Poll Update No. 2

The release of Newspoll in today's Australian caught me a little by surprise, arriving just after I had completed yesterday's aggregation. I was expecting Newspoll to be released next week to coincide with the next Parliamentary sitting week (a typical Newspoll practice). Anyway it's out and it is unchanged on a fortnight ago (50/50). Dropping the result into the aggregation yields a national two-party preferred voting estimate of 52.3 per cent for the Coalition and 47.7 per cent for Labor.

It is worth noting that we are tracking the new Newspoll as being 1.3 percentage points biased towards Labor (in comparison with the other opinion polls, and assuming the house effects of all polling houses sum to zero). Much of that house-effect bias has been evident in the poll results since the elevation of Malcolm Turnbull (where Newspoll-2 has been consistently towards the bottom of the pile).

Turning to the primary voting intention model, again assuming that house effects sum to zero, we can see the following.

The other thing of note in today's Newspoll is the continuing decline in the attitudinal polling for Malcolm Turnbull. Let's start with the raw data before moving the attitudinal aggregation. Of note in the negative PM polling, whereas the former Newspoll tracked closely to the other pollsters, the new Newspoll is significantly more negative than its competitors.

Moving to the comparative results for both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, we can see a small improvement in the net-happiness position of the Leader of the Opposition, a more significant decline for the Prime Minister, in the context where the Prime Minister is still well ahead overall.

Technical information on the polling aggregation process can be found here.