(Cross posted from What the people want.)
According to the results of our May Omnibus poll, the Coalition is improving its vote, but its leader is less popular than ever.
On our First Preference Index, which seeks to measure the vote against a base of September 2008, Labor is at 98, which means slightly less popular than September last year, the Liberal Party is 120, substantially up, while the Greens are marginally up on 106.

However, Malcolm Turnbull’s approval has taken a further dive. I haven’t applied the index approach to these figures so they have to be used with care as our sample is consistent over time, but not necessarily representative of the general population.
He’s not on his own as Kevin Rudd has also taken a tumble, but still enjoys 50% popularity.

Turnbull and Rudd have both dropped 10 percentage points on their approvals (although expressed as a percentage of a percentage this is roughly 33% loss of supporters for Turnbull versus 16% loss to Rudd). Where their approvals are different is in the disapproval figure with Turnbull’s larger than 50%, and three times as high as when we first measured it in September.
However, Turnbull’s preferred PM status has barely moved from September, and is actually up from January.

Which illustrates the problems with judging political parties on the basis of the approval of their leader. It doesn’t necessarily translate into votes.
Why is Turnbull’s approval tracking so badly while things appear to be improving for him? We’ll have some qual later in the week, but at the moment it appears to be his two-stools problem. Because of his urbanity and his past association with the Republican Movement he appeals to centre voters, but they already have Kevin Rudd to vote for. These same characteristics make more conservative voters suspicious of him. It is impossible for him to service both constituencies, so his approval rating is eroded from both directions.

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