Miscellany: federal election guide, Morgan poll, Australia Day polling (open thread)

The Poll Bludger’s long-awaited federal election guide is now in action. It’s outwardly similar to this site’s past such guides but, in very real if not immediately apparent ways, better. A beginner’s guide:

• There is a page for each of the 150 lower house electorates, featuring overviews of their history and demographic profiles, candidate lists that are as up-to-date as I can make it (an ongoing task) with write-ups for those deemed competitive, an interactive map display with booth results from the 2022 election (which opens if you click the “activate” button at the bottom of the post, chart and tabular table of the 2022 results, historical charts showing party votes going back to 2001, and a number of charts recording the electorate’s demographic indicators. The historical vote charts now include primary as well as two-party preferred, which took some doing. One of the ways you can get all this is through a map-based landing page which also contains what could loosely be described as a pendulum.

• Margins and party vote shares are based on my own determinations where redistributions have been held, namely New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and will thus differ from those of the ABC and the AEC. To follow on from this rather arcane earlier post discussing the various approaches taken by practitioners of electoral science in estimating support for independent members in areas where they weren’t on the ballot paper last time, some further explanation is warranted for the margins shown in five seats where independents made the final counts in 2022 and where the boundaries have changed: Fowler, Wentworth, Goldstein, Kooyong and Wannon. I have implemented a new method of estimating latent independent support to add to those described in the earlier post (by the AEC, Antony Green, Ben Raue, and me on my first go), in which statistical models have been developed to predict teal vote share based on the Indigenous Voice yes vote and various demographic variables. We seem to be in fairly close accord in most cases, but are all over the shop with Wentworth (UPDATE: Which turns out to be a tabulation error on my parts, which I’ve now corrected).

• There is also Senate guide featuring an overview page and individual pages for the six states and two territories, along similar lines to the aforementioned lower house seat pages.

• An overview page reviews the 2022 result, explains a few of the basics, considers where the election might be won, lost or fought to a draw, and has chart and table displays of results from last time and election past.

• The BludgerTrack poll aggregate now has a home under the roof of the federal election guide.

This seems to amount to around 80,000 words on top of all the coding and data aggregation that was required, and much of it constitutes preliminary work for the live results that will feature on this site on election night and beyond, which I humbly submit will put all its rivals in the shade. To this point, all I have to show for all this is satisfaction with a job well done: if you think something more is deserved, donations are gratefully received through the “become a supporter” button at the top of the site and at the bottom of each post.

While we’re here, some polling loose ends:

• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has the Coalition with an unchanged 52-48 lead on respondent-allocated preferences, but in from 52-48 to 51-49 based on 2022 election preference flows. The primary votes are Labor 29.5% (up one), Coalition 40.5% (down one-and-a-half), Greens 11.5% (down one-and-a-half) and One Nation 6% (up two). The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1567.

• Further results from last week’s Resolve Strategic poll show 61% support for keeping January 26 as the date for Australia Day, substantially up from 47% when the same question was asked two years ago, with opposition down from 39% to 24%. There remains a marked generational effect, with respective numbers of 35% and 42% for those 18-to-34 and 79% and 12% for 55-plus. Fifty-two per cent expressed support for Peter Dutton’s proposal to enshrine the date in law, with 24% opposed.

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. View all posts by William Bowe