'; ?> Preferred leaders - quants | What The People Want
Preferred leaders - quants
Monday, 17 October 2011 06:50 | Written by Graham Young

The following figures are based on a virtual focus group which was selected from our respondents and normalised against the latest Newspoll findings.

What we did for Labor and Liberal is to give respondents a list of six potential candidates for the leadership and ask them to rank them in order of preference. We then treated the responses as though they were ballots cast in a preferrential ballot. This technique avoids the problem with most polls on these issues which tend to treat the contests as though they are first past the post. This gives a false reading as the person who has the largest single support may have little support outside their own base.

In the case of Labor, the front-runners were Gillard, Rudd and Smith, yet all were well short of 50% support. In the end Smith was preferred by more respondents than any of the others.

The first table gives the first preference of respondents.

Omnibus_September_2011_Labor_Leader_1st_Pref

After distribution of preferences the result was:

Omnibus_September_2011_Labor_Leader_Final_Pref

This is fairly decisive for Smith, but not as good a result as it looks for Gillard. She and Rudd were neck and neck at most stages of the count.

On the Liberal side public opinion is much more decisive. Malcolm Turnbull had more than 50% of the vote at the first preference:

Omnibus_September_2011_Liberal_Leader_1st_Pref

This improved to 58%:

Omnibus_September_2011_Liberal_Leader_Final_Pref

But there are other factors bearing on leadership, and one of them is who attracts the strongest core support. In the case of both Gillard and Abbott, they are the clear favourite for their own voters with 66% of Labor voters favouring Gillard and 74% of Liberal voters favouring Abbott.

Share this article on your favourite social bookmarking sites:
Digg! Reddit! Del.icio.us! Google! Facebook! StumbleUpon! Twitter!
 

Comments   

 
0 #1 All these polls on personalities really — Valda 2011-11-30 13:41
All these polls on personalities really gives me the irrates. It is the policies and/or platforms of the Opposing Parties (Labor or Liberal) that matter. Or, the beliefs of the local member and what he/she wants to do for our country, that you should vote for or against.