For caucus there is no alternative to 'Albo'

The results of our poll on the Labor leadership should buoy Anthony Albanese, not only is he overwhelmingly the preferred ALP leader by a significant margin, but he comes with some of the most positive ratings that I have seen for a politician.

It doesn't matter what voting segment you are talking about but he blitzes his opponent Bill Shorten. While he's the preferred leader for ALP voters by 76% to 24%, it doesn't change much for Liberal voters who prefer him 74% to 26% with only the final digits swapping places.

Only minor party voters resist his charm a little, but he still has a solid majority there too

These figures almost guarantee that Albanese has to win the leadership ballot. The new leadership selection process was chosen to give the grass roots a greater say, and those who should know, say that this opportunity has galvanised people to rejoin Labor.

If the party membership vote is genuine, and I have no reason to think that it isn't, then its result, although it is secret at the moment, will mirror what we are seeing here.

If caucus members vote differently, then we will have the spectacle of a house divided against itself. Labor lost the last election partly because it spent too little time listening to the electorate and its own natural demographic base and too much time listening to union and social media elites. If it votes for Shorten, then it will show that it is still not listening to its grass roots supporters and average voters.

If the Caucus vote prevails over the membership vote, then the grass roots, that has become invigorated, will wither away again. What is the point of voting in such large numbers for one candidate and still losing?

We will also have proof that the Labor Party has been choosing parliamentary representatives who are very unrepresentative of its own base, and be entitled to ask just what that base actually is.

This is quite a different situation from the last parliament where both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were not the leader most popular with the general electorate. Yet while the public would have preferred Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull respectively, it was never the case for the party membership. In both cases Gillard and Abbott had the support of those they most closely claimed to represent. That was why changing leaders to Rudd was so difficult for Labor - the grass roots didn't support his candidacy, even as they despaired of hers.

And things get potentially worse for Labor if they don't choose Shorten when you look at the qualitative results.

The last election was about the "trust deficit". Electors didn't trust Labor to honour its promises or to effectively carry out those it did honour. It was framed by a broken promise on a carbon tax and went from there.

Labor's task in opposition is to rebuild its trust, and if it is to do this Anthony Albanese appears to be the man. The things that people like about Anthony Albanese are that he is genuine, honest, loyal, a good negotiator and performer and represents the Labor culture. He isn’t heavily union aligned and doesn’t have baggage.

"Albanese seems more genuine and sincere. Shorten comes across as extremely wooden, with too much media training and not enough of the human behind the media trained front."

"He seems to be genuine and capable. Shorten is fine and perfectly suited, but I think his motives are less sincere."

"Don't trust Shorten. He would be on the nose with the public, too tied to leadership instability."

In each of these cases, while voters are justifying a vote for Albanese it is always by reference to Shorten.

Supporters of Shorten think he is smarter, like his union background, and use words like “communicator”, “savvy”. Responses tend to concentrate not so much on who he is, but on what he does, another potential weakness in a political system where so much weight is put on personality.

The table below shows you the likelihood of particular words being used by supporters of Albanese and Shorten.

Talking of personality driven politics inevitably leads to the question of whether Kevin Rudd is coming back any time soon, and the answer appears to be that, at least for the moment, we are over him.

The other significant finding of our polling is that when we expand the choice of Labor leader to Albanese, Shorten, Plibersek and Rudd, Albanese still wins easily, but second choice is Plibersek, followed by Shorten, and only then by Rudd.

The first table is the first choice for Labor leader.

Albanese is the clear favourite, particularly amongst Labor and Liberal voters. Plibersek is next, with strongest support amongst Greens. Kevin Rudd is well in the rear, with his best support, such as it is, from Liberal voters.

The second table is second choice for Labor leader. This confirms Albanese and Plibersek as the two front runners.

Labor caucus members have a clear choice today. They can run with the favourite, who will give them the opportunity to prove that popular opinion counts, as well as a public face of trustworthy reliability, or they can vote for Bill Shorten, which will reinforce the impression that the unions run Labor, and that it is the party for opportunists, disconnected with the broader electorate.

Of course they may decide that popular wisdom is wrong and that Shorten represents a much better long term bet, but if they do, and if their view prevails, they will have a lot of explaining to do.