Crikey

Here’s a good reason for Parliament to go back next week. Government MPs can bring on a leadership spill. They’ve got little to lose. The Labor Party would win in a landslide if the Federal election were held now, the latest telephone Morgan Poll finds.

Interviewing conducted on Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week gives Labor an 18% two party preferred lead. Labor’s primary vote is on 50%, the Coalition is on 36%, the Greens on 6.5% and independents and other candidates on 7.5%. 3.5% of voters surveyed did not name a party. The two party preferred vote splits Labor’s way 59% to 41%.

“This latest telephone Morgan Poll is a similar result to last Friday’s face-to-face Morgan,” pollster Gary Morgan says:

Both would result in a massive Labor landslide.

The Morgan Polls are showing higher levels of support for the ALP than most other polls. As this is of interest to all poll watchers it is worth noting that the Morgan Poll conducted face-to-face includes those who don’t have telephones and those who only have mobile phones – generally an ALP skewed segment.

Results for telephone polls that exclude these people have an inherent LNP bias.

We believe this explains the difference between the Morgan telephone poll and the Morgan face-to-face poll.

These are the main findings of a Roy Morgan telephone survey conducted October 4-6, 2007, with 611 Australian electors.

Meanwhile, Peter Brent from Mumble Elections writes:

The latest poll-mix rounds, over the last fortnight, to 57 to 43 two party preferred in Labor’s favour.

This data estimates two party preferred data from pollsters’ primary data, and weights for sample size and how recent the survey was taken.

As the graph shows, the gap is if anything widening.

There’s more on the methodology here.