From The Australian:
According to the latest Newspoll survey, conducted exclusively for The Australian at the weekend, the ALP primary vote jumped six percentage points from 29 to 35 per cent after Mr Rudd was made Prime Minister.
The Coalition’s primary vote dropped from 48 per cent to 43 per cent in just a week while primary support for the Greens went from 9 to 11 per cent.
Primary vote support for the Coalition is at the same level it was at the 2010 election, while Labor’s support is three percentage points lower.
Based on preference flows at the 2010 election, the Coalition still holds an election-winning lead of 51 per cent to Labor’s 49. At the 2010 election the two-party preferred result was 50.1 per cent to Labor and 49.9 per cent to the Coalition.
At the last election the Coalition’s primary vote was 43.6 per cent and Labor’s was 38 per cent.
…Mr Rudd got 49 per cent as preferred prime minister – up 16 percentage points on Ms Gillard’s last poll of 33 per cent, her record low – and 16 points ahead of Mr Abbott who was on 35 per cent.
The bias adjusted polls are as follows. One of the three is close to 50 per cent TTP for Labor. Two are closer to 48 per cent.
The Rudd effect comes back to a touch under 5 per cent.
And, if there is a nationally consistent swing (almost possible) the result would be …
All-in-all, this result suggests a close election.
Because the ReachTEL series (with just three polls) appears to have a moderate Coalition bias, I have excluded it from the sum-to-zero constraint on house-effects (just like I previously excluded the Morgan face to face poll because of its Labor bias). I will review this decision when I have seen a few more ReachTEL polls.
Of note: once bias adjusted, the latest ReachTEL poll is pretty much 50-50 in round terms (See the right-most data point in the next chart).
Adding the ReachTEL poll suggests that the Rudd Resurrection Effect (RRE) might be closer to 5.1 percentage points. Half the RRE samples from the aggregation fell between 4.5 and 5.7 percentage points.
Julian King emailed me today with an update to his model allowing for a discontinuity in public voting intention with the transition from Prime Ministers Julia Gillard to Kevin Rudd.Clearly, circumstances require me to make a similar adjustment to my Bayesian aggregations.I have used the snap Morgan poll to test my updated aggregation with the Gillard-Rudd discontinuity. This is only a test, as the latest Morgan poll is an SMS poll (not the multi-mode series the Bayesian aggregation expects). I will back-out this SMS data from the model when further polling data becomes available.Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to provide the charts from this test, as well as the JAGS code I am using. It certainly suggests a much more competitive election contest. With all the caveats of data inconsistencies, and only having the results from one poll, our very early estimate of the Rudd Resurrection effect is 4.7 percentage points.
