Via Mumbles (early bird off the back of a truck edition), Newspoll comes in with primaries running 46 (up 4) / 37 (down 1) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 56/44 the same way, up 1 from a fortnight ago. This comes from a sample of 1155 giving an MoE around the 2.9% mark.

Oh dear – well this hasn’t been pretty for the press gallery and political commentators today, has it?

Monday morning we were assured that Rudd’s “Walk with the gods is over”, that “It seems more likely that the last year and a half [of polling results] has been the aberration, that we have now entered normalcy” declared Peter Hartcher, with the sort of biblical authority usually reserved for Paul Kelly on a gravitas bender.

“ Back to real life after the honeymoon” went the SMH – the end of the Rudd era was upon us, driven, apparently, by pensions or something or other plucked from the vagaries of political columnist nullspace.

For half an hour Sky News Agenda banged on and on and on about how politics was once again close – how it had changed (they even had serious looking people in suits saying serious sounding things to prove it) – not because it necessarily had changed or not, but simply because they seemingly wanted it to have changed…. more exciting news and all that. Organisations as diverse as the ABC, right through to those talkback radio muppets couldn’t have pulled it any harder if they tried.

And it was all over sampling variance.

Let’s repeat that – these folks went drifting off into political la la land, getting their knickers in right knots, all over sampling variance.

Yes, well done folks – marvellous effort really. As we said on Monday – put that in your narrative and smoke it.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth where budgets rarely make a rats arse of difference to public opinion vote estimates, the usual charts for Newspoll come in like this:

pmsat

ppm

We’ll go over all this in far more detail tomorrow, including having a squiz at the Newspoll budget questions.