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. It’s true that the Exit polls are innacurate to a point, BUT if Howard was going to win they would have showed a trend toward the Libs, which they haven’t It’s over.

  2. No wonder Howard is still going around his seat. He is Bill Clinton Standing in the rain in Iowa on the night of the primary. Yes Clinton one in the end but he finished 3rd in Iowa.

  3. I did my on poll last night at my party…the poeple who wanted ALP were to use the upstairs toilet and the LNP vote were to go downstairs. Unfortunately there was a “house’ bias later on in the night when all the LNP women refused to use the downstairs toilet. So there is no point publishing figures.

  4. There were no pictures of Howard or Costello where I voted in Macquarie, just reems of negative rubbish and plooms of Kerry Bartlett signs. Some capricious official made me put my ‘your rights at work shirt’ on inside out though before I could vote…

  5. So Sky’s exit poll wasn’t a real exit poll at all???

    If they didn’t ask them how they voted you can be sure it’s because they have no idea how to tally the data up properly.

  6. [… have no idea how to tally the data up properly.]

    Or should I say, construct a proper sample. So they weren’t game to use their info to actually call the result.

    Can anyone confirm that they are not actually giving a result??

  7. Howards end said:

    The problem with the weighted mean approach is that it assumes that the population proportions remain constant over time and that variation between the polls is just sampling error. This may be invalid if the underlying proportions are changing over time.

    Snap says: Yes, that is what it assumes. However, you’re still better off to take the weighted mean, without knowing which is best. You can decompose things into errors associated with polls and time. This means the standard error is far bigger than you’d get for the weighted mean.

    That’s why I took the sd of the means from the polls above, which is about 1.4%. This is vastly bigger than can be attributable to sampling error.

    The weighted mean is still the best bet, without knowing which is best, and the s.e. is clearly most affected by between polls/samples variance.

  8. Looking at Sky’s exit poll discussion, looks like Neilsen was about rght. They haven’t got the the actual exit poll results yet, but of the 5 top issues identified by voters as impacting on their votes, 4 are owned by Labor. Those 5, in descending order of importance are: Hospitals, The Economy, IR Laws, The Environment and Education.

    Agreed. It’s a landslide.

  9. GHow much fun is doing th HTV?

    I was at a booth in Seven Hills, a lib guy there saying “liberals for a strong economy” “liberals for jobs growth”. I thought that was really cool, so I started saying “liberals for Iraq, Liberals for Tampa, Liberals for kids overboard, liberals for interest rate lies”.

    He stopped.

    Have to say thoug, all in all it was pretty pleasant, just one knob this morning at my first booth. Apart from that, all pretty civilised, and I was amazed to find that some liberal voters don’t have two heads.

  10. I passed by the AEC’s Melbourne CBD office just ninety minutes ago, where there’s a polling booth. Liberal ads plastered all over it, only a couple of Labor ads.

  11. Makin. I volunteered handing out Labor and Greens cards.

    Bob Day was there. He sounded down.

    Anyone a prediction for Makin, Wakefield & Kingston?

  12. 377 Swing Lowe- How accurate do you think it will be? I’d think that a lot of people who voted Rodent would be too ashamed to admit it in an exit poll. They’d scurry away to their lairs and hope for some cheese tonight.

  13. I think some are calling it a bit early on flimsy evidence – not much to hang the hat on yet. Patience … patience. We don’t know much about these exit polls so far – where, sample etc.

  14. Fair Dinkum, if that despicable dessicated coconut was going to win this election, there is no way the odds were going to stay as rock solid as they still are.

    If enough of a swing was going back to the coalition, their odds would have shortened markedly in the betting to at least 2.75 by now from the current Sportingbet 3.25.

    If I am wrong, I will walk from ever making comments on politics again.

  15. The wording of the economy question was dubious as well. But I think – superseding all are the questions that Howard has been there too long AND I dont want costello to be PM

  16. Once again, a RIDICULOUSLY WORDED economy question.

    “Is Howard experienced enough to handle the economy?”
    What a stupid question. Of course most people would say he is. He’s a 68-year-old who has been PM for 11 years!

    The question SHOULD be: “Are Rudd and Swan too inexperienced to handle the economy?”

  17. The Sky questions released so far were incredibly loaded ones and probably skewed the results significantly… Hopefully their voting intention questions weren’t as loaded…

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