Morgan Poll

Latest Roy Morgan poll is not good news for Labor. This is the second recent Morgan poll with Labor's 2pp vote share below 50%. Morgan has Labor's primary vote below 30 per cent for the first time this election cycle.

Morgan 56.5 to 43.5 in Labor's favour

Yesterday's Roy Morgan poll, which was in the field between 17 and 30 January, had Labor on 56.5 and the Coalition on 43.5 per cent in two-party preferred terms. This equates to a landslide win for Labor.

When I apply the preference flows at the 2019 election, I get an a two-party preferred estimate of 54.9 to 45.1 in Labor's favour. This is still a landslide win fr Labor. 

The Bayesian aggregation, adjusting for house effects, tells much the same story. Even this more cautious assessment of the 2pp vote share for the Coalition would see a Labor landslide win.

The polling feature I am interested in is the disagreements in the primary vote polling between the polling firms. While the pollsters are in reasonably close agreement on the Greens and the Coalition, they disagree substantially in terms of Labor's primary vote and the primary vote for other parties.  Essential and Resolve Strategic are typically more than 5 percentage points apart when it comes to Labor and the other parties.

Updated Aggregation

Today's Morgan poll (51.5 to 48.5 in the Coalition's favour, when allocating preferences according to the last election), allows me to update the poll aggregation. The end result - 51.9 per cent for the Coalition - is where I had it two weeks ago.

Caveats and notes on the poll aggregation process can be found here.

Update (Tuesday 5 April @ 7.15am)

With last night's Newspoll (49-51 in Labor's favour), I can rerun the aggregation, yielding an estimated two-party preferred vote share for the Coalition of 51.4 per cent.

Antony Green has some good observations on the latest Newspoll.

Updated aggregation

Sorry, I was traveling interstate and I had not configured my laptop to run aggregations. Now that I am home again, I can update the aggregation for the latest Morgan and ReachTEL. We are now down from last week's 52.3 to 51.9 per cent TPP for the Coalition (to an estimated 48.1 per cent for Labor).

Poll update

Today's Morgan poll estimate of national two-party preferred voting intention was 53 to 47 in the Coalition's favour, which was a half percentage point improvement for the Coalition on the previous fortnight. The aggregated polling is little changed, on 52.9 per cent for the Coalition (a 0.3 percentage point improvement for the Coalition on the previous fortnight).

On the primary votes, Morgan now asks explicitly about voting intention for the Nick Xenophon team. This has seen an increase in the others category vote from Morgan (from 12 to 14.5 including Katter and Palmer) at the expense of the Greens (down 2.0) and the Coalition (down 0.5).

Calculating TPP voting intention from the primary vote yields (not surprisingly) the same result as the two-party preferred aggregation above.

It is interesting to speculate whether there was an anti-Abbott factor at play in the 2013 election that saw a reduced preference flow to the Coalition. If we take the preference flows from the 2010 election and the current primary votes. it improves the Coalition's two-party preferred national vote estimate by 1.1 percentage points.

Markets and polls

I have added the latest Morgen poll to the analysis (which was unchanged on the previous fortnight with the Coalition on 52.5 to Labor's 47.5). The aggregated estimate of two-party preferred voting intention for the Coalition is 52.6 per cent (assuming house effects sum to zero).

Yesterday's Newspoll weighed on betting markets. Over the past week we have the following movements in the percentage probability of a Coalition win, as implied by the odds from each bookmaker.

%	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun	Mon	Tue
Betfair	85.10	83.45	83.58	85.57	85.10	85.10	82.22	81.45
CrownBet	85.41	85.41	85.41	85.41	84.27	84.27	84.27	84.27
Ladbrokes	83.08	85.03	85.03	85.03	85.03	85.03	85.03	85.03
Luxbet	88.20	87.51	81.17	86.42	86.42	86.42	83.08	83.33
Sportsbet	84.51	84.51	84.51	84.51	84.51	84.51	84.51	82.83
TABtouch	84.27	82.83	82.83	82.83	82.83	82.83	82.83	81.17
William Hill	85.41	84.15	84.15	84.15	84.15	84.15	84.15	82.71

Off the boil

There have been three key polls since the start of February. All suggest the public has cooled on Turnbull government; although there is some disagreement on the extent of that cooling.

• The Morgan poll of 30 January to 7 February had the government on 52.5; down from 56 in early December last year (using preference distributions from the last election).
• The ReachTEL poll of 11 February has the government on 54; down from 55 in the third week of January (and late November last year).
• The Ipsos poll of 11 to 13 February had the government on 52; down from 56 in mid November last year.

Collectively, this is showing up as a post-Christmas decline in Coalition two-party preferred (TPP) voting intention in my aggregation models.

Across all the models I run, the results are.

Update

Turning to the primary votes:

Like Kevin Bonham, I have some doubts about the high end Green vote results from some polling houses.

On the attitudinal front, looking at how "happy" the punters are with the performance of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, we can see some changes.