SYDNEY (AFP) ― Kevin Rudd’s bid to lead Australia again was boosted Saturday when opinion polls showed he remains more popular than Prime Minister Julia Gillard and likely Labor’s best chance of winning an election.

Rudd will face off against colleague Gillard on Monday in a ballot taken by the 103 members of the Labor Party caucus after a divisive battle that has seen the ruling party engage in unprecedented infighting.

Gillard has said she is confident she will win the vote but Rudd has called on his party to accept the “cold, hard, stark reality” and reinstate him as leader to prevent Labor from being dumped by voters at the next election.

Rudd, who was thronged by people seeking photographs, autographs and even hugs as he visited a Brisbane shopping area with his wife on Saturday, said the polls were “out there in black and white for everyone to look at”.

His campaign also received a shot in the arm Saturday when influential Labor minister Anthony Albanese defected to his camp, saying he believed Labor’s best chance of winning the next election was with Rudd as leader.

A Nielsen poll of 1,200 voters published in the Sydney Morning Herald found that Rudd was overwhelmingly the preferred party leader, garnering 58 percent of the vote compared with Gillard’s 34 percent.

The poll also found that Labor’s overall support remained below the opposition’s, with only 47 percent of votes likely to go to the government compared to 53 percent heading to the opposition if an election were held now.

A Galaxy poll, published in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, showed Rudd ahead of Gillard as best placed to lead the Labor party by 52 percent to 26 percent.

The survey of 1,020 voters also found that if Rudd were Labor leader, the party’s share of the vote would jump from the current 34 percent to 37 percent.

A Newspoll in The Weekend Australian also suggested that Rudd was Labor’s best hope of defeating the conservative opposition in 2013, with those questioned said they preferred him as leader over both Gillard and Abbott.

Gillard downplayed the polls, saying: “Delivering good government isn’t about keeping your eyes on the opinion polls.”

“It’s about doing the job that the nation needs done, sometimes that does cost you popularity, but we’ve got to embrace the future, get the big reforms done and that’s precisely what I’ve been doing,” she told reporters.

Rudd shot to power in November 2007 when he led Labor to victory after more than a decade of conservative rule under John Howard.

But by mid-2010, many of his Labor Party colleagues were deeply disgruntled with his style of leadership and he was ousted in a party room coup that installed Gillard as the nation’s first woman prime minister.

Gillard only narrowly clung to government after an August 2010 election and she has endured a year of dismal polling while Rudd, who until his resignation on Wednesday was foreign minister, appears to still enjoy broad public support.

The Prime Minister is believed to have the numbers to win Monday’s vote, with media pundits suggesting she will win by a margin of 2 to 1, but the bloodletting has plunged the Labor Party into crisis.

Albanese, who is leader of government business in parliament, said he believed the way Rudd was dumped when prime minister was wrong.

“We cannot have a situation whereby a first-term elected prime minister is deposed without warning under the circumstances in which it was done,” he said.