A Gillard win on 14 September would be historic in terms of a come fro behind win in modern times, as Peter Brent noted this morning:
You’ve got to compare trend with trend, average over a unit of time (say three months) with average over the same unit in the past.
And across the polls, over sustained periods, the ALP is further behind in two-party-preferred voting intentions than any party has been since the mid-1980s and then gone on to win the next election.
(I say “mid-1980s” because that’s when Newspoll began. This is the problem discussing polling precedents; we really mean back to the 1980s. Before then the data becomes scarce with, from 1940 until the 1970s, the odd Morgan poll and pretty well nothing else.)
The only sustained period of worse polling for a government was the Coalition’s last year in office in 2007. Given the outcome, that’s not encouraging.
The Keating government in its final term 1993–96 was in a better position than the current government.
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