"Anthony Albanese could be on track to being a one-term Prime Minister, with a new poll showing Labor's primary vote crashing in three major states. The federal government is in serious trouble in the eastern states - where most of the seats are - with Labor down to 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 in Victoria and 32 in NSW."
"Labor’s primary vote has crashed to just 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 per cent in Victoria and 32 per cent in New South Wales, the wolf + smith shows. But Labor is dominant in South Australia, where its primary vote is 41 per cent, and 60 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis. The poll – which measured both state and federal voting intention – suggests the government is in dire trouble in the eastern states, with just 43 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in Queensland and 48 per cent in Victoria."
This is how the Daily Mail and the Murdoch tabloids (Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph etc) respectively wrote up a massive new poll by an initially mysterious outlet wolf + smith. But this was in fact another example of laughably incompetent poll reporting from these outlets, one that again happened to be in service of the narrative their right-wing readers would want to see. What the poll in fact found is very different. The state-level figures these outlets were commenting were state voting intention not federal. This was made so abundantly clear in the poll report that, among other subtle hints, the whole of page 10 of the poll report is devoted to making it clear that the rest of the report is state not federal.
