Morgan: 53.5-46.5

Out of bed now, so I’m a bit late with the news that Morgan has completed a hat-trick of polls that have produced their closest result for the year just in time for polling day. Conducted last night, it has Labor ahead 53.5-46.5, their primary vote at 43.5 per cent (the lowest since January) and the Coalition’s at 41.5 per cent (highest since last November). The odd pollster out, ACNielsen, conducted its poll much earlier in the week.

In administrative news, I just did cleared out a huge volume of comments from moderation, so apologies to those who were held up there. Most of you were first timers – you should be able to comment freely now. I’m off to perform my civic duty, and will have a think about how to handle the election night traffic on my return. I’m much preferring IRC to Meebo (see “Dress Rehearsal 3” post below) and beginning to think that alone should be enough to divert enough blog comment traffic to prevent my server from melting down.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

595 comments on “Morgan: 53.5-46.5”

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  1. Just heard on the news. The Liberals are claiming a major irregularity in Corgangamite, and are saying the election in that seat is invalid.

    Apparently the sitting Liberal member Stewat Macarthur died six months ago, but no one could tell the difference until today.

  2. 53.5 would be fine at 6pm WA time, though by the look of the Newspoll state breakdowns mine has become the redneck state. Honestly, everyone ‘over east’ we’re not all materialistic miners in this western third of the country. A 0.6% swing to the government does make us look bad though. And obviously that means coughing up at least one seat… go Queensland, you good thing.

  3. LOL Spiros -you had me going for a moment there!

    Just came back from handing out HTV’s and doing my civic duty -the atmosphere seemed much calmer than at previous elections and it was hard to detect a trend. But then again I’m in a safe Liberal seat so perhaps it wasn’t as evident as in the key marginals

  4. Voted in Selby at the School Hall at 9.15.

    Isn’t it funny how your eyes run along the line of waiting voters at hip-height, carefully examining which how-to-vote leaflets are at the top of their pile. I saw mostly Labor, and a solitary green, but that is not surprising – Selby is a Labor-leaning booth.

    I sense that Labor will fall short in La Trobe, based on gut-feeling and the polls of the last two days, dark clouds on a refulgent day.

    My advice for Labor for the next election – have a different set of ads for the last two advertising days of the campaign. Throw something new at people, a message appropriate to the final stage of the campaign. I thought the message was stale by the last week – it needed something fresh and reactive.

  5. #3 Where on earth is Corgangamite ? Some place where they grow dwarf zucchinis perhaps? And what sort of a name is Stewat?

    Hell, my geography must be shot to pieces. I’m off to do my bit to stave off illiteracy and unemployment.

  6. Gee, some people are slow learners.

    If the Labor Party gets 52%, as predicted by Galaxy and Newspoll, they will win easily. Every party that has ever got 52% in Australian electoral history has always won easily. You don’t like history? Look at the state breakdowns of Newspoll. They show Labor winning 83 seats. Queensland in particular will be a killing field.

    Of course, 52% is the minimum of the poll range. If the vote gets up near Morgan, let alone ACN, it will be a wipeout.

  7. Just voted and to my surprise I voted greens then alp.

    Was always going to give Andrew Bartlett number in the Senate but then struggled with who to put last – Pauline Hanson’s mob or the Shooters Party.

    Always intend being rude to the Lib how to vote card people but then when it happens I can never be bothered.

  8. Got the message from my YRAW organiser.

    Obviously, the viewpoint of unions can be considered to have a degree of bias, hence i brought it here for someone to hopefully confirm….

    So yeah, i guess i’m saying grain of salt and all that.

  9. 11.5% would be pretty close to the ACNielsen poll. If we were to say that the others were outliers… or there has been a developing backlash from the Lindsay pamphlet scandal… then I could believe it. But I don’t dare hope.

  10. Just about to head up the road to the National Tallyroom.

    The Galaxy, Newspoll and even the Morgan polls have sown a lot of angst among we predictors of a big ALP win. The projections still show about a 54.8% TPP and a seat range in the 85-95 area…. but see this morning’s Lazrus cartoon to make your knees go wobbly. The polls certainly seem to be picking up something stirring, but perhaps it’s just rolling over in bed. If the voters really have changed their intentions by 3 or 4 percentage points in as many days, it will have been the greatest such shift ever seen. Either that or the voters have been having a lend of the pollsters all along. I suggested to Possum last week that we need a new regression paramter to model trend- “dramatic unexpected disaster factor”. Perhaps a underdog coefficient?

  11. Another poll, another ALP win, which of course is being reflected on the ground today.

    The lib supporters on here might try and talk up their odds, but let’s face it, the odds are firml against them, and hanging all their hopes on a questionable newspoll and galaxy poll which still had them losing anyway really is a case of reaching.

    Bring on the result!

  12. Let’s face the facts.

    52-48, if it is to be believed, is still a Labor win.

    57-43 is closer to the Reuters average of the trend of all the polls, which is 55-45.

    On the 52-48 polls, I refuse to believe two things

    – That in the Newspoll the Labor vote fell by 5 per cent in WA in just 4 days.

    – That in Galaxy Labor only got 42% primary vote.

    My surprise predictions: Boothy, Bennelong Labor gains. N.Sydney and Higgins in strife. Wentworth 50/50.

    I worked a poll booth for the ALP today, giving how to votes. I’m in the ACT and the only ‘feeling’ I got is that a lot of people will vote Greens or vote below the line, preferencing the Greens, to help Tucker get past Humphries here.

    I still don’t think the Greens will get the second senate spot, but I hope so.

    Be optimistic, friends. Labor WILL win.

  13. Ozymandias @ 6

    Correct me if I am wrong but I am imagining it may partly be the aspirational easterners who move over to WA purely for the economic prospects which may be tipping the balance toward the Liberals?

    I am imagining that the ordinary people of Perth and it’s surrounds who work the same jobs and live the same types of lives that people do in the Eastern states would divide roughly along the same political lines as people do in the east.

  14. Greeensborough Growler @ 11,
    Lindsay will fall to Labor anyway. That’s for sure.
    Just hope that Howard’s dirty racist trick spills over to a wider communities.

  15. Yes Ricky, Labor will win…but its highly amusing how nasty some of your little comrades can get when things tighten up a bit – cf Pi. Of course, this morning’s hysterical headlines will probably help the ALP just in the way a similar phenomenon help Clinton in 1992 – they will energise the “time for change” vote.

    Albert @18, if that exit poll is true, does it really surprise you? There will be carnage in SA tonight, its been on the cards for months, I won’t be at all surprised if Downer and Secker are the only Liberal MHRs returning to Canberra.

    And talking of upsets, here my three nominations:

    (1) we will lose Forde to the Nationals

    (2) we will lose Forrest to an Independent

    (3) Corio to go down to the wire, although I lack the guts to suggest an ALP loss

  16. It doesnt matter what happens in WA, I firmly beleive that the elections will have been done and dusted before their votes has commenced being counted. Of course, the media will try to make it exciting and show unexpected early counting figures massively overstating the prediciton one way or the other in individual seats….history shows that although the amopunt of swing varies between states the trend to or away from the governing party is pretty much uniform federally at every election. WA has always been abberant, and theres are only 10 seats at stake. It doesnt take much for them to not figure in the final needed tally. I expect we will know early who is to be the next government.

  17. Just go back from my first shift of HTV. Interesting, the Democrat candidate is definitely a Liberal man. Him and the Liberal staffer were talking about things and he was falling for Liberal party propaganda.

    Over the skys of Melbourne was a plane writing “Kev 4 PM”

    A lot of younger people went for the Greens HTV, or Greens and ALP. The young ones who came with their Liberal voting parents, took no HTV or went just took the Liberal HTV.

    Mostly people took all, or none, and I dare say in my 2 hours, more people took left leaning HTVs over Liberal / Family First.

  18. As I said earlier, the polls are actually quite consistent with each other if you do your own preference weighting and take account of sample size correctly.

    If you allocate preferences as 75% green to ALP and 50% other. This gives the following table (with sample size as 2nd column):

    ALP n Poll
    53.75 2615 Newspoll
    55.63 2071 ACN(p)
    56 1421 ACN(o)
    52.13 1200 Galaxy
    54.25 1300 Morgan1
    53.13 2115 Morgan2

    The weighted mean is ALP 54.2% of TPP vote. That would yield around 88-92 seats.

    If you use the a 63% weighting for the Greens, it is ALP 53.2%. This yields 81-85 seats.

    Those two numbers are your bounds of plausibility. Somewhere between a Ruddslide and a very comfortable ALP win.

  19. Exit polls are potentially prone to selection bias, and don’t typically include late-hour voters, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in them. They’ll tell us that there’s a swing on, but not really how big it is, if that makes sense.

  20. Yo Ho Ho, it takes a huge and professional, US style exit polling company to do it well.

    1. You’re asking folk moments after the privacy of the booth, to disclose their vote to strangers. Just witness how many take all HTVs just to be polite/opaque.
    2. Without a real army, how are you going to target a true cross-section?
    3. How, within an hour or less can you weight the data as done by normal polling (eg for over-sampling ages, gender etc)?
    4. Any exit poll leaking at 2:30pm can only have sampled morning voters – who knows what bias that might create? (A lot to Labor if early turnout is motivated by a desire for change; a lot to Libs if the elderly are oversampled)

  21. Exit polls may be rough, but it’s still an indicator and I happy that they are good. If the exit polls were the other way round the Libs would be banging on about the narrowing.

    All in all, looking good.

  22. news.com.au online exit poll has Labor ahead 47 to 39 on the LNP. Obviously that will change once all the lib stooges log on and fudge the figures, but a good sign.

  23. William, where ever you are, can I suggest you close one of the threads. Having two threads open is making it difficult to follow what’s going on.

  24. Just finished a stint at ST Andrews primary school in McEwen (a small booth)most took a Greens or ALP HTV card very few took Liberal.

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