Of swings and misses: episode three

From my paywalled article in Crikey yesterday:

In the wake of its most unambiguous failure at a federal election since at least 1980, Australia’s polling industry is licking its wounds.

The Nine/Fairfax papers have announced the Ipsos poll series will be put on ice, and those pollsters who do return to the field shortly will face catcalls whether they persist in recording a Labor lead we now know doesn’t exist, or only now start detecting a Coalition lead that eluded them through the entirety of the past parliamentary term.

Despite it all though, the pollsters’ performance hasn’t been without its defenders.

Spoiler alert: the latter refers to David Briggs and Nate Silver. But Peter Brent can now be added to the list, up to a point, following a review of the issues raised by the polling failure in Inside Story. Specifically, Brent observes that the primary vote miss was less severe than the two-party preferred; that the difference arose from a stronger-than-anticipated flow of minor party and independent preferences to the Coalition; that herding was less apparent on the primary vote (most markedly in the case of Ipsos’s reading of the balance of support between Labor and the Greens); and that the result was, if nothing else, no worse than the Victorian state election.

Another point noted is the strange consistency with which polls have pointed to extravagant gains for Labor in Queensland before and during election campaigns, only for them to fall away at the end. On this occasion, the falling away as recorded by pollsters wasn’t remotely on the scale needed to predict the result, with statewide polling published towards the end of the campaign landing at least 7% shy of what looks like being the Coalition two-party vote in the state.

The question of geographic variability in the pollster failure seemed worth exploring, so I have put together a table of state and electorate level polling published in the last fortnight or so of the campaign, available below the fold at the bottom of the post. Almost all of this polling was conducted by YouGov Galaxy, whether under its own name or as Newspoll. The only exception was a set of state-level two-party preferred totals from Ipsos, published at the tail end of the campaign by the Age-Herald (which performed rather poorly).

Below all this is a list of “average bias” figures, consisting of straight averages of the observed errors, be they positive or negative, rather than the absolute errors. This means combinations of positive and negative results will have the fact of cancelling out — although there were actually very few of those, as the errors tended to be consistently in the one direction. The national and state-level two-party results are estimates provided to me by Nine’s election systems consultant David Quin. With no Coalition-versus-Labor figures available from 15 electorates, this inevitably involves a fair bit of guess work.

A few points should be observed. Given that poll trends pointed to a clear long-term trend to the Coalition, pollsters may be excused a certain amount of Labor bias when evaluating polling that was in many cases conducted over a week before the election. This is particularly true of the Newspoll state aggregates, which cover the full length of the campaign.

Another issue with the Newspoll state aggregates is that One Nation was a response option for all respondents in the early part of the campaign, despite their contesting only 59 out of 151 seats. Their vote here accordingly comes in too high, and as Peter Brent notes, at least part of their failure could be explained by stranded One Nation supporters breaking in unexpectedly large quantities to the Coalition, rather than other minor party targets of opportunity like Clive Palmer.

In seat polling though, where the issue did not arise, the polls were remarkable in having understated support for One Nation, and overstated it for the United Australia Party. This was one face of a two-sided polling failure in Queensland, of which the other was a serious imbalance towards Labor in support recorded for the major parties. While Queensland has caught most of the attention on this score, the polls were just as far out in measuring the primary votes of the major parties in Western Australia. Things were less bad in Victoria, but Coalition support was still significantly underestimated.

The only bright spots in the picture are New South Wales and South Australia, where Newspoll just about nailed the Coalition, Labor and Greens primary votes, and got the big things right in four seat polls. While Labor’s strength was overstated in Macquarie, it does now appear Labor will pull through there – for more on that front, stay tuned to the late counting thread.

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.

1,256 comments on “Of swings and misses: episode three”

Comments Page 24 of 26
1 … 23 24 25 26

  1. Psyclaw @1143
    My post was about my knowledge of Catherine King from both branch meetings and working with her on campaigns, so you can direct your snark elsewhere.

  3. Bill Shorten posted this on Facebook earlier. It’s a portfolio he has experience with, so hopefully he’ll take that experience and use it to expose the omnishambles the coalition have made of the NDIS.

    :large

  5. “I’m still waiting to see any evidence, rather than extrapolating polls for various parties, that a second referendum would overturn the first one.”…

    The only relevant evidence is the result of a second referendum. The second referendum is needed only because the first referendum has led to absolutely nowhere after 3 years. If the second referendum is again a Brexit win, then the pressure to pass Brexit through Parliament would be absolutely enormous. If Remain wins, Parliament should vote to further confirm it, so that nobody has any doubt that the previous Brexit option was stuck but the new Remain option has a smooth sailing through both referendum and parliament…. That would silence the Brexiteers once and for all.

  6. Harry

    I was not snarking at you in any shape or form. You were specifically excluded. You made it clear that you actually know CK.

    Best you go back and read my post a bit more slowly.

    I was referring to some here who “know” nearly all of Albo’s placements better than Albo himself.

  7. Dutton’s bit of bravado regarding Keneally betrays his panic (one might say feeling of terror!) at the prospect of being under extreme scrutiny for the next three years.

  8. Look, you fuken fool, why should people with disabilities lose their best, if not their only, political advocate EVER in the history of Australia because the MSM are going to cry ‘Leadershit’?
    For the many people with disabilities, I say go fuk yourself with one of those Qld pineapples. You deserve each other, selfish pricks.

    Graham @ #1036 Sunday, June 2nd, 2019 – 12:46 pm

    Shorten awarded a shadow portfolio in Labor’s new front bench.

    Labor have learned nothing. Kill Bill worked, and now they want to spread the contagion around a bit more.

    The LNP would have had a failed leader out the door and into a couple of directorships before now.

    Labor is intent on maximising their disadvantages. Yet again.

    Those Opposition benches must be really comfortable.

  9. Briefly can get a bit tiresome with the libkin thing but he is perceptive unlike most on here who inhabit a planet other than earth.

    In 1996 Howard fractured the coalition of voters that gave Labor it’s longest run of success at the federal level and apart from 2007 Labor have not been able to fracture the coalition of voters that the right have managed to weld together, indeed it is getting stronger as far right preference flows become less contrarian.

    Abbott’s adverserial approach on energy policy quickly put pressure on the Rudd voter coalition, and then Gillard via Carbon pricing handed government back to the right, this is the issue that the right are building their narrative of Labor being blind to the concern of the less affluent around, and it working a treat.

    As Briefly points out the fracture is largely along class lines , with ethnicity also playing a small role, Labor are losing the caucasian working class.Unlike the Democrats in the USA, labor here have not had and will not get the benefit of large amounts of unskilled immigration to keep them in the game.

    The coalition will not make the mistake of importing a Labor voting constituency. Labor can win the next election if the Liberals get really crazy brave or a recession falls out of the sky, if neither of the above happens they will go backwards.

  11. Psyclaw
    I appreciate you are making a general comment and its a fair enough point but when I criticise Linda Burney, I did so on her review into welfare payments policy which to me looked like Burney hadn’t done the policy work in an area that is key to the federal government and its problems are well documented so a review was a weak policy. With any frontbench group there will always be a few that on face value look out of place.

  13. Someone asked earlier who represents Dutton’s portfolio in the Senate. I have a feeling it used to be Linda Reynolds, but have no idea who it will be now. Perhaps her again.

  14. kayjay:

    Okay.

    I reckon Late Riser should start a PB book on which pollster will be first to pop its head over the parapet with a new poll 😀 😆

  15. KayJay

    I remain clueless regarding polling now or in the future.

    You have a lot in common with the people at Essential,Newspoll etc etc 🙂

  17. Psyclaw
    My apologies. I took your comment about seeing someone on a train as a reference to my comment about travelling to a lunch with Albo. I don’t have as close an association with him as I do Catherine which is why I made the comment that I think she will take to Infrastructure very well as she’s already engaged with the territory locally and is competent.

  18. That Graham character reminds me of that person called Graham something or other who runs another politics blog that no one reads and who is an avowed Coalition supporter. I think he’s also from Queensland.

    Anyway, I expect to see more stuff like he’s put up today. Seemingly a Left supporter who concern trolls Labor, but they are really just a RW destabiliser of Labor.

  19. I don’t think we will see a Newspoll for a few weeks. But if there is one I’m going for 51/49 to Labor, at least until they work out the needle is stuck.

  24. briefly and mundo
    I can understand you feeling pessimistic about Labor’s fortunes for next election. I reckon there will be significant hurdles as Palmer has just demonstrated you can buy electoral outcomes with enough cash to splash and this will not be lost on the likes of Gina et al..
    However, I think that with the type of strong local engagement we do in Ballarat federally, It’s winnable.
    Personally I’m waiting for a large whistling sound across the country as of a deflating balloon, when people wake up they aren’t getting $30,000 from the gov’t for their “franking credits”.

  26. PuffyTMD says:
    Sunday, June 2, 2019 at 6:07 pm

    BTW
    I am ecstatic that Bill is back on the NDIS. He should never had it taken away.
    __________________________________
    No one was more ecstatic than Bill Shorten to be shot of the NDIS and move on up to be Workplace Relations Minister in 2010. Recent reports indicated that he wanted Health and Foreign Relations before settling for NDIS. So, not a great passionate advocate at all.

  27. citizen says:

    At the moment the polls probably belong in the entertainment section.

    Right next to the “Your Day by the Stars” astrology predictions.

  28. Remember folks without polls William will get bored and forget us. Careful what you wish for. Besides they are always a good talking point.

  29. There seems to be closet LNPs who try desperately to cause trouble on here but they fail to achieve anything but waste their own time. Still if it keeps them of the streets and forming Lib kin gangs making it safer to go out to dinner, it’s all good.

  30. Davidwh
    I feel for William. It’s all gotten so much harder. It’s interesting how much we were all convinced by the polls. I was chatting to the bloke giving out Lib HTVs at the polling booth I was working and he was quite convinced that Labor was going to win.

  32. From details recently published by Roy Morgan on ownership of polling companies. Looks like they’re owned by the unions. Yep, I reckon they’ll be first back in the field.

    6. Essential Poll – conducted by Essential Media Communications the holding company is The Essential Research and Communications Group Pty Ltd. The shares are held equally by Peter Lewis & James Douglas but the shares are not beneficially held (owner not known). Conduct Robo-Polling; clients as published include Shop Distributive & Allied Employees Association Nat Branch, United Firefighters’ Union of Australia-Victorian Branch and Federal Australian Education Union.

  33. C@tmomma @ #1168 Sunday, June 2nd, 2019 – 6:18 pm

    That Graham character reminds me of that person called Graham something or other who runs another politics blog that no one reads and who is an avowed Coalition supporter. I think he’s also from Queensland.

    Anyway, I expect to see more stuff like he’s put up today. Seemingly a Left supporter who concern trolls Labor, but they are really just a RW destabiliser of Labor.

    You’re thinking of Graham Young. He was the Liberal campaign director who got Pauline Hanson sacked as an endorsed Liberal candidate back in the day. He was later expelled from membership by the Liberal party. Interestingly he was part of the consensus that Labor would probably win the recent election.

  34. Harry ‘Snapper’ Organs,
    I can understand you feeling pessimistic about Labor’s fortunes for next election. I reckon there will be significant hurdles as Palmer has just demonstrated you can buy electoral outcomes with enough cash to splash and this will not be lost on the likes of Gina et al..

    I’m not entirely sure about this prediction because you would have to think that Australians will fall for Palmer’s crap all over again. When, if you look at the claims he made this time, by the time of the next election it will probably be the case that none of it has eventuated. Especially the bullshit about China working with mark McGowan and Labor to build air strips and ports for the Chinese Military!

    I’d love to know who made that 5,minute ad for Palmer, btw, it was very professionally produced and quite convincing, obviously. No Cheap Jack ad company and video production house, that’s for sure.

    And I’m still quite suspicious about the guy with the Russian-sounding name that Palmer employed to churn out his social media memes.

    It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Palmer had employed the same Russian crew that seeded social media with memes for Trump. No underhanded move is beyond Clive Palmer.

    Which reminds me, I wonder how the poor man’s health is going? Didn’t he have Alan Bond Disease? You know, the one that only afflicts you when you are facing court examinations.

    Also, have his Queensland Nickel workers been paid yet? The ones that refused to sign Non Disclosure contracts, that is.

  36. Labor’s new Home Affairs spokeswoman, Kristina Keneally, has vowed to put “a blowtorch” on Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton over the largely overlooked blowout in asylum seekers arriving by plane over the past four years.

    Senator Keneally, one of the winners among new Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s frontbench appointments, quickly had to defend herself against verbal attacks from Mr Dutton, who said she had a record of not supporting tough border protection measures.
    Kristina Keneally during Labor’s failed election campaign.

    She said she supported boat turnbacks, offshore processing and regional resettlement but insisted they had to be done humanely.

    Mr Dutton had been taking credit for stopping asylum-seeker boats with measures that had in fact been the work of now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Senator Keneally said.

    “Peter Dutton has in fact allowed people smugglers to evolve their business model from using boats to using planes,” she said.
    In the past four years, the number of people claiming asylum after arriving by plane had risen to more than 81,000.

    Most were not refugees and, while their cases were less complicated than those of people who had arrived by boat, they were “languishing on bridging visas for two and three years”.

  37. And I think ReachTel is part of Ucomms which is union owned. (Does the “U” in Ucomms stand for unions?)

  38. In the wake of the Virginia Beach mass shooting yesterday (where legally purchased firearm was used), it’s worth looking at voting outcomes in the state when it comes to gun control.

    The fate of the legislation, SB1748, was so widely expected that the outcome drew virtually no public attention. For more than 20 years, Republicans and a few rural Democrats in the General Assembly have killed almost every measure aimed at restricting gun ownership.

    …

    Each year, Democrats propose multiple gun-control measures, such as strengthening background checks, limiting handgun purchases to one per month and allowing localities to regulate guns in public buildings. They call these “common-sense” measures to save lives.

    Each year, Republican majorities in one or both chambers of the legislature vote them down, usually in committee. GOP legislators say their goal is never to infringe on people’s Second Amendment rights.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-news/in-january-virginia-gop-killed-bill-to-ban-sales-of-large-capacity-gun-magazines-like-those-used-by-virginia-beach-shooter/2019/06/01/ee5efd8e-8489-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html?utm_term=.c0c1534aebb6

  40. A few things re polling ownership above:

    1. Essential having unions as clients does not necessarily mean Essential is union-owned. (Also Morgan’s article is rather misleading in describing Essential as “Conduct Robo-Polling” when Essential’s best-known poll is by online polling.)

    2. ReachTEL is not part of uComms. Rather, uComms uses ReachTEL’s framework for polling, and one of its three co-owners was the founder of ReachTEL.

  41. E. G. Theodore @ #1102 Sunday, June 2nd, 2019 – 3:09 pm

    C@tmomma:

    Yep. Gaslighting, pure and simple.

    Quite right.

    In fact Mr Albenese would be wise to insist that Mr. Shorten take on a cabinet role, and it would seem that he is. As I understand it, Mr. Shorten has a relatively minor disability (a speech impediment) which he has successfully overcome (albeit at the cost of offending nath in the process); this makes him well suited to the NDIS role.

    Bill Shorten is not suited to the NDIS role because he has a disability. What, having a speech impediment gives Bill special powers, like a super-hero. What has that got to do with getting down with the actual people who cannot get more than one shower a week in their homes and can only afford a couple of taxi trips a week, or cannot get travel insurance, or find a ramp within ten kms of home, or find someone to get them through the Libs’ bastardisation of the NDIS?

    Gee, sometimes people just shit me off.

    Bill Shorten knew not much about Disability before he was given that role. He learnt. He sat down with the people who thought up the National Disability Insurance Scheme, as it got called. This is Bill Shorten’s, and the ALP’s, outcome from listening to stakeholders, real stakeholders. The ones who needed the services and programs.

    It is now law of the land. It is off to a rocky start but it can be improved.

    You cannot improve what is not there.

    So yes, Shorten deserves to stay in Cabinet. Yes, he deserves to get the NDIS. The people with disabilities deserve to have Shorten turn his considerable talents once again to the NDIS.

    If the MSM whinge ‘Leadershit’ so bloody what?

  42. Kevin Bonham @ #451 Sunday, June 2nd, 2019 – 7:09 pm

    A few things re polling ownership above:

    1. Essential having unions as clients does not necessarily mean Essential is union-owned. (Also Morgan’s article is rather misleading in describing Essential as “Conduct Robo-Polling” when Essential’s polling is primarily online polling.)

    2. ReachTEL is not part of uComms. Rather, uComms uses ReachTEL’s framework for polling, and one of its three co-owners was the founder of ReachTEL.

    Yes but https://www.theguardian.com/profile/peter-lewis-australia

  44. citizen @ #1157 Sunday, June 2nd, 2019 – 6:01 pm

    Dutton’s bit of bravado regarding Keneally betrays his panic (one might say feeling of terror!) at the prospect of being under extreme scrutiny for the next three years.

    Yes, yes, that bad man must be truly terrified.
    FMD
    Dutton fears no one from the Labor party.
    \Why the fck would he.
    What, is some big loud angry passionately articulate mouth from the ALP gonna take him down a few pegs?
    Oh wait, do it during an election campaign. Yeah, oh darn. Have to wait now to show that Peter Dutton the door.

  45. You can see why Dutton is not happy that KK is his opposite number, with cut-through lines like this, delivered with a smile:

    “Peter Dutton has in fact allowed people smugglers to evolve their business model from using boats to using planes,” she said.

  48. PTMD @ 7.13pm

    Spot on once again. No-one in the country better to grow the NDIS than Mr Shorten. And since he has a point to make, especially to the media charlatans, he will put his all into it.

  49. Viewing Albanese tonight on Aunty gives rise to some trepidation: that is to suggest, he reminds me of Beazley, Crean, Shorten. Labor should’ve gone for generational change – to wit, Chalmers, who’s young, articulate and above all, a Queenslander, the state where elections are won or lost.

  50. C@t I would love to read your candid review of the campaign in Robertson. Your anonymous so you can say what actually happened from the inside. As someone not involved I can say what I saw from North Avoca

Comments Page 24 of 26
1 … 23 24 25 26

Leave a Reply

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