Rough Newspoll Preferred PM graph

This graph is presentationally challenged. It was done quickly. Will return to it later today (Friday) or over weekend to fix it up, with labels, hopefully decent time scales, and include voting intentions.

Incumbent's preferred PM rating is orange, opposition leader's green. Scale is 15 to 65. Time is from 1987 to August 2003. The horizontal scale is out of wack: 1987 to 1996, although accounting for most of the period, uses less than half the graph. This is because the graph is based purely on numbers of polls - the Howard years have been measured within an inch of their life - and making it work to time scale is beyond my capabilities.

That sudden big lead taken by PM (roughly above the word "orange") denotes the beginning of Howard government in March 1996 .Before that you can see Hawke ahead of both Howard and Peacock for the few preferred PM measurements until, as Shanahan says, Hewson starting hitting the front (where green is above orange for first time). Keating's thrills and spills saw him ahead about half the time before he went down in 1996. Note that Howard (green) was behind Keating as preferred PM right up until election day.

Crean certainly does extremely badly on this measure. But what is really "interesting", as he  might put it, is that until the current term big preferred PM leads were matched with big voting intention ones. That's not the case today, with the vote pretty close.

I'll redo this on the weekend and include voting intentions with scale and labels etc.