Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Neutrally Geared Edition

2PP Aggregate: 50.0-50.0 tie (-0.3 for Coalition since last week)
Coalition would probably just win election "held now" (seat projection 78-68-4*)
* see note re Greens below

So far a quietish week on the polling front, with Morgan and Essential the only national polls expected or seen.  However there are lots of polling snippets to deal with, plus the belated appearance of actual colour in the betting section, so here goes.

The week saw a fairly comfortable audience-scored win to Bill Shorten in a "people's forum" debate watched by hardly anyone, which commentators generally called a draw.   With the audience for debates screened on Pay TV basically containing no-one but political addicts, it's doubtful these debates have much influence on voting intention unless something really out of the box occurs.  The week-to-week shifts in voting intention so far this campaign (and the mock campaign before it) are so small they could be explained by anything ... or nothing.  A campaign about little of consequence meanders along in search of some defining Events.

Some Recent Senate Polling And Related Claims

This article assumes, for the sake of analysis, that the Senate election will be a double-dissolution under the new Senate system.  Neither of these things are yet confirmed, but both appear highly likely.  

I thought that there had been no polling at all of the Senate races yet, and innocently told a journalist so this week, but to my surprise reports of not one but two Senate polls have surfaced (one since I made that comment).  There are also many reports of an (apparently unpublished) Australia Institute analysis that claims that from five to nine non-Green crossbenchers could get up at a double dissolution, apparently based on commissioned Senate polling from ReachTEL and Research Now.  The Research Now (an online panel poll a la Essential) polling has been published but the main thing I can find on the ReachTEL is an AFR report from a month ago (!) that had somehow escaped my notice.

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch: Newspoll Uber Alles

(Note for Tasmanian readers and anyone else interested: my piece on the Colbeck demotion appears below this one, or click here.)

2PP: 50.6 to Coalition (-0.7 since two weeks ago) - updated from 50.5 following Essential
Closest margin since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister
Seat projection off this 2PP: 80 Coalition, 66 Labor, 4 Others 

After five weeks of reasonably static polling with the Coalition's 2PP at just above 51%, the past week saw another dip that was widely attributed to the government's unsuccessful and apparently half-hearted attempt to convince State Premiers to support state-based income taxes.

Newspoll especially got a lot of attention by finding Labor to be ahead of the Coalition (51:49) for the first time since Malcolm Turnbull took over as PM.  Much reporting - with the ABC alas the worst culprit that I noticed here - treated Newspoll as if it was the only poll in town.  In fact Morgan was the first poll to have the Coalition ahead on 2PP (two weeks earlier but not in the current week), and reputable aggregates all still show the Coalition with a slim 2PP lead.

The attention on Newspoll in the political classes to the exclusion of most others has long been disproportionate but may be becoming even more so.  As evidence that the Turnbull government was in trouble, a single 49:51 result was very flimsy. given especially that:

Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: And They're Off! (Probably)

2PP Aggregate: 51.3 to Coalition (-0.2 since last week)
Coalition would win election "held now" with much reduced majority

In this issue:
Voting intention and aggregation
Leaderships: Turnbull Goes Negative
Metapoll Or Metaparasite?
New England
Polls Fail In Brisbane
Other Polling (Includes worst poll of the week)
Betting Watch

After one of those days constitution junkies love, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull may have just started a 103-day countdown to a July 2 double-dissolution.  We won't know for sure until we see whether the recalled Senate goes to water over the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) legislation, but the early noises from the crossbench are defiant.  Should the crossbench indeed refuse to pass the bills, we're looking at at least eight weeks in which the election date will be absolutely clear, but perhaps a few more.  We can also expect a 53-day formal campaign. Long campaigns have been in disrepute since Bob Hawke bored the nation into liking Andrew Peacock in 1984, but it was not always thus.  Menzies called a long campaign in 1958 and the experience didn't scare him off doing it again three years later.  (See Malcolm Farnsworth's tabulation of formal campaign lengths).

The government enters this new phase of the leadup in a reasonable but not stellar polling position.  A rapid plunge in its standing in February shows signs of levelling out short of actually gifting Labor the lead.  However, there's a fair bit of variation in the individual poll results.  This fortnight we've seen 2PP scores for the Coalition of 53 from Ipsos, 52 from ReachTEL, 51 from Newspoll, two 50s from Essential and 49.5 from Morgan.  The 50.5-49.5 lead to Labor in Morgan was the first time Labor has led the 2PP in any of the 55 polls taken since the removal of the previous PM Tony Abbott.  Morgan has tended to lean to the Coalition since Turnbull took over, to a recently reducing degree, but the evidence of this result has caused me to now treat Morgan as neutral on average. Perhaps it will soon return to its old ways and start again skewing to Labor.