Yesterday’s Essential Research release concludes what I’d normally regard in the off season as a weekly cycle of poll results, making this an appopriate moment for a situation report. News reports yesterday were full of talk of a shift back to Labor based on a three-point lift in their primary vote from Newspoll, which neatly encapsulates what’s wrong with mainstream journalism’s reportage of opinion polling. For all The Australian’s success in marketing it as the gold standard, Newspoll is not – and indeed, does not claim to be – any more immune to statistical noise than any other poll. This particular shift was undoubtedly more noise than signal, coming as it did off a below-par result in the previous week’s poll.
For a more meaningful read of the situation you should refer to a poll aggregate, of which the one most readily to hand is of course BludgerTrack. However, you can find much the same story being told by Julian King at Pottinger (who has the Coalition at 53.6%), Simon Jackman (53.5%), Mark the Ballot (52.7%), Kevin Bonham (52.3%) and the AFR’s Poll of Polls (51.8%) (with apologies to any I’ve missed, like Andrew Catsaras’s which only appears on Insiders). Much of the variation comes down to the weight given to Essential Research, which is excluded altogether by Mark the Ballot and downweighted by BludgerTrack for having gone off trend.
Mark the Ballot’s charts offer a better visual representation of what emerges from the numbers coming out of BludgerTrack, which is that the rate of Labor’s decline slowed this week. The current output of the BludgerTrack model has Labor down 0.4% since this time a week ago (note that this isn’t exactly the same thing as the “last week” comparison on the sidebar, which reflects the model’s result at that time rather than its current retrospective evaluation) compared with 0.7% in the week to August 17, 0.7% in the week to August 10 and 0.5% in the week to August 3. As Mark the Ballot and BludgerTrack concur, the rot set in around mid-July, perhaps a fortnight before the election was called.
Of course, it’s a little too late in the game for a mere slowing of the momentum against them to do Labor much good. It would take a black swan event to return Labor to parity in the 12 days still available to them, the potential nature of which is by definition impossible to foresee. Labor’s other hope of course is that the polls and the aggregates derived from them are fundamentally wrong. A favourite argument of those predisposed to this view is that the online polling of Essential Research is telling a different story from polls using other methods, having had Labor at a post-Gillard high of 50-50 for the past two weeks. Nate Silver, it is noted, gave online polling the highest collective score in his post-match report after the presidential election, finding an average error of 2.1% compared with 3.5% for live interview phone polls and 5.0% for “robopolls”.
However, I would observe that the pollsters at the top end of Silver’s list are a mix of live phone interview and internet polls, with the live phone interview average dragged down by a number of poor performers at the bottom end (the most spectacular example being Gallup). Given the strong performances of Newspoll and Galaxy at recent state elections, at least on two-party preferred, it would require a leap of faith to conclude that either belongs in the latter camp. If anything, the risk appears to be on the downside for Labor. Essential Research aside, the big anomaly of the polling picture is that national polls have been kinder to Labor than electorate-level ones, a phenomenon by no means unique to the robo-polls (and it should be noted that the disparity seems to be lower in the case of Galaxy’s automated polling, suggesting that “house” as much as “method” bias has been at work here).
Now to some observations on the state-level projections. Labor received a large bounce in New South Wales and Queensland after Kevin Rudd’s return, bringing them into parity with the 2010 election result in the former case and well in front of it in the latter. However, in Victoria the move to Labor was more subdued. Three weeks after the Rudd comeback, BludgerTrack had the Coalition’s national lead at 50.5-49.5 and pointed to swings in Labor’s favour of 0.6% in New South Wales and 2.4% in Queensland, while going 3.7% in the other direction in Victoria (remembering that the 2010 election gave Labor its best result in Victoria since the Second World War). So far as BludgerTrack is concerned, the decline in Labor’s fortunes since has been driven by New South Wales, where the swing has now caught up with Victoria’s. That being so, one could perhaps hypothesise that it’s the Daily Telegraph wot’s winning it.
As for Queensland, that 2.4% swing to Labor is still there as far as BludgerTrack is concerned, inconsistent as that may be with reports of internal polling, the weekend Newspoll showing Labor going heavily backwards across eight Liberal National Party marginals, and a series of grim results for Labor coming out of Griffith and Forde. I keep waiting for new data from Queensland to square the circle by showing the other recent results to have been anomalous, and it keeps not happening. Of the last nine data points available to me from Queensland, which go back as far as August 7, only one fails to show a swing to Labor. The one exception is the sturdiest result of the bunch – an 800-sample Galaxy poll conducted late in the first week of the campaign. The rest are sub-samples from national polls, some (but not all) with very small samples.
The samples are smaller still for Western Australia and South Australia, although there are enough of them that it would be hoped that aggregating them would get you fairly close to a real world figure. On this basis, Labor’s once promising position in Western Australia relative to the 2010 result seems to have deteriorated significantly. In South Australia, Labor is rating a little better than media chatter (not to mention the weekend’s Hindmarsh poll) suggests they should be, though not to the extent of indicating an improvement on the 2010 status quo in terms of seats.
One final thought. With Labor holding 72 seats out of 150, it seems very likely that they will need a swing in their favour if they are going to win the election. Out of 17 national and 39 electorate-level polls conducted during the campaign (not counting a small number of electorate polls involving Greens or independent sitting members), not a single one has shown such a thing.
Clive Palmer channeling Bob Ellis on Polls and new light about Brough on late line
“@JaneCaro: #Lateline Proof re #Ashbygate? That’s worth waiting for.”
is abbotts compensation scheme pure guilt about being part of a government which failed to pass on very credible information about a terrorist attack?
guytaur:
What is Palmer saying about Ashbygate?
confssions
He has not been on yet.
“@bradthegunn: #lateline Clive saying polls are rigged and has proof of #ashbygate @davrosz about bloody time ..”
‘Australian press watchdog chides Murdoch media’
Banner headlines tomorrow, no doubt.
‘Chides!!’
Wild The Maltese Shih Tzu, also known as the Mal-Shi, Malti zu, and the Malt-Tzu, is a dog breed hybrid. One of
The adaptable Maltese Shih Tzu is an adorable, sweet little guy with a long name. Created with the same goal as the Doodles — to be a small companion who doesn’t shed much and is therefore more appropriate for people with allergies — the Maltese Shih Tzu is a classic cross, a sweet lapdog who likes to play with the kids.
Clive Palmer was a hoot today on Triple J.
Even I think he is a nut job. $70 Billion extra in tax receipts by making companies pay tax at the end of the financial year rather than Quarterly?!?! WHAT?!
Stop the boats… by letting anyone enter Australia without a Visa. WTF?!?!
Clive Palmer proves you can be rich without having to be smart
absolutely! and he also repeatedly calls women in their 50s ‘girls’ and ‘good girls’.
his comment to the woman apprentice the other day “you must be the most popular girl here”. was creepy old sleaze shorthand for him thinking “I bet all the blokes want to f@#k you. I would.”
he believes women to be less capable than men.
Anybody following #imvotingliberal on twitter. Go and have a look- very funny
@Sean/1157
Yes, and you can move your money offshore to make money too.
“@justinbarbour: . @ImVotingLiberal because schools need more flagpoles and chaplains, not buildings or textbooks. #imvotingliberal”
“@phonytonyabbott: #imvotingliberal because Tony Abbott is smrat and he’s a roads scholer”
http://www.openaustralia.org/debates/?id=2012-10-29.125.2
interesting reading
CTar # 955: Indeed! I also knew some girls at my agency (whether or not it was the same one) who spent time watching that swimming pool.
Coalition Fightback 3.0
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/8/26/election/abbotts-secret-fightback-plan-3
“But that’s not important. What’s important, or at least interesting, is that Tony Abbott has his own Fightback! plan, put together by the same man who did it for John Hewson, but this time it’s a secret.”
hah! I have to follow this one.
Lets hope Palmer has something big to tip on that sleazy opportunist Brough.
Clive Palmer now on Lateline
One of the worst things Abbott ever did was to subject his daughter/s to the blokey appraisal of a rugby radio commentary team.
He even colluded on calling them ‘sexy”.
How demeaning.
That was bad. But the worst of it was he had absolutely no idea he was degrading his daughter/s or women in general.
In fact, he thought he was celebrating women. He thinks women want to be thought of as f*ckable above everything else.
What a f*cking tosser.
I used to feel sorry for his wife. She wants to support him, but has to allow him to denigrate their daughters.
But I don’t any longer. She has bought into the saleability of their charms. As if they have nothing else to offer.
At least Rudd doesn’t do that with his daughter. She is a published author in her own right. And has her own mind, which Rudd respects and celebrates, and obviously seeks counsel from (if reports of the MidWinter Ball are to be believed).
Vote 1 Labor. For womens’ rights.
I seem to have found my way onto a PUP spam list. Serve me right for following back Marti Zucco on Twitter in the hope he’d say something really outrageous. 🙂
Reposting poll roundup/seat betting watch for this week:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/poll-roundup-and-seat-betting-watch-new.html
After the nonsense here earlier, I ask anyone who can’t tell the difference between analysis of betting and advocacy of it not to click on the above link!
Talking about dickheadedness… why the hell was Kevin Rudd wearing a Broncos Trackie in the middle of Sydney to announce he was closing Garden Island and sending the jobs up to Queensland?
What a dickhead
Truely amazing to read the absolute crap & blatant lies been spewed out of the mouths of supporters of the left on here!!!!
You worms come out of the woodwork don’t you when you see your party in trouble!
Rudd is the most egotistic animal that has walked this planet!
His ego will get the better of him & you will find Kevin747 flitting off to G20 for a last fling.
Pompous arse!
PS don’t forget the hair dryer Kevin, we don’t want you to do a hissy fit in front of Obama do we!!!
Like to throw another iron into the fire of victims of crime.
A friend who worked on identifying bits of Bali dead.
Suffers from PSTD to this day.
Received two medals.
Strange. I thought this was only about compassion or empathy. It is, in any case, about loss.
Any updates on Clive?
confessions
about to get to it I think
Thanks guytaur.
@kezza2
You disgusting individual! What absolute crap!
How dare you make such a statement!
Another dishonest & low comment I have come accustomed to from rusted on Labor Party scum
Some kind of ReachTEL arriving early tomorrow morning – 5:30 am. They have been polling Griffith; I’m not sure if this is that or if it is a federal one or something else. They’ve also been polling Newcastle (commissioned)
“@GrogsGamut: Palmer says Brough said to him “We want you to give us the money and fund it” re Ashby case #lateline”
Correction; ReachTEL denies polling Griffith.
Nothing new from Palmer. It’s all about Brough and Hockey cleared.
“@GrogsGamut: Palmer on Brough “I’ll sue him” #lateline”
TP # 1083
Thanks for that long term and wise view. Helps a little bit in dealing with present rage.
“@jesswrightstuff: Clive Palmer to sue Mal Brough for defamation as “soon as his lawyers” get the papers together over claims Palmer lied re Ashby fund plea”
Whatever the ReachTEL poll, we’ll assume a 14% swing against the ALP shall we?
davidwh:
The caravan has moved on obviously. Imagine if Clive had come out with this when Ashbygate first broke?
It is a very troubling memory for many in Perth, too, cw. The sadness is very deep.
A measured and reasonable contribution, Wesley – except that the story about the hair dryer is entirely untrue.
Both Palmer and Brough can’t be both telling the truth so one of them is telling porkies. Not sure how anyone can prove which one is the porkie teller when it was a one-on-one conversation without any witness. Doubt it will ever get to court.
In case no comment is taken as disagreement.
Kezza2 is expressing everything which I, for one, find disgusting in Abbott and fellow travellers. Including the women in the audience.
In addition, I was absolutely appalled by the, I must say, whorish, demeaning and much appreciated by the audience for Julie Bishop’s performance.
I have been exposed to more elevating strippers performances.
She could at least have taken her clothes off, for the amount she is paid.
Who TF is this Wesley Rickard? Seems beyond even Sean’s standards. Identify yourself so we can call the mental health team if needed mate this looks like crisis team material … help is out there
This is fun!
davidwh
Have you forgotten the judgment of J Rares regarding Mal Brough?
Confessions Palmer would have made his statement under oath then cynic that I am.
That’s funny. 😆
Victoria no.
confessions @ 1195
The idea of Kevin Rudd impersonating an officer actually is very funny 🙂
Brough cannot stay out of trouble for long.
🙂