The Labor Party would be wise to worry less about polls and more about stopping the Liberal National coalition from destroying everything.

Essential is typically very late in picking up trends, so let's wait for a Galaxy or a Newspoll.

It's meaningless, but it is still great to see the liebrals (how can a party miscalculate the nbn by $34 billion?) behind.

salad in wrote on Feb 18^th, 2014 at 2:42pm:


That 52/48 poll looks to be an outlier - if a few more polls had the Coalition in the lead then that would be the position we are in.

For mine it's either 51/49 to the alp or 50/50 - as governments age, they generally get less popular/less votes (look at Howard in 1998 - who only got 49% of the vote and still won.)

Fit of Absent Mindeness wrote on Feb 18^th, 2014 at 2:28pm:

An interesting result, but not hugely informative on its own.

As the Poll Bludger puts it, Essential Research polls have a bias towards stability. This is caused by the methodology, where each week's poll result is actually an aggregate of two separate polls.
Quote:
(Source)

What makes this poll interesting is that the Liberal vote has moved two points (with this going to the ALP and PUP) which is more than usual for the slow-moving ER. This suggests that the latest weekly sample has been on the low side for the Liberals. Next week's ER poll will include this low sample.

The two-party preferred figure also does not explicitly ask respondents which major party will get their 2PP vote. If there's a trend where neutral voters are deserting the Coalition or ALP, this poll won't pick it up.

The Nielsen poll did sample this as well as using the 2013 election method and this caused that poll to produce two different 2PP results (differing by 1%). I do not know if this is significant, but this is a trend that should be watched.

Maqqa wrote on Feb 18^th, 2014 at 9:46pm:

funny how Gumpy claims libs losing a by-election is a great result & bad polls are a great result ....

you must have been horified when Abbott actually won the election

Andrei.Hicks wrote on Feb 18^th, 2014 at 10:17pm:


Greens has always seen things differently to the rest of the world and Buzz, well he takes a little getting used to ... in my opinion Gumpy is far worse.