From Crikey 19 October 2007
Peter Brent from Mumble Elections writes:
All of a sudden, the contest gets interesting. Nielsen this morning moved towards the government by two percent two party preferred and Galaxy by three.
Taken together, the two polls have the government’s primary vote up by two and a half points, Labor’s static and Greens down a point.
The poll-mix usually crunches polls over the most recent fortnight, but for the graph below the most recent two party preferred numbers are taken from today’s two polls, the only ones taken since the campaign was called. They come to 53.5 to 46.5 in Labor’s favour.
That’s still a landslide in anyone’s language, but desperate governments can’t be choosers.
So is this the beginning of a comeback? If it follows the 2004 campaign pattern it is. In this scenario, voters are finally responding to non-hypothetical survey questions and are focussing on real issues.
Or is it a wee correction, simply a function of polls being taken hours after the launch of a big tax policy? Paul Keating got a similar jump in the first week of his 1996 campaign, and we know how that story ended.
So will it be 1996 or 2004? Only the future polls will tell.
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