Historian Luke Nichter considers the turmoil you know about – assassinations, chaotic conventions, the racist rise of George Wallace – but also the backroom dramas you don’t
When Essential decided to stop releasing our fortnightly party preference polling after the 2019 election one of the factors driving our decision was the way “horse-race” polling had become a destabilising influence on the body politic. Rather than actively engaging with the public to develop policies that met community need and taking those ideas to an election, the running scoreboard became a cheap and easy proxy for public engagement. If you.
But releasing our quarterly two-party-preferred âplusâ sequence this week, it strikes me that in the current environment, the horse race could have an opposite, stabilising effect.
Despite ongoing and strong approval of the federal governmentâs response to the pandemic, the stated voting intention over the past three months has been lineball, if not slightly in favour of Labor.
This is not to fall into the well-worn trap of saying âLabor is aheadâ. Until an election is called there is no âaheadâ. Rather it is to say, as we embark on the year after the most remarkable year in our living memory, that the political contest will commence from a fairly level standing start.