Marginals robo-poll bonanza

A barrage of electorate-level automated phone poll results has emerged over the past day, with horror results for Labor in almost every case.

Before I dive into today’s glut of electorate-level polling and the picture of unmitigated disaster it paints for Labor, mention should be made of today’s declaration of candidates and determination of ballot paper ordering. I’ve finished labouring through the chore of uploading the candidate lists to my election guide, in the course of which I was unavoidably struck by one salient fact: there are far too many candidates at this election. The total comes in at 1188 for the House of Representatives and 529 for the Senate.

The former number is solidly clear of a previous record of 1109 in 1998, amounting to nearly half an extra candidate per electorate, and well clear of the 849 in 2010, a relatively low number thought to have resulted from the election being called three months ahead of time. The Senate number is still more unprecedented, blowing the lid off the previous record of 367 candidates. Remarkably – suspiciously, even – this comes despite a doubling of nomination deposits to $1000 for House of Representatives candidates and $2000 for Senate candidates.

Some might consider a greater array of candidates a boon for democracy, but in my view that’s entirely negated by the obstacle posed to the act of voting, at least under our present system. This is starkly illustrated by the metre-long Senate ballot papers that voters in the larger states will be required to grapple with on September 7, and the magnifying glasses that will be supplied in polling booths to assist in reading the small print crammed on to them. That will no doubt have all but the tiniest handful of voters opting for the above the line option, exacerbating one of the least attractive features of our system – the mass transfer of votes as dictated by preference deals.

As for the lower house, an analysis by the Australian Electoral Commission indicates that each extra candidate causes a 0.2% increase in the informal vote. If partisan advantage is what matters to you, it’s likely that this makes a large number of candidates disadvantageous to Labor. Labor’s surprise defeat in Greenway at the 2004 election may well have been influenced by an 11.8% informal vote, which was in turn influenced by what I believe to have been a then record (at a general election at least) 14 candidates. This time around there are 12 candidates in Corangamite, Deakin and Mallee, 13 in Bendigo and McMillan, and 16 in Melbourne. Notably, all these electorates are in Victoria, which seems to have the largest number of organised micro-parties – perhaps having been inspired by the example of Family First and the Democratic Labour Party in winning Senate seats over the course of the past decade.

So, to these opinion polls. There are 14 automated phone polls in all from three different agencies, with swings ranging from 0% to 15% and averaging 8%. This is enormously out of kilter with the national polling that was coming through before we hit a dry spell at the start of the week, which suggested a swing of more like 2%. So one might variously hypothesise that there has been a huge shift to the Coalition this week; that the polls have targeted areas where Labor is doing particularly badly; that there may have been something about these polls to bias them towards the Coalition, through some combination of their being automated, mid-week and electorate-level polls; that the national polls have been heavily biased to Labor and the automated polls have shown them up. The latter at least I do not think terribly likely, the truth probably involving some combination of the first three.

We have also had more conventional phone poll results from Newspoll, conducted from Monday to Thursday from samples of 504 each, which oddly target Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor’s seats of Lyne and New England. These respectively have the Nationals ahead 59-41 and 66-34, which if anything suggest swings to Labor. The primary votes from Lyne are 26% for Labor, 51% for the Coalition and 7% for the Greens, while from New England it’s 24%, 53% and 5%.

Running through the automated polls:

• Lonergan and JWS Research have both targeted Forde and Lindsay, with very similar results in each case. In Forde, the JWS Research poll of 568 respondents has Liberal National Party member Bert van Manen leading Peter Beattie 54% to 33% on the primary vote and 60-40 on two-party preferred, for a swing of 8.4%. The Lonergan poll, for which The Guardian offers great detail, covered 1160 respondents and showed van Manen’s lead at 56% to 34% and the Greens at just 4%, compared with 12% at the 2010 election. While no two-party preferred figure is provided, it would obviously be very similar to JWS Research’s 60-40. As low as van Manen’s national profile may be, JWS Research gives him a 49% approval rating against 19% disapproval, with Peter Beattie on 35% and 51%. Kevin Rudd’s net approval rating is minus 18% against minus 1% for Tony Abbott. The Lonergan poll has 40% saying Peter Beattie has made them less likely to vote Labor against on 22% for more likely.

• Longergan’s Lindsay poll, conducted on Tuesday night from a sample of 1038, has Liberal candidate Fiona Scott’s primary vote at no less than 60%, up 17% on 2010, with Labor member David Bradbury on 32%, down 13%. The Guardian quotes the pollster saying a question about how respondents voted in 2010 aligned with the actual result – I will assume this took into account the tendency of poll respondents to over-report having voted for the winner. I am a little more puzzled by the claimed margin of error of 3.7%, which should be more like 3% given the published sample size (UPDATE: It transpires that this is because Lonergan has, unusually, done the right thing – calculate an effective margin of error that accounts for the fact that the sample is weighted, and that cohorts within it have been extrapolated from sub-par samples). The JWS Research result has the primary votes at 57% for Liberal and 35% for Labor, with two-party preferred at 60.7-39.3.

• ReachTEL has four polls with samples of around 600 apiece, which have the Liberals leading 65-35 in Bennelong (a swing of about 12%) and 53-47 in McMahon (11%) and 52-48 in Kingsford Smith (7%), with Labor hanging on by 52-48 in Blaxland (10%).

• The other Financial Review/JWS Research results show the Coalition ahead in Brisbane (54.1-45.9 from primaries of 50% LNP, 36% Labor), Macquarie (55.1-44.9, 51% Liberal, 35% Labor), Corangamite (53.3-46.7, 48% Liberal, 36% Labor), Aston (63.4-36.6, Liberal 59%, Labor 29%), and Banks (52.8-47.2, Liberal 50%, Labor 43%). The one ray of sunlight for Labor is their 51-49 lead in Greenway, from primaries of 46% for Liberal and 44% for Labor. A full graphic of the JWS Research results is available from GhostWhoVotes, including some diverting results on personal approval. Bert van Manen in Forde and Alan Tudge in Aston appear to rate as very popular local members, while David Bradbury in Lindsay and Darren Cheeseman in Corangamite do not. And Fiona Scott in Lindsay, fresh from the publicity bestowed upon her by Tony Abbott, is easily the highest rating of the challengers.

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.

1,419 comments on “Marginals robo-poll bonanza”

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  1. No, Diogenes. If I was doing a Bayesian probability thing I could no doubt put these things to use, but I don’t think there’s any credible way you can throw electorate polls into a national poll aggregate. The electorates they choose to poll are not going to be representative.

  3. Simon
    [Mick77 – Actually if the ALP is holding Blaxland then Rudd is doing better than Gilard.]
    I didn’t know that she was gonna lose Blaxland but I doubt that in practice that would have happened. Gillard would have pulled back to 45-46% 2PP imho, and Rudd is headed for those percentages as well.

  5. If these polls are just showing Labor losing marginals by normal margins, then you could probably just shrug these off but the fact that the marginals in question are blowouts for the Coalition and traditionally safe Labor seats are shown as marginal Labor or even Lib gains, even accounting for a possible skew to the Coalition, is a bad sign for Labor.

  7. [There has been no doubt about the result of this election since 2011. That is the truth of the matter…..the rest is just about the margin, not the outcome, well that is my opinion!]

    Possbily right. The ALP did the right thing though and didnt die wondering.

    Im glad they corrected the error of 2010 – if only to warn those who follow of their folly.

    Come on Ruddster – settle, focus, bring home the base, and the senate (much of Abbott’s madness will be stopped here), and a team big enough to fight on.

  8. As I said earlier

    In two weeks there won’t be any policy differences between the laborals, sick pick yr asshole.
    Vote wikileaks for a difference!

  9. [True, but however, if Rudd did what Labor did in QLD (i.e. Give up) then the voters will backlash even more.]

    Thas a fact. Word. No surrender. Bligh made a big mistake there.

  12. [lefty

    You should have waited on our bet. I may have been willing to revise down my 60 seats or less for Rudd!]

    Im sticking with our bet Mick. No fear there. 60+.

  13. confessions – Indeed, reality being that even if the ALP does lose, if the polls above are correct and they hold Blaxland and Greenway they are doing better than Gillard would have done

  15. [No, Diogenes. If I was doing a Bayesian probability thing I could no doubt put these things to use, but I don’t think there’s any credible way you can throw electorate polls into a national poll aggregate. The electorates they choose to poll are not going to be representative.]

    Could you include them in your Monte Carlo?

  16. [they are doing better than Gillard would have done]

    We’ll never know how Gillard would’ve gone.

    Meanwhile there are still 3 weeks of this campaign left. How low can Wonder Boy go?

  17. Anything that can change in a week can change back in another week, however that is unlikely…the Abbott implosion that PB has been waiting for for 3 years…only two weeks to hide the imbecile.

    No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence…

  18. [I count 17 individual seat polls in 16 seats of the 150 in the last 48 hours.]

    I’m just wondering if there is anyway of including this data in analysing the state of play. It seems like a lot of data not to include.

  19. I can’t believe that Greenway JWS poll result. How on earth did Diaz get a SECOND run at that seat after a disastrous swing in 2010 when the swing was on? The libs will have to blitz the seat and hide Diaz away for the next 3 weeks to have a chance.

  20. Is there a relationship between margin and swings?

    Then you could work on the individual seat swing results and get a feeling for what that was showing nationally couldn’t you William?

  21. [Could you include them in your Monte Carlo?]

    Yeah, I guess I could. If I did that now though the results for the electorates that have been robo-polled would be pretty seriously out of whack with those that haven’t. Better I think to just say that the Monte Carlo simply simulates the BludgerTrack results, and is only as accurate as they are.

  23. Mick77 – You can say what you think, the fact is Rudd was ousted by the ALP after getting them back into power and took over only when the ALP faced meltdown. He cannot work miracles, at the moment he is at least ensuring the ALP has enough of a base to take on Abbott once he starts to push through his deep austerity cuts. The polls were clear, before Gillard was ousted it was about 57-43 to the Coalition, on average most polls show Rudd has improved somewhat on that, and you never know, a week is a long time in politics and there are still several weeks until polling day

  24. lefty
    [Im sticking with our bet Mick. No fear there. 60+.]
    Fine but more correct to state >60. Exactly 60 seats = I win, but I think it’s gonna be quite a few less than that anyway.

  25. I hate to say it, but I think the LNP will win Greenway, albeit just.

    The size of the swing will always overwhelm the size of the dingbat.

  32. Kinkajou
    Posted Friday, August 16, 2013 at 11:58 pm | PERMALINK
    Anything that can change in a week can change back in another week, however that is unlikely…the Abbott implosion that PB has been waiting for for 3 years…only two weeks to hide the imbecile.

    No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence…

    ——true,true, fingers all crossed and toes. he pumped and no self awareness. let him hang

  33. [77: they should have dumped him last week while they could.]

    Ah the beauty of the close of noms: Candidates no longer are treading extremely carefully lest they’re dumped. Also, if a party is dumb enough to back a bad candidate, they have to pay for it, instead of rushing to change…

  35. FWIW Latika Bourke doesn’t think much of the Labor leadership’s communication and campaigning skills. She is travelling with the Labor campaign and notes that the micro-management, poor communication and general chaos the new leader became renowned for before he was removed last time are still present.

    Aside from the GST scare campaign there is this blunder as well:

    [Liberals believe the Government has badly burnt faith and could possibly lose the election as a result of its decisions to raise taxes on cigarettes, impose a levy on the banks, and change the rules around salary packaging for employer-provided cars.

    This isn’t because these taxes are without merit, but because Labor once again failed to lay the groundwork for the unpleasant task of raising taxes, and in so doing provided the grounds for a devastating “who’s next?” attack from the Coalition. This could prove fatal for the Federal Government.]
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-16/bourke-rudd-must-give-voters-a-reason-to-back-him/4892936

    I thought it was Swan and Gillard standing in the way of the government delivering its economic and/or budget messages effectively? Appears the communication problem is more widespread than just one or two MPs.

    Unless the govt gets itself back on track quick smart, the polling could well decline even further!

  36. Simon
    What the ALP did to Rudd in first term was unfathomable, other than his colleagues hated his guts and couldn’t work with him. But it was a dastardly act and we all thought it was about “bad polls” and “losing his way” but ironically Labor would kill for polls like that today. Obviously we all think differently and come with different biases but the return of Rudd included a real negative element of going backwards, reinforced ironically by resurrecting Beattie. Rudd 2007 is not = Rudd 2013 and I see no salvation at this point and I also share Rudd’s colleagues opinion of him. He’s a nasty piece of work and a bit weird whereas Abbott has status of pretty ordinary “devil we know” without being an incumbent PM. We shall see.

  37. [ The polls were quite clear, Gillard would have had the worst defeat in ALP history.]

    At the rate things are going we could well end up that way anyway.

  38. [James J
    Posted Saturday, August 17, 2013 at 12:03 am | PERMALINK
    75: Could be the Liberal’s Nicole Cornes.]

    Exactly the individual I was thinking about when I saw the footage!

  39. Confessions, you mean to say the ALP’s problems were actually structural and institutional and not just mean old Julia’s taint? Next thing you’ll be telling me that fixing these problems will require a lot of overhaul of the ALP structure and everyone in it, rather than a quick coat of paint!

  40. @Confessions/85

    The problem with raising the GST under Labor is that it will have the same effect that “carbon tax” did.

    Raise the costs.

  43. Simon

    Bit disingenuous, since this was based on 3 months out from election day
    [The polls were quite clear, Gillard would have had the worst defeat in ALP history.]
    but 10 mins earlier form you on Rudd 3 weeks out
    [you never know, a week is a long time in politics and there are still several weeks until polling day]
    Gillard & Rudd are two sides of the same Labor coin, and Rudd looks like spinning down to 45-46% whereas Gillard would probably have spun up to 45-46%. Again we shall see.

  44. Liberals believe the Government has badly burnt faith and could possibly lose the election as a result of its decisions to raise taxes on cigarettes, impose a levy on the banks, and change the rules around salary packaging for employer-provided cars.

    ————–true. why did they do this? i know, costing, but a bit of vagueness ok

  45. William:

    You could well be right…..I thought I had seen an analysis by someone (perhaps Kevin B) on this site which suggested that very thing (swing magnitude associated with margin). It is possible it was in the USA rather than here though, it was some time ago.

    I have had a quick look at the relationship between swing and ALP TPP in graphical rather than numerical form and it does look like the safe ALP seats had smaller swings (some towards the ALP) and the safe LNP seats had big swings to the LNP.

    The trouble is the noise and the exceptions!

  47. Murray Goot of the Macquarie University politics department on individual seat polling at the 2010 federal election. Though as Kevin Bonham notes, JWS Research did a lot better at the Victorian state election a few months later (and their other polling for the Fin Review this year has looked fairly plausible to me).

    [How well did the marginal-seat polls perform? Some were accurate, others remarkably inaccurate. Of the pollsters that polled in batches of more than a dozen seats, Galaxy appears to have done best. In Queensland, where it marked down 10 Labor seats as potential losses, Labor lost nine. In New South Wales, where it saw seven potential Labor losses, Labor lost four. In Western Australia, it saw two Labor seats at risk and both were lost. And in Victoria, it saw Labor losing two seats and Labor lost them. This gave Galaxy a score of 17 out of 21; in none of its sets of four did the average error exceed 1.2 percentage points. Newspoll, in contrast, picked only 11 of the 15 marginals along the eastern seaboard that changed hands and identified another that did not—effectively, a score of 11 out of sixteen. Its biggest problem was in Queensland where it had marked as ‘in doubt’ only five of the nine Labor seats that fell. After the election, the result from its 17-seat poll did not appear on the Newspoll web site.

    Morgan’s predictions for individual seats, based on its State-by-State figures (Personal communication), were out by 12 (Morgan 2010a). It had the Coalition gaining seats it did not gain (Dobell, Lindsay, Page, NSW; Brand, WA), losing seats it did not lose (Herbert, Qld; Sturt, SA), and failing to win seats it actually won (Macarthur and Gilmore, NSW; Dickson, Brisbane and Bonner, Qld; and Swan, WA). Across the three seats Morgan polled on election day (Lindsay, NSW: La Trobe, Vic.; Herbert, Qld), the average error, two-party preferred, was more than 6 percentage points; in two of the three cases (Lindsay and Herbert), Morgan called it for the party that lost. In contrast, The Advertiser/Sunday Mail scored four out of four (Kelton 2010) and Patterson five out of five.

    Of the predictions generated by the JWS day-of-the-election automated phone poll, no less than one-third turned out to be wrong. Among the 18 marginal seats it expected Labor to hold were five it lost (Bennelong and Macquarie, NSW; Hasluck and Swan, WA; Solomon, NT); among the 15 it expected Labor to lose were four it held (Lindsay and Robertson, NSW; Moreton, Qld; Corangamite, Vic.); and among the six it expected the Coalition to lose were four it held (McEwen and La Trobe, Vic.; Boothby, SA; Stirling, WA).]

  48. Carey M:

    I don’t pretend to have any knowledge of the ALP machinations, so don’t tend to offer opinions on structural matters.

    The main thing I’ve detected with the party over the years is that they’re scared of the Liberals. They were scared to defend their record in the Hawke/Keating years, scared to stand up to Howard’s racist dog whistling, scared to go after the Howard legacy when they regained office, scared to push through on their policies (even going to a DD election over carbon pricing), and on and on.

    Their mantra in govt again should be: Get ruthless or go home!

  49. Mick77 – Indeed, and on present and past polling Rudd would do better than Gillard would have done based on the polls ie ‘the POLLS were quite clear’, but events can change for whoever led the party what is contradictory about that? Even after a bad week for Rudd in the polls, he still outpolls Gillard’s average performance

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