Voice to parliament: Linda Burney's electorate leaning towards No ...

Before jetting to Broken Hill in far-western NSW, Mr Albanese emphasised his optimism for the result and encouraged voters to seize the opportunity for a historic change and moment of unity.

“Twenty-five per cent of people have not made up their mind yet. There’s nothing to be gained for a nation succumbing to a fear campaign,” Mr Albanese said on Monday afternoon.

“What helps a nation grow and expand and be better is hope and optimism and a sense of seizing the moment of the future. I think also people will ask themselves after 122 years, if not now, when?

“When will we get around to completing our Constitution by acknowledging the fullness and richness of our history?”

Newspoll and Resolve polling, two separate surveys which showed support for the No case remained ahead nationally, in a tightening race.

The Focaldata polling focused on individual seats, and indicated Labor’s message for constitutional change was failing to land even in electorates held by some of its highest profile MPs.

In deputy prime minister Richard Marles’ electorate of Corio just south of Melbourne, support for the No vote sat at 57 per cent, while in Mark Dreyfus’ seat of Isaacs on Melbourne’s south-eastern shore known as the “sandbelt”, the No vote also remained ahead on 61 per cent.

In Linda Burney’s suburban Sydney seat of Barton, the vote sat line-ball and within a three per cent margin of error, with the No vote on 52 to the Yes vote’s 48.

Teal seats showed disparity in voting behaviours; Zali Steggall’s seat of Warringah, in Sydney’s north, close to evenly split on 55 to 45 with No ahead. In Goldstein in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs, Wentworth in Sydney’s wealthy east and Kooyong in Melbourne’s inner east are all within the margin of error. North Sydney, held by Kylea Tink, is the only Teal electorate where the Yes vote is ahead, on 57 to 43.

Labor national secretary Paul Erickson declined to discuss the figures on the basis he did not regard the result as an official poll. Former Victorian Labor assistant secretary Kosmos Samaras, who now leads Redbridge Consulting which polls for Climate 200 and some Teal MPs, said the figures confirmed a broader trend in which the No vote led, while some suburban and wealthier inner-city seats were showing surprising support for the No campaign.

“The key is that it is another data point in a set which confirms a certain trend and where the result is going,” Mr Samaras said, who added the result was being considered widely in polling circles and had been taken seriously by strategists.

But the nature of the technique, called multi-level regression and post-stratification, had missed demographic nuances including education levels and ethnic make-up of regional seats which would alter how they perform.

He said Ballarat and Bendigo in regional Victoria were expected to perform better for the Yes campaign than the 42 per cent in Transport Minister Catherine King’s Ballarat and 35 per cent in Bendigo.

“It looks like it should look ... support for Yes is higher in some wealthier and more educated electorates, and then drops off as you get further out of the city,” Mr Samaras said.

“But there are nuances ... there’s a big difference between attitudes in established migrant communities and those that came over within the last 20 years ... the older ones are more likely to vote No, the more recent groups are more likely to vote Yes.”

A Liberal insider noted the split between voting patterns in Western Sydney and some of the wealthier inner-city seats, where it is believed that cost of living pressures are affecting the way voters feel about the Voice and measures to address disadvantage.

“We’re noticing some electorates with higher incomes are voting No at a higher level than we expected, and at a higher level than communities with a lower socio-economic status,” the insider said, adding that the nature of the Voice in addressing disadvantage could be jarring to higher-income households at a time when they were struggling to cover bills.

“In places where people are on lower incomes, they’re much more open to changes which try and address disadvantage, mainly because they’re usually the net beneficiaries of any assistance. But that’s different for communities at the other end of the scale,” they said.