Cross-posted from Mark the Ballot.
One of these pollsters is not like the others.
Once again I am left pondering Essential’s steadfastness; when the other houses have moved away from Labor by a comparable 4 or 5 percentage points. It will be interesting to see if this divergence is just a point in time thing (either the other three move back to where they were or Essential moves), or whether it turns out to be a longer-term discontinuity.
The weekly aggregation is unchanged on last week (46.1 to 53.9). But I am less comfortable with the notion that the zero-sum across polling houses is where the actual national voting intention lies. I suspect it is 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points to the left of the current average. I am working on strategies to better quantify when the sum-to-zero constraint may differ materially from the national voting intention (as it did at the last election).
