noisy and somewhat contradictory voting intention data from the various polling firms.