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.

Two party preferred

As I noted yesterday, the rise of One Nation and the relative poorer performance of the Coalition and Labor in the primary votes, make the two-party preferred (2pp) vote estimate less useful and less reliable when it comes to predicting which party would form government if an election was held now. To add insult to injury, fewer pollsters are publishing any 2pp estimates. Below, I have five 2pp poll aggregations:

• An aggregation of published pollster 2pp estimates for Labor v Coalition

• A synthetic 2pp aggregation for Labor v Coalition - using preference flows from the 2025 election. However, this should be treated with caution, as the One Nation primary vote is roughly four times what it was at the last election, and there is no guarantee that preferences will flow in the same way as at the last election. My suspicion is this undersells Labor

• An aggregation of published pollster 2pp estimates for Labor v One Nation, noting this series only starts in January this year.

• A shadow 2pp aggregation for Labor v One Nation using the preference flows from the South Australian state election in 2026. I have used the same preference flows as Kevin Bonham's for this exercise. 

• And a theoretical 2pp aggregation for Labor v One Nation should Coalition voters warm a little towards One Nation. The purpose of this aggregation is to test the sensitivity of the 2pp under a more generous Coalition to One Nation preference flow.

The next chart has the medians from the above aggregations. The lines are colour coded by the 2pp counter-party: blue for the Coalition and orange for One Nation.