The night before Christmas

There is no polling to report, and I have my head buried too deep in my forthcoming federal election to report anything of substance on my own account. But with the announcement of the election universally anticipated on the weekend for either May 11 or May 18, a new open thread is very much in order, so here it is.

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.

801 comments on “The night before Christmas”

Comments Page 12 of 17
1 11 12 13 17
  1. One of Shortens achievments over the last few years has been holding the team together. That unity and disciple will pay dividends at the sharp end of the campaign.

    They will have announcments ready to go in the campaign, and will have a plan for the timing of those. Now, there will be some in shortens team who already know what those are, …….but…betcha they wont blab or leak them . They will be well aware that the timing of those announcments is going to be critical to the ALP campaign plan and how the implementation of that develops.

    Shorten may, appear, during the campaign to make “captains calls”?? Bet you $ they are not, but are actually preplanned tactical options.

    There is little chance that somewhere along the line the ALP will make some mistakes during the campaign. They are human and this campaign will be a hard fought and stressful one. But they would have to be full on Shaved Goat, Mango Butter and Seed magnitude mistakes to save the Muppets.

  2. Boerwar @ #542 Friday, April 5th, 2019 – 4:24 pm

    Puffy

    That looks bad.

    Most of South Australia has a group of related phenomena which come together and which can be summarized thus: the rate of soil formation is less than the rate of soil loss.

    This translates into a sort of inevitable outcome: sooner or later the soils will be totally depleted and you will be down to bedrock.

    I agree. Australia has a great big topsoil loss problem, so I understand. How much this is due to land clearance for cropping is a good question. But if bare farmland is just sitting there the soil is going to get blown away.

    SA has a lot of arid land, though and that must add to the dust when rainfall is infrequent.

  3. citizen @ #535 Friday, April 5th, 2019 – 4:46 pm

    We’re still getting taxpayer funded advertisements designed to favour the LNP. Presumably they will continue up until the exact time that Morrison visits the GG. Morrison would want to get the maximum political mileage out of advertising that is paid for out of our pockets.

    Last night I flicked across a few channels and three of them had Liberal Party government advertising at the same time. These people are thieves, how dare they spend hundreds of millions of public $ for their own aggrandisement.

  4. Ven

    You may be stunned that the right lost the Faction war. That does not mean the Greens are a mess.
    Look at the Lower House. Increased vote towards the Greens.

  5. I honestly can’t wait until Bernie doesn’t win the primaries and Nicholas is on here screaming about how the process is rigged and the DNC stole it from him. Bank on it.

  6. Of course if the Libs had an A grade dirt file on Shorten they would deploy it during the campaign. Any sooner he could be replaced by Albanese. No, you want Shorten locked in before you drop the big ones. 🙂

  7. What is this emoting by Morrison? And this generalised ‘they deserve our respect’? People with disabilities are just that, people. They deserve equity and the same respect all other people deserve. Not pity, not glorification and definitely not being treated as ‘special’. There are people with disabilities who are complete arskewipes.

    Morrison is right in one way I suppose, people with disabilities deserve respect for surviving the utter bastardry of the LNP, such as robodebt, and short-changing the NDIS.

  8. Ven
    One of the penultimate phases of the Greens decline was always going to involve a struggle between genuine environmentalists and doctrinaire Reds. IMO, the latter were always going to triumph inside the Greens. One of the outcomes was going to be a decline in electoral appeal along with a flight of the environmentalists. So the Greens Party is disintegrating as a Front organization.

    As the doctrinaire Left has taken control, so the extreme policies are coming out:
    1. Introduction of the UBI which costs around $400 billion per annum when total revenue per annum is around $300 billion per annum.
    2. Destruction of the Australian cotton industry because of doctrinaire opposition to GMOs.
    etc, etc, etc.
    While things do change, the doctrinaire Left has historically rarely managed to gather above 5% of the vote in Australia. That is where the Greens are headed: less than 5%.

  9. BW

    NSW election results. Left increasing vote share. Right losing vote share. Thats how the war was settled.

    Not quite the disaster you are making it out to be.

  10. Reports of a decline in enthusiasm among Sanders’s supporters also appear to have been greatly exaggerated. His fundraising and poll numbers disprove the idea that he’s an also-ran. But there are other signs of his continued vitality. Despite his near-universal name recognition, and the media’s overwhelming attention lately to O’Rourke, Biden, and Buttigieg, Sanders has consistently been among the top three Democratic candidates in Google searches, suggesting continued interest in his campaign. Finally, he appears to be broadly liked throughout the party. A Morning Consult poll in February found that he was the second choice for voters who supported the campaigns of Biden, Warren, and O’Rourke, suggesting that support could coalesce around his candidacy as other Democrats drop out.

    He almost certainly will be one of the last candidates standing. The coverage of his campaign will only grow, especially as the remaining candidates seek to distinguish themselves from the Man Who Remade the Democratic Party. (The Washington Post published two opinion pieces this week that represent the case that Sanders’s detractors will likely make against him: that he is “the Donald Trump of the left” and that he is unable to answer specific questions about his ambitious and expensive proposals.)

    Anything is possible. That’s been the most common refrain in Beltway punditry ever since Trump shocked the world on November 8, 2016. It’s worth remembering that at this point in the 2016 cycle, Trump was more than two months away from even announcing his candidacy. So it’s possible that such a figure is waiting in the wings of the Democratic contest (Mike Bloomberg doesn’t count). It’s also possible that support will coalesce around a dark-horse candidate like Buttigieg. And it’s possible that Biden will finally enter the race and defy both his anemic performance in previous presidential contests and the emerging #MeToo narrative about his handsiness.

    But “anything is possible” is, perhaps, the wrong lesson to take from Trump’s victory. After all, he took the lead in Republican primary polls barely a month after entering the race, in late July, and he never relinquished it. It wasn’t until Republican voters began casting ballots that it dawned on the media that Trump might actually win the nomination. All of the available evidence right now suggests that Sanders is the frontrunner. The pundits ignore this at their own peril.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/153462/bernie-sanders-frontrunner-obviously

  11. Of course if the Libs had an A grade dirt file on Shorten they would deploy it during the campaign. Any sooner he could be replaced by Albanese. No, you want Shorten locked in before you drop the big ones.

    Yeah, Shorten has been LOTO since 2013. In that interem, with the exceptions of short honeymoons for Abbott and Turnbull, the ALP has been leading in the polls. As well as an actual election that occurred in 2016. Any time we could have seen the employment of a career-killing dirt file, but nah they’re waiting for that very special time before using it. Delusional.

    And let’s be clear: He hasn’t gotten a dream run either. They’ve tried to throw the sink at him. So it’s curious why this dirt file you imagine is going to get him hasn’t been unsealed yet. Oh yeah, it’s imaginary.

  12. ‘Puffy
    SA has a lot of arid land, though and that must add to the dust when rainfall is infrequent.’

    It is the norm for arid lands to have extremely slow or non-existent rates of soil formation. There isn’t the juice to maintain the necessary soil fauna. There isn’t the production of organic material for the soil fauna to feed on.

    I recall a conversation with a gun wheat farmer on the Eyre Peninsula. I put the proposition to him that since the rate of soil formation was less than the rate of soil loss on the Eyre Peninsula, sooner or later there would be no wheat/sheep industry on the Peninsula.

    You could see the penny drop.

  13. Not even the Democrats will be stupid enough to nominate someone who has precisely zero chance of defeating Trump, no matter how much money he raises. Most of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 but now recognise that it was a terrible mistake will hold their nose and vote him back in if the alternative is Bernie Sanders.

    I say that without passing any comment about either Sanders personally or his platform, it just so happens that he’s running to be US president, and the US will not elect him.

  14. ‘guytaur says:
    Friday, April 5, 2019 at 5:07 pm

    BW

    NSW election results. Left increasing vote share. Right losing vote share. Thats how the war was settled.

    Not quite the disaster you are making it out to be.’

    Oh, I don’t think the disintegration of the Greens is a disaster at all. I think it is a natural progression as the bedfellows fall out over the fundamentals.
    This was bound to happen sooner or later. 30 years is later, but better late than never.

  15. Rational Leftist
    says:
    And let’s be clear: He hasn’t gotten a dream run either. They’ve tried to throw the sink at him. So it’s curious why this dirt file you imagine is going to get him hasn’t been unsealed yet. Oh yeah, it’s imaginary.
    ___________________
    I agree. But many on here have speculated upon such a file. I was just speculating that if it did exist it would be used soon. I don’t think there is anything to worry about. Shorten is most likely a very boring person with nothing much going on except for his ambition.

  16. OK one more. I’ve said it before, but if ANYONE had dirt on Shorten they would have dropped it in 2016. They didn’t, so they don’t.

    Enough of unicorns, it’s knock-off time.

  17. bw

    😆

    No unlike the Democrats after the factional war the Greens have had their vote in lower house seats increase. No disintegration can be inferred from NSW election results.

  18. RL,

    If the Libs hadn’t deployed their dirt file or any other weapon after/before/during Shorten dispatching 3 Lib PMs, then you’d have to say it’s unicorn.

  19. Not so rational when you can’t read polling and fundraising data.

    Rationality has nothing to do with me saying things you don’t want to hear.

    Sanders has a lead but he also has an extremely high unfavourability rating. This is what’s known as the “frontrunner’s curse” in Democratic primaries. Ask Howard Dean in 2004, ask Hillary Clinton in 2008. If the candidate has the spotlight as the frontrunner but isn’t growing and has high unfavourables, then it means that majority of Democrats want someone else and, as soon as that viable option appears, they rally to them. I know about this from experience. I have been covering this shit for years and have studied up on elections prior to that. It’s not a guarantee, sure, but it’s a lot more of a well-thought take than “HE HAS A PLURALITY IN THE POLLS. JUST ACCEPT HE’S GOING TO WIN.”

  20. BW

    Federally it could get very interesting for the Greens. The left is locked in. It has a lot in common with Labor left.

    Could be very handy come time to negotiate legislation in the Senate depending on where BOP falls

  21. RL

    Nope. Nicholas has not said that. I certainly have not. All that has been said is Sanders is the front runner now.

    Anyone predicting who is going to win the Democratic nomination before the debates is in my view a mug. Note I said Democratic nomination too. Sanders like it or not is running as a Democrat

  22. I would not be game to predict who will vote for whom. except for the rusted-on Trumpists, in the USA fed election.

  23. Nicholas has not said that

    Nicholas literally referred to him as the presumptive nominee this morning.

  24. RL

    Yes that is the rational position to take because if the vote was held today Sanders would be at the top of the ticket thats what being the front runner means.

  25. ‘guytaur says:
    Friday, April 5, 2019 at 5:18 pm

    BW

    Federally it could get very interesting for the Greens. ‘

    Why, are we expecting some more revelations?

  26. Rational Leftist – a guy who chose his online moniker with no self-awareness whatsoever.

    The rational read of the data is that Bernie Sanders is the clear frontrunner in terms of a combination of polling data, fundraising data, campaign infrastructure, and the widespread respect that he enjoys among Democratic voters (including those who aren’t naming him as their first choice at the moment) – and that Joe Biden’s polling numbers are soft and that he is very vulnerable because of his bad policy record (in terms of what Democratic voters want from their 2020 nominee for president) and his inability to understand the concept of personal space.

    The people who dismiss Bernie Sanders’ prospects of becoming the next president are nearly all centrist cranks in denial. Why would a rational person trust their judgement?

  27. Sanders might die of an age-related condition before anything real happens.
    Then he can join Nader in the pantheon of doctrinaire Leftists who helped hand the US to the Repugs.

  28. My annoyance with Sanders is less with him and his policies and all the people around him who are toxic borderline-cultists who act in such bad faith and treat everyone else not in their cliques as mortal enemies (in many cases, worse than Republicans) who seem to think basically pushing everyone in their clique away and spitting at olive branches is how their agenda is going to be passed. It makes me extremely skeptical of the claim that they “care about the issues, not the personality”

  29. Most of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 but now recognise that it was a terrible mistake will hold their nose and vote him back in if the alternative is Bernie Sanders.

    That is the opposite of what the exit polls from 2016 found: that there was a significant number of voters who would have voted for Sanders had he been the Democratic nominee, but voted for Trump because the Democrats had nominated the most establishment-friendly, inauthentic, neoliberal candidate available.

    Look, centrists don’t like Sanders – that isn’t exactly news.

    But centrists are going to vote for Sanders if he is the Democratic nominee.

    So what the centrists want isn’t important.

  30. RL

    If you paid attention to the issues you would have noted running a strong Left of Centre field won more than it lost for the Democrats as the GOP campaigned about all those socialists

    Edit: My theory is that make the base happy to come out and vote and you win. That was the lesson from Trump winning if you missed it.

  31. New rule: Anyone who thinks they’re clever by saying my moniker on here is incorrect because I said something they didn’t want to hear gets whatever shit they dribble afterwards completely ignored.

  32. My view is that the Democrats will tear each other to pieces and will thereby gift us another four years of Trump.

  33. My annoyance with Sanders is less with him and his policies and all the people around him who are toxic borderline-cultists

    That is not a rational approach to evaluating his prospects of becoming president.

    It’s just a visceral expression of dislike for a group of people.

    You don’t like Sanders supporters – tremendous whoop. What does that have to do with assessing the probability of his becoming president? Your feelings are not relevant to that question.

  34. New rule: Anyone who thinks they’re clever by saying my moniker on here is incorrect

    Well nobody forced you to choose the most grandiose and least accurate pseudonym on the blog.

  35. If you paid attention to the issues you would have noted running a strong Left of Centre field won more than it lost for the Democrats as the GOP campaigned about all those socialists

    I never said anything to the contrary. I think that one good thing that came out of 2016 was the realisation that the Democrats need to listen to more progressive voices and improve its position on those issues. I oppose the bad faith nonsense by a small niche who thinks only they (or those they’ve handpicked) have the ability to make things better. This kind of attitude never ends well and never gets any of the reforms you want.

  36. GG

    That has been the GOP theory about campaigning on Nancy Pelosi is a socialist
    Thats what they campaign on about Sanders.
    Thats whey they campaign on about AOC who is not even in the Presidential race.

    MidTerms showed how hollow that was and how moderates did not stay home when left candidates have stood and run

  37. I’m surprised there’s been no squealing about Di Natale being left out of the YouGov/Galaxy on leadership. It had Scomo, Bill, PH & Clive only.

  38. LR

    Not the group known by the label of centrists.

    Nicholas is dead on about their popularity in the US. Otherwise known as the Elites,

  39. Well nobody forced you to choose the most grandiose and least accurate pseudonym on the blog.

    Yeah, tone-policing from the idiot who thinks posting diatribes filled with word salad on topics he recently learned about at uni – despite the fact that he clearly doesn’t understand them. That’s put me in my place.

  40. BW,

    It’s their opinion and that’s all that really counts.

    No compulsory voting means you have to get out your base. Trump has his MAGAs and the establishment who got him there in the first place.

    Sanders will have a disorganised rabble , an indifferent mainstream of Dems and a feral Nicholas sending his thoughts and prayers from Oz.

  41. Anyone who becomes Labor leader in the current environment will be demonised and relentlessly attacked by an aggressive MSM. It wouldn’t matter if it is Bill Shorten or anyone else, it is likely they would be unpopular in my opinion. If we can kick the Murdochs out of our country we will be better off. New Zealand and Canada are free of this undemocratic swill.

Comments Page 12 of 17
1 11 12 13 17

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *