ANU post-election survey and Essential Research poll

Comprehensive new research suggests a telling shift from the “others” column to the Coalition through the campaign period, while Labor were either consistently overrated by pollsters or fell off a cliff at the end.

Some particularly interesting post-election research has emerged in the shape of a paper from Nicholas Biddle at the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods. This draws from the centre’s regular online panel surveys on social attitudes, which encompasses a question on voting intention for reasons unrelated to prediction of election results. The study compares results for 1692 respondents who completed both its pre- and post-election surveys, which were respectively conducted from April 8 to 26 (encompassing the start of the campaign on April 11) and June 3 to 17 (commencing a fortnight after the election). Respondents were excluded altogether if they were either ineligible to vote or failed to answer the voting intention question.

The results are, to a point, consistent with the possibility that pollsters were confounded by a last minute shift to the Coalition, particularly among those who had earlier been in the “others” column. The changes can be summarised as follows, keeping in mind that a “don’t know” response for the April survey was at 2.9%, and 6.5% in the June survey said they did not vote. Since the disparity leaves a net 3.6% of the total vote unaccounted for, the shifts identified below will err on the low side.

The Coalition vote increased an estimated 2.6% from the time of the April survey, suggesting the polls were right to be recording them at around 38% at that time, if not later. However, no movement at all was recorded in the Labor vote, suggesting they were always about four points short of the 37% most polls were crediting them with. The exception here was Ipsos, which had Labor at 33% or 34% in all four of the polls from the start of the year. The Greens fell very slightly, suggesting a poll rounding to whole numbers should have had them at 11% early in the campaign. Newspoll consistently had it at 9%, Ipsos at 13% or 14%, and Essential fluctuated between 9% and 12%.

The biggest move was the 5.9% drop in support for “others”, although a fair bit of this wound up in the “did not vote” column. Even so, it can conservatively be said that pollsters in April should have been rating “others” at around four points higher than their actual election result of 15%, when they were actually coming in only one point higher. This three point gap is reflected in the size of the overestimation of support for Labor.

The results also point to a remarkably high degree of churn — an estimated 28.5% did not stick with the voting intention expressed in April, albeit that a little more than a fifth of this subset did so by not voting at all. The sub-sample of vote changers is small, but it offers little to suggest voters shifted from Labor to the Coalition in particularly large numbers. The Coalition recorded the lowest rate of defection, although the difference with Labor was not statistically significant (I presume it’s normal for major party supporters to be more constant than minor). Conversely, 49.4% of those who left the “others” column went to the Coalition (which comes with a 9% margin of error), and most of the remainder did not vote.

The survey also features statistical analysis to determine the demographic characteristics of vote changers. These find that older voters were generally less likely to be vote changers, and that young vote changers tended not to do so in favour of the Coalition, presumably switching for the most part between Labor and the Greens. Also particularly unlikely to budge were Coalition voters who lived in areas of socio-economic advantage. Those at the other end of this scale, regardless of party support, were most volatile.

Also out this week was the regular fortnightly Essential Research survey, which is still yet to resume its voting intention series but will do so soon. A question on the anticipated impact of government policies over the next three years produces encouraging numbers for the government, with 41% positive and 23% negative. A question on racist sentiments finds 36% agreeing that Australia is a racist country, and 50% saying it is less racist than it was in the past. Breakdowns record no significant differences between those of migrant and non-migrant backgrounds, although the former may include too many of British origin for the results to be particularly revealing.

A question on political interest finds only 15% professing no interest in federal politics, with 53% saying they follow it closely or “enough to know what’s happening”. A big question though is whether polling has gone astray because too many such people are included in their samples. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1075 respondents drawn from an online panel.

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.

1,483 comments on “ANU post-election survey and Essential Research poll”

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  2. John Quiggin has a good take on the ANU study about why the ALP lost the federal election. The ALP foolishly made their campaign a gladiatorial contest of leaders instead of focusing on their policies. This helped the Coalition because Shorten was an unpopular leader. The ALP relied heavily on vacuous phrases such as “top end of town” instead of using their policies as their core strength.

    https://johnquiggin.com/2019/09/07/why-labor-lost/?fbclid=IwAR3pFAMIhKn8azKCbKOBPcK2HwlQVfw-oKVYgQNO0ny4mc01r_fgWASK_m0

    For a day or two, Labor ran ads talking up its positive policies and focusing on the whole frontbench rather than Shorten alone. But that stopped almost as soon as it started and it was back to the fact that Morrison only cared about “the big end of town”. Apart from the clunky and dated rhetoric, we already knew that. By contrast, even as a close follower of politics I didn’t know Labor had an excellent dental policy until Tanya Plibersek mentioned it after the election.

    The ANU study backs this up, first by saying that lots of people changed their minds at the last minute, which isn’t consistent with deepseated hostility to Labor policy, and second by saying that the big negative was reactions to Shorten, presumably driven in part by the Liberals’ negative campaigning.

    The crucial point here is that, by playing the gladiatiorial leadership game, Labor was setting itself up to lose. Campaigning on policy would have reinforced the point, obvious since the election, that the coalition didn’t have any.

  3. As of Friday evening, Trump had posted 15 tweets and five maps about Alabama and the storm to try to prove his original tweet was correct, despite the fact that he’d been publicly rebuked by the National Weather Service. He also showed reporters an altered map of the storm’s path on Wednesday to defend his claims, a move that may be illegal, according to federal law.

    “He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who’s in frequent contact with the White House told Insider on Friday.

    Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “you should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”

    https://www.businessinsider.com.au/trump-aides-worried-about-mental-state-alabama-hurricane-dorian-2019-9

  4. How about people that receive Franking Credit refunds from the government?

    Well perhaps except they’re mostly all retired anyway so it’s hard to make the case that it matters if they want to spend their franking credit rebates blazing up all day.

  5. @RBJRON
    ·
    4m
    Just listening to the news and Scomo was on talking about extending the use of the Indue card to the Northern Territory and Cape York Peninsula, saying the card is working, people are finding work

    Where’s his proof?

  6. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “you should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”

    I wondered the same thing yesterday. His whining however has caused the NOAA to fall in line behind Dear Leader, much to people’s dismay including former NOAA leaders.

  7. Mr Shorten thought his job was to “take one for the team”, several times a day (and twice before breakfast), absorb all the negativity, and thus (as he thought) allow the rest of his team to get on with a positive agenda. However, it doesn’t work that way as people want someone they look up to , despite also wanting “an ordinary person” and the inevitability that the people looked up to will disappoint.

  8. @collettesnowden
    ·
    3m
    Replying to @RBJRON

    So far I have not seen a journalist ask him to explain the co-relation between Indue and employment.
    Do jobs magically appear in remote regions? If so, how?

  9. Stephen Mayne @MayneReport
    ·
    Sep 2
    When even Paul Kelly thinks it is okay for News Corp journalists to endorse Liberal candidates like Sarah Henderson in preselection contests you know the partisan culture in the Murdoch empire is ingrained. Very disappointing for independent balanced journalism to do this.

    I remember Sarah H used to be one of noddies who enthusiastically repeated every sledge at Labor and smiled in all the right places when Lib MPs were on their feet. She looked more like a puppet than an individual thinker. She’ll obviously be an ideal non-thinker in the Senate.

  10. “So far I have not seen a journalist ask him to explain the co-relation between Indue and employment.”

    That would be because the important thing is the co-relation between Indue and $ to Liberal and National party mates. Get with the program lizzie!! 🙂

  11. One common characteristic of conservatives seems to be their admiration for “tough love”
    Unless they’re on the receiving end.

    Indeedeedo.

    I used to think the Coalitions idea of tough love was all tough and no love. I now think it is like the ‘give and take’ joke….. they are tough on you so they can shower their mates with love.

  12. @MsVeruca
    ·
    41m
    Replying to @sussanley and @TSCommissioner
    Yay – let’s all turn species extinction into a tv game show!

    Here’s the Grassland Earless Dragon which is on the verge of extinction because your department is lifting the protected native grasslands cover for it.

    Less than 1% habitat left – some of it on Angus Taylor’s farms.

  13. Or, in other words, can Mr Morrison point out what and where are these jobs that will magically appear in the NT and the Cape York Peninsula, because Indue and drug testing?

  16. Psychlaw
    McAlinden had “interactions” with several members of my extended family, including punching my brother in the head when he was his altar boy. (Interestingly This happened in The Sacristy but in Aberdeen rather than St Patrick’s Melbourne)

    Wilson will get off, he has already played the dementia card

  18. Whether inherited or secured in other ways, extreme wealth takes on a momentum of its own. The super-rich have the money to spend on the best investment advice, and billionaire wealth has increased since 2009 by an average of 11 percent a year, far higher than rates ordinary savers can obtain.

    Bill Gates is worth nearly $100 billion dollars in 2019, almost twice what he was worth when he stepped down as head of Microsoft. This is despite his admirable commitment to giving his money away. As Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the 21st Century, “No matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can grow beyond any rational justification in terms of social utility.”

    My Oxfam colleague Didier Jacobs calculated a few years ago that another third of billionaire wealth comes from crony connections to government and monopoly. This could be for example when billionaires secure concessions to provide services exclusively from government, using crony connections and corruption. The Economist has developed a similar measure of crony capitalism with similar findings.

    What is clear it seems to me is that corruption and crony connections to governments are behind a significant proportion of billionaire wealth.

    https://medium.com/@Oxfam/shocking-inequality-billionaires-are-a-sign-of-economic-failure-155e8a5cb540

  19. @DuchessFrida
    ·
    Sep 6
    Last week a trip to Uluru.
    This week’s outing on a submarine…

    My husband said that it seems Pauline Hanson is crossing things off her bucket list and the Australian taxpayers are funding it!

  20. The crucial point here is that, by playing the gladiatiorial leadership game, Labor was setting itself up to lose.

    See, I don’t recall the campaign this way at all.

    I’m assuming by ‘gladiatorial’ we are talking about making it all about the leaders – our guy vs their guy.

    Labor, from what I saw, didn’t do this at all. The Labor campaign was hopeless, clearly, but whatever it was it wasn’t as characterized above.

    The Labor advertising hardly featured Shorten at all. Perhaps the mistake was that while the Libs focused all their ad campaign on Morrison and Shorten, because they had no policy and the rest of the Coalition frontbench was gagged in a back room somewhere, the Labor campaign also focused on Morrison and the top end of town stuff.

    But that’s not what I understand to be Labor ‘playing the gladiatorial leadership game’.

    If the argument is that Labor should have kept going with the warm and fuzzy “hey aren’t our policies great” theme – perhaps. I remain to be convinced that this would have resonated where it counted and counteracted the negative and mendacious crap being peddled from all other quarters.

    Sad to say I think Labor can’t win that way. They win by, yes, having a charismatic leader and not scaring the horses. I don’t think that agrees with the “gladiatorial leadership game” theory.

  21. Now this is really scary. No need to worry – we’re rich???

    @MikeFitzAU
    ·
    Sep 6
    Volunteer hands out Sept 20 #ClimateStrike info outside a Brisbane private school.

    Parent: ”This doesn’t apply to us. We’re private.”

    I fear the wealthy really believe that their riches will protect them from 50ºC summers, societal breakdown, the extinction of humanity…

  22. C@tmomma
    says:
    Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:55 pm
    nath,
    As you probably well know, or are smart enough to work out, but didn’t say, the Packers donate to the ALP so as to give the impression of a lack of bias. Though the differing amounts tell the real story.
    __________________________________
    I suppose the ALP hasn’t done the Packers any favours then? Seem to remember a certain ‘Minister for Chanel Nine’ and some favours over Crown Casino that worked out well for the Packers. I’m sure that’s just for an entre.

  26. Is there any research on what voters expect from the Liberals compared with what they expect from the ALP? It is widely believed in this forum that the threshold for Liberals to win government is lower than what is necessary for Labor to win. If that is true I suspect that a big part of that is the myth about the fed gov’s finances being like a household’s. When voters believe that the fed gov’s financial position is broken or sick, they think it is time to return to the Libs. In reality the fed gov’s financial position is always the same: unlimited. What matters is full employment, stable prices, low inequality, sustainable resource use, and quality public services and infrastructure. If the public assessed economic wellbeing on those criteria, it would be much harder for the Libs to win.

  27. The DPP are not going to have another go at Wilson.

    The section of the crimes act involved is opaque and one of the findings as to credibility involve someone who is now deceased.

  29. Baghdad: The Islamic State group has been reluctant to use humans to carry bombs because of the group’s reduced numbers, so it has tried out a new tactic: bovine suicide bombers.

    Residents of al-Islah, Iraq, say they have witnessed “a strange” sight: two cows harnessed to explosive vests roving the northern side of the village, according to Colonel Ghalib al-Atyia, the spokesman for the police commander in Diyala province.

    The animals wandered into the outskirts of the community, and when they seemed close to houses, the bombs were detonated remotely, killing the cows, and damaging nearby houses, but not harming any people, Atyia said.

    In the colonel’s assessment, the attack signalled that the terrorist group, whose ranks were sharply reduced by its four-year fight against Iraqi security forces backed by US special forces, was resorting to unconventional methods since they lacked manpower.

    Still, using cows to deliver bombs is an odd strategy in Iraq, where the animals are prized both for meat and milk. A cow can easily cost $US1200 ($1700) or more, and no one in the area could remember ever seeing a cow sent to its death in such a way, said several witnesses.
    …
    The use of animals as booby traps is not new. During the civil war in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, the insurgents who called themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq placed bombs both inside and under dead livestock, counting on families to try to clear away the corpses.

    In Afghanistan, donkeys were occasionally pressed into service to carry bombs targeting NATO forces.

    https://www.theage.com.au/world/middle-east/running-out-of-supporters-islamic-state-finds-new-bombers-cows-20190907-p52oys.html

  31. Re McAlinden
    Allegedly he first offended in Ireland in the 1940s and was exported to Maitland diocese. There was then nearly 50 years of him being sent from parish to parish, diocese to diocese, state to state, country to country. It would make sense that Wilson was not the only hierarchy who knew what was happening

    His MO was to identify families in the parish with young daughters and cultivate that family; giving the children a lift in his car (when cars were uncommon), dining with the family and sleeping over. My mother wondered why he was favouring her cousin’s family with his presence. If she knew why she would have been very thankful.

  34. Just shocking that those involved last night in what could be described as an imbroglio resulted in the owner of this site to close it down – unprecedented in my experience, not that I’m experienced.

  37. The Coalition didn’t expect to win the last election, and thus had no real policy agenda ready to implement. Nor do they really care enough to develop any. Given Labor’s disarray, they are probably thinking they might win again next time without them as well. And they are probably correct.

    So, you can expect their entire term in office to be full of rorts and brainfarts, like drug testing welfare recipients and demonizing children.

    All this while much of the country is already burning, and it is only the beginning of the danger period.

    What a shithole country we have become 🙁

  38. Player One @ #1034 Saturday, September 7th, 2019 – 7:28 pm

    The Coalition didn’t expect to win the last election, and thus had no real policy agenda ready to implement. Nor do they really care enough to develop any. Given Labor’s disarray, they are probably thinking they might win again next time without them as well. And they are probably correct.

    So, you can expect their entire term in office to be full of rorts and brainfarts, like drug testing welfare recipients and demonizing children.

    All this while much of the country is already burning, and it is only the beginning of the danger period.

    What a shithole country we have become 🙁

    Begs the question why 75% of voters give their first preference to them…

  39. Now this is really scary. No need to worry – we’re rich???

    It seems most likely that they just saw ‘Strike’ and assumed it was about striking school staff.

    But being in such a bubble that you haven’t heard of the Climate Strikes yet…

  41. The Coalition don’t need policy. They have some but no one wilk vite for them (more cuts and orivatisations). So they sort of vaguely promise that everything will stay as it is and together with their media allies run various attack and scare campaigns against the Opposition and class enemies. They didn’t use the dogwhistle this tome around – the Christchurch atrocity took that off the table – but they were preparing to use it at the start of the year. In the end they didn’t need it. Racists alteady know who to vote for, or at least which of the two majors to preference higher.

  42. lizzie says:
    @RBJRON
    Just listening to the news and Scomo was on talking about extending the use of the Indue card to the Northern Territory and Cape York Peninsula, saying the card is working, people are finding work

    Where’s his proof?
    ————————————–
    More importantly how can the Government link the two because people can already (in Victoria at least) have their money managed but having ones money managed doesn’t make that person employable.

  43. Nicholas says:
    Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 6:19 pm

    As long as dysfunction in reformist opinion persists, the Liberals will be favoured to win. The splitters keep the Reactionaries in power.

  45. Player One says:
    Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 7:28 pm

    The Coalition didn’t expect to win the last election, and thus had no real policy agenda ready to implement. Nor do they really care enough to develop any. Given Labor’s disarray, they are probably thinking they might win again next time without them as well. And they are probably correct.

    Labor are not in ‘disarray’. But they have many enemies. Contra-Labor voices attract 2/3 primary votes. Labor will have to rebuild its plurality and to do so has to defeat all the various Liberals and their many clones and surrogates. This process is beginning to take form.

  47. The era of Labor-Green conflation has to end. The Greens are inimically hostile to Labor. By making this clear to voters Labor will be able to reclaim its lost plurality. It will take time. But there is no alternative.

  48. briefly @ #1045 Saturday, September 7th, 2019 – 8:14 pm

    Labor are not in ‘disarray’. But they have many enemies. Contra-Labor voices attract 2/3 primary votes. Labor will have to rebuild its plurality and to do so has to defeat all the various Liberals and their many clones and surrogates. This process is beginning to take form.

    You see ‘enemies’ where others see ‘disarray’.

    Now, perhaps both are true. But it is undeniable that it would help if Labor had coherent policies.

  49. For those who the article linked in Dawn Patrol:

    “It’s been conventional wisdom in Labor since losing the Tampa election that every time asylum boats hit the headlines, the Coalition prospers. But rather than shrink away from the conversation, the opposition has opened a political contest.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/07/labor-in-uncharted-waters-on-boats-as-rightwing-media-scrambles-to-mock-and-ridicule-keneally

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