Because I have way too many things to do right now I decided in my usual fashion to do one more that isn't any of them! Introducing my 2025-2028 federal 2PP polling aggregate, which at this very early stage sits at 56.3 to Labor, with an overall pattern of basically no 2PP movement since it had enough data to wake up on 29 June. The above is a 7-day smoothed aggregate though it has been as high as 57.2 on individual daily readings, and as low (a 0.8 point outlier lasting one day only!) as 55.5. By the end of the term who knows if 2PP will even still exist the way the Australian right are going after this year's drubbing, but for the meantime, here we are. Differences will be detected with aggregates that use pollster-released 2PPs (these tend to have Labor losing support more quickly) and also my estimate is currently running about a point below Bludger Track but with a similarly flat trajectory.
The aim of the aggregate is to present a frequently updated figure for what the current polls should be taken as saying collectively about the state of the two-party preferred contest. This is never a prediction or a statement that the polls are right, it is just putting a number on where they're at.
This aggregate works quite differently from previous aggregates that had a simple 5-3-2-1 week of release formula, and does so mainly because of the increasing frequency of polls with long in field periods or late releases. The mathematics are kept simple enough that I should be able to understand if something is going wrong (edit: indeed I fixed one glitch overnight after two August polls were found to have been entered as July; it made very little difference), but are no longer readily hand calculable to make my treatment of data less chunky and arbitrary. The working of this year's aggregate is below:
