Trove newspaper poll archive

Every newspaper article in the National Library's Trove archive that mentions a poll: 3,047,897 articles from 1803-01 to 2025-12, and the 7,868 among them that report one.

Morgan, Nielsen, Newspoll, and the rest were read in newspapers long before they went online. For the years the pollsters' own sites don't reach back to, the newspaper is the only published source left. This page keeps that record in one place, for safekeeping and so the tracker's older figures can be checked against where they first appeared. Trove's coverage sets the limits: state papers to the mid-1950s, The Canberra Times to 1995, and little after that but government gazettes.

Coverage over time

Articles that match "poll", by decade. "About polling" counts those written in the language of poll results (opinion poll, two-party preferred, primary vote, and so on), and "Poll reports" those that name a pollster. The 1990s stop at 1995 because later papers are still in copyright, not because polling stopped.

The mastheads

The top 15 of 2127 titles, by articles that mention a poll. From the 1960s until Trove's copy of it ends, The Canberra Times carried most of the published poll coverage.

The poll reports

The 7,868 articles that name a pollster. Each links to the article on Trove, where the page scan and its corrected text are free to read. The full list is in trove-poll-articles.csv, and the monthly counts behind the first table are in trove-mentions-monthly.csv. The machine-read text of 3167 articles is copied in trove-text.jsonl.

1968 4

1969 13

1970 5

1971 11

1972 40

1973 39

1974 49

1975 36

1976 25

1977 22

1978 18

1979 12

1980 24

1981 18

1982 27

1983 26

1984 40

1985 35

1986 31

1987 32

1988 47

1989 82

1990 109

1991 100

1992 96