There’s polling, and then there’s polling.
Yesterday, Possum did a piece for Crikey (reproduced on his blog) which was a great take-down of some MSM reporting of some pretty inconsequential movements in the Newspoll numbers. Poss reckons the Oz (especially the Shanahany bits) is back to their old tricks - spinning, shifting the goalposts, and generally trying to make things look worse than they are for the PM.
If you’d rather rely on qualitative polling than the hunches of Dennis to get an insight into what people thought about the budget a little while back, check out Graham Young’s write-up of his What the People Want polling series in On Line Opinion this morning.
The summary? “Overall the budget didn’t evoke strong emotions and was incremental rather than revolutionary.” Kevin Rudd consolidated things, and although Graham’s survey didn’t include the fuelwatch fracas, it’s likely that the long-term effect of the last week or two will be closer to the findings of his polling than the guesses/spin on the meaning of quantitaive polling by gallery journos.
[...] Jason Wilson highlights the valuable (and interesting) qualitative polling of the Australian electorate being done by Graham Young et al (including Mark Bahnisch), while Mark himself wonders why the MSM don’t commission qualitative polling instead of having the usual pundits write dubious interpretations of the public quantitative polls. [...]