The Poll Bludger

With early voting to begin on Tuesday, details of how-to-vote cards are starting to accumulate. So far as the Senate is concerned, the ABC is making life easy by gathering them in one place, while the eternally patient among you can view lower house how-to-vote cards for Labor candidates and Liberal candidates one by one on individual candidate pages. I tend to consider the subject not worth much of the news space devoted to it, because only major party voters follow them in substantial numbers, and in most cases they make the final count and their preferences are thus not distributed — though the number of exceptions is of course much higher than it used to be.

The Victorian Electoral Commission provided a rare insight into the matter when it made available full ballot paper data for seven seats at the 2022 state election, which is normally available only for upper house counts and in New South Wales, where its applicability is limited by optional preferential voting. The rate at which Labor votes exactly followed the how-to-vote card was consistently around 30% (helpfully, there were large numbers of candidates in these seats, so few are likely to arrived upon the requisite order by happenstance). The rate of adherence among Liberal voters varied widely according to the amount of effort the party was putting into a given seat — 57.0% in Brighton, where it was fighting off a teal independent, and 53.9% in Hawthorn, where it was successfully challenging a Labor incumbent, but only 29.4% in Preston, where the fight was between Labor and the Greens.

As for minor parties, whether the Greens actively preference Labor (as they are doing in every seat at this election) or offer no recommendation (which is as far as they ever go in repudiating Labor) makes about five points’ worth of difference to the percentage received by Labor, which is typically upwards of 80%. The impact is likely even less for smaller parties, which lack the volunteer base needed to disseminate how-to-vote cards on a large scale at polling places. As such, it would not pay to put too much weight on the decision by Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots to direct preferences against most sitting members. It was, indeed, news to me that his United Australia Party had done much the same in 2022, a fact related by Kos Samaras of RedBridge Group in a report in the News Corp papers yesterday. Out of 108 seats where the relevant data exists, I calculate that Labor got 41.7% of UAP preferences in seats where they had sitting members in 2022 and 35.5% where the Coalition did – the opposite of what would have been expected if their voters had been following the how-to-vote card in non-trivial numbers.

The same approach was adopted by One Nation during its early heyday at the Western Australian state election in 2001, in this case involving a party with genuine mass support and not simply the artefact of a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. This is sometimes said to have been a key factor in Labor’s unexpectedly clear-cut win at the election over the two-term Coalition government of Richard Court. To test this, I have just blown the dust of my print copy of the statistical returns from that elections and identified 24 seats where One Nation candidates were the last excluded in the preference count and their votes distributed between Labor and the Coalition. The distinction in this case was at least in the right direction, but nonetheless very modest — Labor averaged 53.2% of the preference transfers in Coalition-held seats and 49.7% in Labor-held seats. I assumed there would be a relationship between Labor’s vote share in a given seat and the strength of its preference flow — the likeliest explanation for the counter-intuitive finding just noted for the United Australia Party — but there was in fact little evidence of this.

So with all that in mind, the following points worth noting have emerged from news reportage, in lieu of my own lack of motivation to investigate the matter too deeply myself:

• Macnamara is the only seat where Labor is not directing preferences, which it is doing there at the initiative of incumbent Josh Burns in recognition of the local Jewish community’s concerns about the Greens. It is entirely possible that Burns will run third, in which case Labor preferences will come into play in the race between the Liberals and the Greens. Had it played out that way in 2022, the Greens would have won handily on a flood of Labor preferences, just as Burns easily defeated the Liberals after receiving fully 90.25% of the preferences from the third-placed Greens. Macnamara partly corresponds with the state seat of Brighton, where the behaviour of Labor preferences in 2022 was noted above. The 10,126 Labor votes in the seat included 3231 who followed the card, 5468 who favoured the Greens over the Liberals independently, and 1427 who had the Liberals ahead of the Greens. If those who followed the how-to-vote card had split in the same proportion as those who did, the flow of Labor preferences to the Greens would have fallen from 85.9% to 79.3%. Making a reasonable assumption that the Labor primary vote in the seat will be about 30%, this suggests Labor’s open ticket could contribute about 2% to a swing of upwards of 10% that the Liberals would need if it came down to them and the Greens.

• Next door in Goldstein, Liberal candidate Tim Wilson has teal incumbent Zoe Wilson second last ahead of the Greens, leaving her behind One Nation as well as Labor. The Age notes that Wilson said in 2019 that he had “a longstanding view that we should put One Nation and their despicable acolytes last”. While this may be of interest on an optical level, Wilson’s preferences are of little electoral consequence as he seems assured of making the final count.

• Conversely, the Liberals in Western Australia have put teal independent Kate Hulett ahead of Labor in third place in Fremantle (though here too they favour One Nation, who are second), a fairly remarkable turnaround on the March state election when they had her last but for the Greens.

• Labor are favouring Liberal over the Nationals in the three-cornered contest in the new Western Australian seat of Bullwinkel. However, an apparent improvement in Labor’s fortunes suggests the issue here is likely to be whether Nationals candidate Mia Davies or Liberal candidate Matt Moran makes it to the final count against Labor’s Trish Cook.

• The Liberals may have scotched the chances of independent Peter George by putting him behind Labor in Franklin. George is a former ABC journalist running with support from Climate 200 and in opposition to salmon farming, none of which would have endeared him to the Liberals. With 19-year-old Greens candidate Owen Fitzgerald having conceded he would be unable to sit in parliament due to a dual citizenship, Matthew Denholm of The Australian reported the party was expected to throw its support behind George, who had already been endorsed by former party leader Bob Brown.

• Liberal-turned-independent Russell Broadbent has interestingly opted to place teal independent Deb Leonard all-but-last in Monash. Leonard was presumably counting on getting ahead of him and benefiting from the strong preference flows that typically apply between independents.

• Paul Karp of the Financial Review reports Ziad Basyouny and Ahmed Ouf, who are respectively challenging Tony Burke in Watson and Jason Clare in Blaxland with support from The Muslim Vote, are directing preferences to Labor ahead of Liberal “after failing to strike a preference deal with the opposition”. The Liberal how-to-vote cards have them both dead last, which does not surprise, but will nonetheless make life difficult for them. A review article in the Sun-Herald today says Labor believes it could face swings in the seats of “more than 6%”, with Watson of greater concern.

Quite a bit of polling and polling-adjacent news to relate:

• The News Corp papers have another wave of the RedBridge Group-Accent Research poll tracking 20 marginal seats that once again records substantial movement in favour of Labor, whose two-party lead in seats that collectively broke around 51-49 in Labor’s favour at the 2022 election is now at 54.5-45.5, out from 52.5-47.5 last week. The report relates that Labor’s primary vote is steady since last week and the Coalition is down two to 34% — a graphic showing both on 35% and the Greens on 13% combines results from this week and last week. The poll also finds 51% accepting Labor’s position that Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan “will cost $600 billion and he will need to make cuts to pay for it”, with only 13% disagreeing; 45% agreeing that “Labor’s reckless spending is driving up inflation”, with 29% disagreeing; 42% agreeing that “Peter Dutton will cut Medicare if he is elected”, with 26% disagreeing; 36% rating that Labor has “the best election promises for them” compared with 26% for the Coalition; and 37% agreeing that “Australia is poorer, less safe and more divided because of Anthony Albanese”, and 36% disagreeing. The poll was conducted last Wednesday to Tuesday from a sample of 1000.

• The report accompanying the poll relates a 51-49 Coalition lead from the small-sample Victorian component of the poll, encompassing Aston, Casey, Chisholm, Corangamite and Menzies, suggesting a collective 2.5% swing to the Coalition. James Campbell of News Corp relates conflicting claims on internal polling from the state: Coalition sources claim “their tracking poll is holding up”, whereas Labor claims to be ahead in all its seats except Aston, “which they haven’t bothered to look at”.

• The Australian reports Labor strategists believe they are “edging closer to claiming a majority government victory on the back of a recovery in New South Wales and Victoria”. There is, however, a seemingly shared expectation that the Liberals will win Gilmore and recover the by-election loss of Aston, and likely gain Bennelong from Labor, Ryan from the Greens and Monash from Liberal-turned-independent Russell Broadbent. Labor is “understood to have its nose ahead in a tight three-cornered contest” in Greens-held Brisbane, but faces a “tough fight” against the Greens to hold Wills. Teal independent challenges to the Liberals in Bradfield and Wannon are “expected to go down to the wire”. Sources from both sides said they did not expect Labor to make gains from the LNP in Queensland.

• Dennis Shanahan of The Australian has another surprising set of poll numbers from conservative outfit Compass, this time from Wentworth, where Liberal candidate Roanne Knox is said to be leading teal incumbent Allegra Spender 47% to 28%, with Labor on 15% and the Greens on 10%. The poll, conducted by SMS from a sample of 627 at a time undisclosed, also finds the highest priority issue in the distinctly liberal electorate is “national security and immigration”. The aforementioned report in The Australian on party strategists’ view of the overall situation said the Liberals were “hoping to win back the teal seats of Curtin, Goldstein and Kooyong”, but made no mention of Wentworth.

• Tom Rabe of the Financial Review reports “pollsters and sources from both major parties” rate the Liberals favourites in the three-cornered contest for the new Western Australian seat of Bullwinkel, although some Labor sources believe they could still manage what they acknowledge would be an upset.

• Speaking on ABC Adelaide’s breakfast radio show on Thursday (listen from 3:12:30), Seven Network state politics reporter Mike Smithson related that a Liberal source had told him the party had “almost given up on Boothby” and was “now sandbagging Sturt”.

• Nine Newspapers has published audio and SMS messages from surveying conducted by uComms for Climate 200 that critics characterise as “push polling”. The Australian quoted a Climate 200 spokesperson earlier in the campaign saying results from its “message-tested vote intentions” questions were “used for internal campaign reasons only and not shared with the media”.

• Erin Clarke of the e61 Institute offers a finding that males aged between 15 to 24 have lately defied a long-term across-the-board trend of declining “belief in traditional gender norms”, to the extent of holding more conservative views than all male age cohorts other than 65-plus. The finding suggests it might be instructive for pollsters to start providing breakdowns that separate the age cohorts by gender. Peter Lewis of Essential Research helpfully provided such data last month in The Guardian, finding that men aged 18-to-34 gave Peter Dutton a net approval rating of plus 19%, compared with minus 20% among young women and minus 5% overall, and an average positive rating for Donald Trump of 47% across five different policy areas, compared with 26% among young women and 24% overall.

YouGov brings more good news for Labor, its latest federal poll crediting them with a two-party lead of 53-47, out from 52.5-47.5. The primary votes are Labor 33% (up one), Coalition 33% (down half), Greens 13% (steady) and One Nation 7% (down one-and-a-half). Anthony Albanese is nonetheless down two on approval to 43% and up two on disapproval to 49%, while Peter Dutton is up two to 40% and down three to 50%. Albanese leads 48-38 on preferred prime minister, little changed from 48-37 last week. The poll was conducted Friday to Tuesday from a sample of 1506.

On the cusp of interruptions to the campaign arising from Easter and Anzac Day, a flurry of new poll results:

• The Freshwater Strategy poll for the Financial Review has been the most favourable series for the Coalition throughout the past term, and remains so with a new result recording a tie on two-party preferred. The change from 51-49 in the Coalition’s favour in the post-budget poll is due to either rounding or respondent-allocated preferences, as the primary votes are entirely unchanged at Labor 32%, Coalition 39% and Greens 12%. There is also little movement on the leaders’ ratings, with both down a point on approval and steady on disapproval, leaving Anthony Albanese at 37% and 48% and Peter Dutton at 36% and 47%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister is nonetheless out from 46-45 to 46-41. I don’t normally pay much attention to the poll’s “management of voter priorities” results, but it may be notable that Labor now leads 35% to 31% as the best party to handle housing compared with a 33% to 30% deficit last time. The poll was conducted Monday to Wednesday from a sample of 1062.

• The News Corp papers report a new MRP poll by RedBridge Group and Accent Research, conducted from February 3 to April 1 from a sample of 9953, projects a minimum 66 seats for Labor, 55 for the Coalition and 15 for minor parties and independents, with 14 seats too close to call. Chisholm, Aston and Dobell are rated as Coalition gains from Labor, with Sturt and Bass going the other way. As is sometimes the case with MRP polling, there are some unorthodox projections with respect to minor parties and independents, with the Liberals favoured to gain Kooyong from Monique Ryan and Brisbane from the Greens, but lose Cowper, Calare and Monash to various stripes of independent. The seats rated too close to call are Labor-held Robertson, Reid, Shortland, Bennelong, Gilmore, Paterson, Bruce, Hawke, McEwen and Lingiari, Liberal-held Hughes and Casey, teal-held Goldstein, and the new seat of Bullwinkel.

• The Daily Mail reports on an Ipsos poll that offers nothing on voting intention, but finds Anthony Albanese on 35% approval and 39% disapproval, Peter Dutton with distinctly poor ratings of 27% approval and 47% disapproval, and Albanese leading 44-30 on preferred prime minister. Forty-seven per cent expected Labor to win, compared with 26% for the Coalition, but 35% felt the country was headed on the right track compared with 51% for the wrong track. No field work dates are provided, but the sample was 2006.

• The Courier-Mail reports polling conducted for Australian Energy Producers by JWS Research shows the Greens set to lose all three of their seats in Brisbane, by an eyebrow-raising margin in the case of Ryan, where incumbent Elizabeth Watson-Brown is credited with just 13% of the primary vote. The LNP candidate is on 45% and leads second-placed Labor 57-43 on two-party preferred. Things presumably aren’t much better for Stephen Bates in Brisbane, where Labor is credited with a 51-49 two-party lead from primary votes of 42% for the LNP and 29% for Labor. The report says Labor leads the LNP 51-49 in Griffith in scenarios where Greens member Max Chandler-Mather drops out and the LNP leads him 53-47 where Labor does, but the primary votes that would allow for the likelihood of the respective scenarios to be evaluated are not provided. We are told the sample for the Ryan poll was 2547, but I suspect this was for the three seats in total.

• The Lowy Institute has published some preview results of its annual survey of attitudes to foreign policy, finding 41% of the view that Anthony Albanese would be more competent at handling foreign policy compared with 29% for Peter Dutton. Dutton is at 35% to Albanese’s 34% for handling Donald Trump, but Albanese leads 45% to 25% for handling Xi Jinping. There was a 64-36 break against the proposition that the United States can be trusted to act responsibly in the world, compared with 56-44 in favour last year. Eighty per cent nonetheless hold that the relationship is very or fairly important to Australia’s security, down only three points. The survey was conducted March 3 to 16 from a sample of 2117.

The second of three leaders’ debate will be hosted by the ABC from 8pm this evening, to be moderated by David Speers. It was also announced on Monday that the third will be held on Sunday, April 27, a week out from polling day, to be conducted by the Seven Network and moderated by Mark Riley. On the polling front, Nine Newspapers has further results from the Resolve Strategic poll showing Labor’s policies favoured over the Coalition’s on tax (40% to 34%) and housing (40% to 27%) (UPDATE: This is actually a new survey of 801 respondents, conducted “in the days after” the weekend poll). There is also a characteristically thorough review of the polling over the past few months by Macquarie University academic Murray Goot at Inside Story.

I’m hoping to do a bit more over the coming two-and-a-half weeks by way of probing into the innards of recent poll results, starting by focusing on regional breakdowns from RedBridge Group’s four federal polls for this year, which helpfully use the same classifications employed by the Australian Electoral Commission. The table below shows combined party vote shares for these four regions at the 2022 election, together with their deviation from the national result, then repeats the exercise for the four RedBridge polls published so far this year, followed by a measure of how much these relativities have changed. So for example, the Coalition is up two points in “provincial”, but this translates to no change in the third table because it’s also up two points overall.

The results suggest Labor’s biggest improvement has come from the “rural” category, which might be thought unhelpful for them, raising the spectre of unproductive improvements in safe conservative seats. In point of fact though, the AEC employs the term loosely enough to encompass a number of important seats: Gilmore, Hunter, Eden-Monaro, Lingiari, Leichhardt, Lyons and McEwen. To the extent that outer metropolitan might nonetheless be thought most strategically important, the small-sample results from the four polls individually offer some suggestion that it is here Labor’s improvement has been strongest, despite Peter Dutton’s best efforts: Labor’s successive two-party preferred results have been 45%, 53%, 53% and 55%, whereas inner metropolitan and provincial have recorded little change.

More evidence of a tide to Labor from Nine Newspapers’ Resolve Strategic poll, which has been (at least since the end of 2023) one of the strongest series for the Coalition, but now credits Labor with a two-party lead of 53.5-46.5, compared with 50-50 in the post-budget poll and 55-45 to the Coalition with a distinctly poor result for Labor in the mid-February poll. Labor is up two points on the primary vote to 31% (amounting to a six-point increase from the mid-February poll), while the Coalition is down three to 34% (five since mid-February), the Greens are steady on 13%, and One Nation are down one to 8%. Independents are up three to 12% — presumably this is based on a generic question that will be superseded in coming Resolve Strategic polls tailored to the candidates running in the respondent’s electorate, causing this number to fall.

Anthony Albanese is now in net positive territory on his personal ratings, his combined good and very good result up six to 45% (an 11-point improvement since mid-February), while poor plus very poor is down six to 43% (a 13-point improvement). Peter Dutton is down three to 34% and up six to 53% (an 13-point deterioration since mid-February on both counts). Anthony Albanese now leads 46-30 on preferred prime minister, out from 42-33 last time. The poll also finds 33% saying their view of Donald Trump has made them less likely to vote Coalition, compared with 14% for more likely, with respective numbers of 21% and 22% for Labor. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1642.

There is also the regular weekly Roy Morgan poll, which has Labor leading 54.5-45.5 on two-party preferred, out from 53.5-46.5, which reflects improvement for Labor on respondent-allocated preferences rather than primary votes: Labor is down half to 32%, the Coalition is up half to 33.5%, the Greens are up one to 14.5% and One Nation is steady at 6%. The two-party measure based on previous election preference flows also has Labor leading 54.5-45.5, which is unchanged on last week. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1708.

Resolve Strategic’s breakdowns show this poll to be distinctive for a strong result for Labor among men, at 34% on the primary vote compared with 29% among women. Breakdowns for the three largest states show Labor up five in Queensland and the Coalition down six in New South Wales, without correspondingly large movement for the other major party. All of which has now been incorporated in the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, giving Anthony Albanese’s personal ratings a substantial lift without adding anything noticeable to voting intention, on which Labor’s two-party vote shot up 0.7% with the addition of last night’s Newspoll. Essential Research, which a been a little stickier than other pollsters over the last month or so, should be along overnight.

UPDATE (Essential Research): Essential Research has broken out of its stasis, with Labor now holding a lead of 50% (up two) to 45% (down two) on the 2PP+ measure, which leaves room for a 5% undecided component. On the primary vote, which also includes a 5% undecided component, Labor is up one to 31%, the Coalition is down two to 32%, and the Greens are up a point to 13%. The pollster has followed its own course with Anthony Albanese’s personal ratings, which surged in January and have been fairly stable since: the latest result has him steady on 44% approval and up one on disapproval to 47%. Peter Dutton is down two on approval to 39% and up one on disapproval to 48%. The pollster doesn’t track preferred prime minister, but this result includes head-to-head questions on handling key issues, which find Albanese leading Dutton 34% to 28% on his presumed weak point of addressing the cost of living, and 30% to 20% on Dutton’s presumed strength of keeping Australians safe. Both leaders were favoured by 29% for responding to the Trump administration’s tariffs.

The foregoing is based on a report in The Guardian — a full report will be along later today. The poll had a sample of 2142 and was likely conducted Wednesday to Monday.

UPDATE 2: Full Essential Research report here. The Coalition continues to do better than Labor on firmness of voting intention. The voting intention numbers have increased Labor’s two-party lead on BludgerTrack from 51.6-48.4 to 51.9-48.1, and it now shows swings (however slight) to Labor in four of the five states being tracked, with the inevitable exception of Victoria.