There’s been much buzz this morning around the Newspoll in The Australian which shows 62 per cent of Victorian voters believe that Daniel Andrews has handled the coronavirus crisis well.

Newspoll also finds that 61 per cent of voters nationally, including 57 per cent of Coalition voters, say the Victorian hard lockdown restrictions are appropriate.

The second part of the polling is easy to explain. When your neighbour’s house burns down, you hope the fire won’t spread to yours. And Jeff Kennett was bang on the money when he told the Today show he was “not surprised at all” by Newspoll’s main finding, adding “When you have people in situations of stress they always look to their leaders to actually be able to guide them to a safe place.”

But there’s another poll out this morning you should look at, the fortnightly Essential Report.

Essential Research

There’s a golden rule of understanding polling. You never take one poll on its own. You look at polling over a period of time, then start to draw conclusions. The trend is your friend.

Essential very clearly shows that the proportion of people who rated the Victorian government’s response to coronavirus as “good” plunged from 65 to 49 per cent in mid-July — a massive 28 per cent (not percentage point) fall. Most of the time since then, it has stayed below the 50 per cent mark.

At the same time, Essential again shows the Andrews government has been firmly at the bottom of the class throughout that same timeframe, the only government regularly receiving failing grades. Their latest polling puts the next lowest state, New South Wales, on 67 per cent — a full 35 per cent (again, not percentage points) ahead of Danandrewstan.

The #IstandwithDan Twits can settle down. As Kevin Donnelly observed in these pages last week, Dictator Dan is a dictator dud.

Essential shows that’s how the punters feel.