More than half of voters in the latest Guardian Essential poll believe Bill Shorten and Labor will win the next federal election. Only 21% think the Morrison government can recover from a horror year, and prevail at the polls in 2019.

The disillusionment of Australian voters is also palpable in the final opinion survey of the year – 65% of the sample of 1,026 respondents say 2018 has been a particularly bad year for Australian politics and 57% saying it has been a bad year for the federal government.

That collective thumbs-down about the state of the national discourse is even more visceral than last year – likely reflecting the impact of yet another coup against a sitting prime minister, and a turbulent year peppered with byelection contests triggered by the section 44 fracas. In the final poll of last year, 54% of the sample felt it had been a particularly bad year for Australian politics.

Labor remains ahead of the Coalition in the latest survey, as it has in every Guardian Essential poll this year, suggesting a hard-baked trend. The opposition is ahead of the government on the two-party preferred measure 53% to 47%. A fortnight ago, Labor was ahead 54% to 46%.

The Coalition’s primary vote is 37% and Labor is on 36%.

With the Morrison government enduring a difficult final parliamentary session in 2018 now it no longer commands a majority in either chamber, voters were asked whether they thought Scott Morrison should run for a full term, or whether he should call an early election.

Just over half, 52%, said the government should hang on until next year, while 27% think an early election is warranted.

A sizeable majority of Coalition voters, 76%, think Morrison should wait, while Labor voters are divided, with 43% wanting an early election and 40% saying the government should hang on.

There is a clear expectation that Labor will win next year’s contest, although partisan loyalties influence perceptions: 89% of Labor voters think Shorten will win and 53% of Coalition voters think Morrison will.

Voters in this fortnight’s survey were also asked questions about the attributes of the major party leaders. Since the questions were last asked in September, voters are more inclined to think Morrison is erratic (up 7%), narrow-minded and arrogant (both up 5%) and less inclined to say he’s intelligent (down 5%).

The main movement in perceptions about Shorten is a 4% decrease in the number of voters saying he is arrogant. There have also been drops of 3% in the number of voters thinking the Labor leader is good in a crisis and understands the problems facing Australia.

On the positive side for the prime minister, Morrison is more likely to be considered more honest than most politicians (+8%), a capable leader (+6%) and visionary (+6%), while Shorten is a little more likely than Morrison to be considered erratic (+4%), arrogant (+3%) and superficial (+3%).

But on most attributes, the perception gap between the two leaders has narrowed since the questions were put in September.

Morrison has attempted to gain traction in the closing weeks of the political year by accelerating various policy announcements, including unveiling the next governor general at the same time as Shorten was opening the Labor party conference in Adelaide.

The government was hoping stronger-than-expected budget figures would dominate the last week before Christmas, but that plan has been derailed by a controversy that has forced a junior frontbencher, Andrew Broad, to resign his position.

Shorten has presided over the ALP’s national conference in Adelaide, with factional power brokers working assiduously behind the scenes to try and minimise any overt conflict between delegates deemed to be politically inconvenient for the leader.