Newspoll, Nielsen, Westpoll

So …

• GhostWhoVotes reports Nielsen has Labor ahead 52-48, from primary votes of 39 per cent for Labor, 41.5 per cent for the Coalition and 13 per cent for the Greens.

• The Australian reports the 2500-sample Newspoll we were shown two-thrds of yesterday panned out to 50.2-49.8, the decimal place being a feature of Newspoll’s final polling since about two years ago.

• Westpoll/Patterson Market Research has polled 400 voters in each of Canning, Hasluck, Swan and Cowan, putting the Liberals narrowly ahead in each: 51-49, 52-48, 52-48 and 53-47 respectively. Canning aside, where Alannah MacTiernan is clearly doing exceptionally well in narrowing down a 4.3 per cent Liberal margin, the figures point to a swing against Labor of about 2.5 per cent within a margin of error of under 3 per cent.

UPDATE: Newspoll state breakdowns show the shift they have recorded against Labor has been driven by a collapse in Queensland, where their two-party vote is down six points on last week to 42 per cent, and New South Wales, where they are down four to 48 per cent. This points to election-losing swings of 8.4 per cent an 6.2 per cent. And yet the poll also finds Labor climbing still higher in Victoria for a swing of 3.7 per cent, maintaining their 3.6 per cent swing in South Australia, and recovering four points to their 2007 level of support in Western Australia. After appearing to reverse her decline last week, Gillard’s disapproval has shot up five points to 43 per cent, almost equal with her steady 44 per cent approval. State results vary from plus-22 net approval in South Australia to minus-16 in Queensland. However, Tony Abbott’s disapproval is also up four points to 50 per cent, and his disapproval down one to 42 per cent. Gillard’s lead as preferred prime minister has narrowed from 50-35 to 50-37.

UPDATE 2: Kevin Bonham in comments notes that the Queensland result looks very much an outlier, and if it was replaced with the state’s trend figure the national result would be 50.8-49.2 in favour of Labor. This of course would normally be rounded to 51-49.

UPDATE 3: While a nation waits in breathless anticipation of the result in Boothby, The Advertiser offers … a poll of Hindmarsh. This predictably has Labor well ahead, although the size of the margin – 62-38 from a swing of 7 per cent – is interesting.

UPDATE 4: Roy Morgan has done a very strange thing – recontacted the 187 undecided voters (fair enough) and Greens voters (huh?) from their recent poll to check if they had made up or changed their minds, and reassigned their vote choices accordingly. Their figures thus record Greens votes shifting to other parties, but not other votes shifting to the Greens.

UPDATE 5: A late situation report.

New South Wales. The final Newspoll has the swing at 6.2 per cent, and while this seems to be what Labor is bracing for in western Sydney, the result is well clear of what is expected statewide. Nielsen and Morgan both have it at 3 per cent. A swing of that size in Sydney alone would cost Labor Macquarie, Macarthur and Bennelong, and the expectation that these seats will indeed be lost has become almost universal over the past few days. There is also an emerging consensus that two further Sydney seats on much larger margins, Lindsay and Greenway, are being swept away on a late surge to the Coalition. However, Imre Salusinszky of The Australian suggests the backlash against Labor ends at the city limits. Robertson is rated “the only regional seat in NSW where Labor regards itself in deep trouble” (Gilmore evidently doesn’t count), and even there the result is 50-50. Labor is thus expected to retain Eden-Monaro, Dobell and Page, and if this proves wrong they can kiss the election goodbye. There would also remain the vague hope for Labor of a boilover in Liberal-held Robertson.

Victoria. Meanwhile, the swing to Labor in Victoria is at the very least holding firm: Newspoll has it at 3.7 per cent, Morgan at 0.7 per cent. Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald quoted a Liberal source talking of a stronger-than-anticipated swing driven by “resentment in the southern states towards the almost-maniacal focus on western Sydney and Queensland”. Certainly Labor is expected at a bare minimum to win McEwen, and are generally rated favourites to take La Trobe. Beyond that pickings in Victoria are slim, though there are dim hopes Dunkley or Aston might prove a bolter. Conversely, Labor are by no means a foregone conclusion of retaining Corangamite, which looms as a must-win for them in every sense of the term. Labor are all but giving away Melbourne to Greens candidate Adam Bandt, who could find himself in a very interesting position over the coming week or two.

Queensland. Newspoll has set a cat among the pigeons by showing a lethal swing against Labor of 8.4 per cent and a primary vote below 30 per cent. However, this is sharply at odds with Nielsen’s 3 per cent and Morgan’s 4.4 per cent. Should it come in at the lower end of expectations, Labor could yet save quite a bit of furniture. I believe Peter Brent is overselling his point in saying “sophomore surge” means the Coalition is more likely to lose from a majority of the vote than Labor, but there’s no question this phenomenon warrants more attention than it has been given. At the 1998, members of John Howard’s class of 1996 facing re-election for the first time experienced an average swing 1.1 per cent lower than the overall swing in their state. Similarly, the 19 Labor MPs ushered into the Victorian parliament by the Steve Bracks landslide of 2002 out-performed the statewide swing by 1.4 per cent at the 2006 election. Should that pattern be repeated this time, it would be an enormous boon to Labor in Queensland where sophomores are defending eight seats, including six on margins of 4.5 per cent or less. Labor could thus be confident of holding back the tide in a couple of seats with margins under the statewide swing. The consensus is fuzzy about individual outcomes, with seemingly only Leichhardt and notionally Labor Dickson on everybody’s list. Most feature any or all out of Flynn, Dawson, Longman and notionally Labor Herbert. Speaking on The Drum, Annabel Crabb noted Labor had been surprised how little attention the Liberal National Party had been paying to Bonner, Petrie, Brisbane and Moreton, but of these it seems only Moreton is entirely safe.

Western Australia. The best guess is that Labor will suffer frustrating defeats in every WA marginal, with Canning, Hasluck, Swan, Cowan and Stirling all emerging in the 0 to 5 per cent zone on the Liberal side of the pendulum. The seat most likely to buck the trend is Canning, which speaks volumes for Alannah MacTiernan’s performance given its 4.3 per cent margin. Labor would still be holding out hope of an upset in Swan or Hasluck. The latter if not the former can probably be relied upon to closely track the statewide swing, which the late polls can’t agree on: Newspoll says 0.3 per cent to Labor and Nielsen says 4 per cent to the Coalition, while the result from Morgan’s small sample came in at 1.2 per cent to the Coalition.

South Australia. Newspoll has the Labor swing in South Australia at 3.7 per cent, which seems on the high side, but we also have an Advertiser poll for the seat of Hindmarsh putting it at 7 per cent. That should make both Sturt and Boothby highly winnable for Labor, but there is a near universal view that Christopher Pyne’s expensive campaign for the former has paid dividends. Boothby on the other hand is expected to go down to the wire.

Elsewhere. There is limited local polling data available, but it is very widely expected that Darwin-based Solomon will be lost to Labor. In Tasmania, a big ticket campaign promise earlier this week suggested the Liberals have not given up on Bass, but most expect Labor to again obtain a clean sweep of the state’s five seats. Certainly they can afford nothing less.

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.

980 comments on “Newspoll, Nielsen, Westpoll”

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  1. Thank you for the kind comments, everybody. I will be live blogging like I normally do at state elections, and there will be a Crikey CoverIt Live chat room type thing of the type you may have seen us do a few times in the past.

  6. BB very useful quote from Carney. The government has self-inflicted any woes it may have with loss of seats. Two factors behind this I think. Rudd and his Office were non-politicians and didn’t sell anything the government did to any extent. Second, Labor has been far too tentative about running economic arguments: perhaps they believe the propaganda that they are no good at economic management. When the PM went out on the offensive over the economy last week the response in the polls in terms of relative credibility on the economy was terrific!

    Another dimension of the problem is that swinging voters in marginal seats have absolutely no knowledge of anything beyond their self-interest. Give them a stimulus cash payment, prevent them from losing their jobs, and you won’t get any gratitude. Just the hand extended for a tax cut and family payments at the election, if not a subsidy for the four-wheel drive.

  7. G‘night William & Folks…

    Let’s hope tomorrow is the start of something new (but not too new!).

    William, I’d like to add my thanks for the efforts you put in to keep us unruly bunch of arguers in relative harmony.

    Do you ever sleep?

    What’s really good about the site is the humour, especially in contrast to the dire, doom-laden misery of right-wing sites, where they’re always whingeing about something being ruined forever. Sure, we have our share of dread here too, but someone always comes along with a joke or a quip to lighten the load.

    PB is a great resource and a welcome respite from the daily chores of life when they get too onerous. Long may it live!

    All the best,

    BB.

  9. ‘The government believed the public would see that if your house is on fire and you’re trying to put it out, you don’t worry about the water bill or damage to the furniture.

    It was wrong. There has been virtually no political reward for Labor in the stimulus’.

    Yep, BB.

    Equals even more kicks, very hard and possibly so deep as to rear end the careers of certain bums on seats.

    Who imagine so wrongly that ‘they’, not ‘we’, represent the Labor view.

    NSW will go down big time, in due and of course. But some of these guys have inbuilt survival kits.

    Fed Labor in particular has to get onto this.

  10. Agree with other posters that William and the other PB posters deserve their own vote (of thanks) for a great site which is very helpful for us tragics.

    The trend line in the Newspolls (Australian website) and the data William posted recently about all pollsters overestimating the ALP vote by 1% or so in their last polls before election is very telling. Those predicting ALP nearing 80 seats have been sipping the blue water from the radiator I think. Hung parliament looking more and more likely and ALP ceiling about 51.5% or 76 seats now…

  11. Maxine had her own fanclub in days gone by — when the ABC was the incisive newsgatherer. Her move to politics coincided with the beginning of the degeneration, come to think of it.

  13. The ALP primary in Qld really was 27%. In NSW it was 35%.

    [Labor has suffered in its primary vote in Queensland in the last week of the campaign, down eight percentage points in just three days to 27 per cent, compared with 42.9 per cent in 2007.

    In NSW, Labor’s primary vote is down from 39 per cent to 35 per cent, compared with 44.5 per cent at the last election. ]

  15. I am still standing by my 90 seat prediction to the ALP. blue water or no blue water there is no way the electorate is going to swing to the Mand Monk.

  17. [All the Bludgers said that it was OK for Rann to win despite losing the popular vote. Do they have the same opinion if Abbott wins without winning the popular vote?]

    I don’t recall commenting here about Rann winning but I have commented about it elsewhere. My view is that parties that win the majority of seats while losing the popular vote do so because they have deliberately played for seats (because they are what matters) and could probably have played for the national popular vote successfully if that was what mattered.

    Given that governments have incumbency advantages in managing their support levels, I think any government that wins the 2PP without being able to translate that into at least a hung parliament in seat terms is campaigning incompetently and deserves to be out of office.

  19. Does the pollster competition come down to:-

    Newspoll – 50.2-49.8
    Morgan – 51-49
    Essential – 51-49
    Galaxy – 52-48
    Nielsen – 52 -48

    Have the final polls ever been so tightly bunched before ?

  24. The tightest odds at present are $1.62 Labor; $2.22 Libs at Sports Alive. I still say the degree of this ‘narrowing’ in almost one day in the betting is unprecedented.

  25. Jon – sure you’re not a tory with those drinking preferences?
    Whatever happened to sitting down with a slab of new and a few chasers of bundy?

  26. [The trend line in the Newspolls (Australian website) and the data William posted recently about all pollsters overestimating the ALP vote by 1% or so in their last polls before election is very telling.]

    Didn’t see this, but was this about pollsters all overestimating the Labor vote by 1% in their last polls before recent previous federal elections, or did it include elections federal and state where Labor have been in government?

    Just wanting to unravel if the tendency is to overestimate *Labor* or to overestimate *the opposition* (whoever that may be at the time).

  30. [The tightest odds at present are $1.62 Labor; $2.22 Libs at Sports Alive. I still say the degree of this ‘narrowing’ in almost one day in the betting is unprecedented.]

    Funny thing is the seat betting’s barely moved today except for some Labor seats in Queensland coming in dramatically, eg Bonner and Petrie, though they are still narrow favourites in those.

  33. We’ll see Mod Lib, we’ll see.

    Everyone here, of every persuasion, has put foreard their theory thst best suits the outcome they want.

    Putting all the recent polls together, and the trend they exhibit, it cannot be said the coalition are currently on the rise.

    If you get out on the streets, they are very quiet.

    The betting, and public opinion has it that Labor will win in the reps. I don’t resile from that. I still think 78 – 80 as a minimum. Swings and roundabouts.

    My commentary on the election itself?

    It has been fodder for the MSM to try and find self importance. The analysts have tried their hardest to become the real focus. And in so doing, have shown themselves (with a few exceptions) to be either brainless hacks or seriously lazy.

    The ABC really needs to be purged — it has adopted the tabloid style rather than behave as its charter demands.

    The other media outlets — well — what can be said? Populated by self-serving has beens, or naively stupid up-and-comers. White noise for the most part. Rupert’s puppets almost to a man/woman. They should be both ashamed and humiliated.

  34. It’s all a bit confusing, but I reckon we will know more once we get the next poll – which is expected to be released by the agency involved around 9:00 pm tonight, although that will only be one more poll to place into the trend line.

    I think we probably need a Citizens’ Assembly to reach a consensus as to which time period of all polls should constitute the election result.

  37. Diogenes @18:

    [They could count the votes but not release the numbers though.]

    Yes they could, but they would have to count them with scrutineers present to ensure transparency, and the scrutineers would at least sample and then leak their sampling results.

    I have some experience of this from the Hobart City Council election I was able to call several hours before counting commenced. 🙂

    (We have postal voting and on counting day they spend some time taking the papers out of the envelopes before they count them. So as papers were being taken out of the envelopes I watched and sampled and hence was able to provide sampling to my candidate before they started the official count. Sadly that loophole was slammed shut for next election after an irate opponent complained!)

  40. In ’98 the final Newspoll over stated the ALP 2pp by 2% compared to the election.
    In ’01 it under stated by 2%
    In ’04 it over stated by 2.8%.
    In ’07 it under stated by .7% which was its most accurate result.
    In ’10 it ………..
    ?

  42. tomorrow night i will be here to celebrate a great victory with the the true believers.
    i am going now to rest up and catch up on my beauty sleep (as Rodney Rude would say to that – stay in bed a f****ing month).
    Chow for now true believers.

  46. Just popped in , my last post because am up at 4 am to beat Libs to my big Polling booth , on booth all day and then scruntinneer tomorrow nite so wont see much till its over

    Some thoughts
    Julia and Labor ran a FINE campiagn but only we know it It was filtered by TV News and MSN adverse Contrast is to Tony Abbott who rarely got questioned especialy on 38 billion promises costing and who ran away from Pressers often cutting them short , and who was presented positive generally by MSN & TV News whilst Julia generaly shown neg

    NB/ I’ve predict a Labor win on host of bread & butter issues and vision issues prev said
    Labor’s future is simple holding Brissie seats excl Bowman and minimise Sydney fringe
    When peoples claim Labor did not ‘sell’ in campaign against abov evidense they talk BS

    Despite me expecting a Labor victory , i got a reel bitter taste in my mouth becuase

    story of whole 3 yrs of Labor….has been distorted/exaggerated attacks from Libs , MSN , Greens , and most ‘expert’ politcal comentators….plus a toxic NSW and Q’ld Govt background

    VS Senior Labor MP’s Kevin , Julia , swan , Tanner etc for whole 3 yrs trying to ‘sell’ but there message gets ‘un-sold’ when communicated to th Public
    and this campaign treatment of Labor has been no diferent So in victory will be also a bitter taste of no fair go from all Partys and organizations who ar not Labor Julia’s victory speech may erase that

  47. William – you are a patient and enduring convenor of a heap of interchange and political interest and enjoyment for a lot of people – some of whom would otherwise not be able to access it. And that is a good deed in itself. See you all later on this election day.
    JV

    *off to a hotbed of resentment*

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