For caucus there is no alternative to 'Albo'

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.