Poll Bludger: federal budget still haunts Vic Libs’ election campaign
With less than a month before the Victorian state election,
polls indicate the state government’s popularity is still suffering from
Hockey’s ill-received budget.
With just 22 days left available to him before the polls indicate the state government’s popularity is still suffering from
Hockey’s ill-received budget.
November 29 state election, Victorian Premier Denis Napthine faces the
imposing task of winning back seats that currently look lost at a rate
of two per week.
That’s the picture which emerges from an aggregation of
state opinion polls, which have been accumulating at a remarkable rate
over the past fortnight.
No fewer than six pollsters — in effect, every player in the
public polling game — have read the Victorian electorate’s pulse in the
past fortnight, and they have been remarkably consistent in pointing to
a Labor lead on two-party preferred of between 52-48 and 54-46, based
on minor party and independent preference flows from the 2010 election
(which, if anything, seem likely to strengthen for Labor this time).
The uniformity is particularly striking given the range of
methodologies involved, including one poll conducted online (Essential
Research), one by SMS (Roy Morgan) and four by phone — live interview
polls in the case of Galaxy, Fairfax-Ipsos and Newspoll, and an
automated poll from ReachTEL. With the exception of Newspoll, each of
the phone polls targeted mobiles as well as landlines.
As bad as the results may be for the Coalition, they in fact
represent a slight improvement on its position in the middle of the
year, as demonstrated by the chart below aggregating the polling
conducted during the Baillieu-Napthine government’s term in office.
Labor’s dominance was established by the current government’s second
year in office, before being sharply punctuated when Denis Napthine
recorded honeymoon ratings after he took the reins from Ted Baillieu in
March 2013.
There is perhaps slight evidence for the popular narrative
that the government’s ship was beginning to turn early this year before
being torpedoed by the federal budget, but the bigger picture is of a
persistent decline for Napthine from his early peak.
This appears to have been slightly arrested recently after
Napthine placed the government on the right side of public opinion with
respect to the East West Link, but the change is well short of the
paradigm shift that was required.
The graphic above also shows a modelled determination of the
likely seat outcome based on the current reading of the poll aggregate,
which has Labor on track for a secure majority of 50 seats out of 88.
This has been determined through a model that calculates
two-party win probabilities for every seat, based on the size of the
overall swing and specific seat-level factors such as the effect of
retiring members and sophomore surge.
On this basis, Labor is rated very likely to add Frankston,
Mordialloc, Carrum and Bentleigh to the 43 seats it currently holds,
while also being in the hunt in Forest Hill, Prahran and South Barwon.
What’s less clear from the polling is how much of a chance
the Greens have of biting into the Labor majority. While the polls are
of one mind in respect to Labor’s advantage over the Coalition, the
Greens’ polling has been all over the shop.
Ipsos (17%) and Roy Morgan (18.5%) were in agreement in
showing the Greens reaching extraordinary heights, whereas Newspoll,
Galaxy and Essential had them at 12% or 13%, only a slight improvement
on their 11.2% at the 2010 election. The Greens have a general tendency
to underperform compared with their polling, so it’s the 12% to 13%
range of the latter three pollsters that seems easier to credit.
A swing of that size is modest in absolute terms, but it is
likely to be magnified in the inner-city seats where the Greens need it
most. That’s just as well for them, since the likelihood that the
Liberals will repeat their politically successful gambit from 2010 of
placing the Greens last on their how-to-vote cards means they will have
to rely entirely on their own vote-pulling power to rein in Labor
margins of 3.6% in Brunswick, 4.7% in Melbourne and 6.4% in Richmond.
The Greens will not enjoy the advantage of a retiring Labor
member in Brunswick this time, as they did in 2010, and any confidence
they might have about Melbourne can only be dented by their surprise
failure to win the seat when former Labor member Bronwyn Pike resigned
in mid-2012.
Even so, Labor’s need to defend its Left flank from the
Greens in once-safe inner-city seats is an ongoing distraction, and it
won’t be any easy decision for the Liberals to pass up the opportunity
to aggravate it by throwing the Greens a bone on preferences.
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