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Labor’s poll lead narrows as major party support erodes

Labor enters the final days of the campaign within reach of claiming a narrow majority but faces a fraught run home as its support falls and voters desert the major parties.

 

May 17, 2022, updated May 17, 2022
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail. Photo: Lukas Coch/AAP

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail. Photo: Lukas Coch/AAP

A Roy Morgan poll finds Labor ahead of the Coalition after preferences by 53 to 47 per cent, a drop in its headline support of 1.5 points.

This would represent a swing of 4.5 per cent toward the Opposition since the last election and its strongest share of the vote since the 1983 election.

But beneath the headline figure the poll finds much shallower underlying support for Labor partly caused by voters spurning the major parties in record numbers.

“There is still the prospect of Australians waking up to a hung Parliament on Sunday morning,” Roy Morgan chief executive Michele Levine said.

“It is more important than ever for the ALP to finish strongly in the last few days of the campaign.”

Such a shift in support to Labor would notionally deliver the party, accounting for the concentration of its support in different states, a gain of up to ten seats, or two more than needed to command a majority on the floor of Parliament and provide a Speaker.

But election swings are not uniform; even if such projections were replicated nationally only a few seat contests would need to buck the trend to frustrate Labor’s ambitions to govern in its own right.

The penultimate poll of the campaign finds changes in voter behaviour and party support even more likely to worry the Opposition.

Labor’s primary vote share is down 1.5 points this week, putting it on level pegging with the Coalition on 34 per cent.

Such levels, Levine notes, would represent a record low in major party support not seen since Labor was pipped at the post by the Anti-Socialist Party in 1906.

Read the full poll report at The New Daily.

 

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