Via The Guardian:
Labor narrowly leads the Coalition 51 to 49 on a two-party-preferred basis, according to the survey, representing a swing of 5.3% since the last election in 2015.
The poll reaffirms the possibility the Coalition could be facing minority government after election day on 23 March, or be returned with only a wafer-thin majority.
However the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green has warned this state election is particularly hard to predict given the number of tight, three-cornered contests around the state which would likely render the usual election calculator redundant.
“It promises to be quite a close contest, and it’s also highly likely we won’t know who the government is at the end of election night,” Green wrote last week.
Labor’s primary vote sits at 36%, according to the Essential survey, up from 34.1% at the last election, while the Coalition’s primary vote is 39%, down from 45.6% in 2015.
The drop in the Coalition’s primary vote in this survey also coincides with the growth in support for One Nation, with 8% of voters saying they would give them their first-preference vote. The party did not contest the previous state election.
A similar proportion of voters said they would give first-preference vote to the Greens (9%), a figure that is largely unchanged since the 2015 election when the party attracted 10.3% of the primary vote. It comes despite a significant split emerging in 2018 and the departure of upper house MP Jeremy Buckingham from the party.
A further 9% of those surveyed said they planned to vote for an independent or other minor party, meaning 26% of voters would give their first preference to someone other than Labor or the Coalition.
It’s a very strange election with the public pissed at the mismanaged population crush-loading by the incumbent LNP but toying with an ALP promising more people with even less infrastructure.
That bleeds votes to the margins where The Greens continue to commit population suicide, blowing the greatest electoral opportunity of their little pink lives, and giving rise instead to the very force they so desperately want to prevent in a surging One Nation invigorated by Mark Latham.
And I thought politics was about winning power!
