Category: Federal Election 2025

The News Corp papers have a new poll RedBridge Group and Accent Research, which appears from the reporting to be a national poll, though in other respects it looks like the third wave of the marginal seat tracking poll that last reported in early March. It credits Labor with a two-party lead of 52-48, out from 51-49 in the pollster’s last result from March 13 to 24. The primary votes are Labor 33% (down one), Coalition 36% (down two) and Greens 12% (up one). The poll also finds 40% now feel the government is “focused on the right priorities” compared with 43% for the contrary view, which compares with 30% and 52% when the same question was asked in November. Thirty-eight per cent rate Peter Dutton and the Coalition as “ready for government” compared with 43% for unready, which compares with 40% and 39% in November.

Thirty-three per cent felt Labor’s “economic vision” was better for themselves compared with 28% for the Coalition; 31% felt Labor’s was better for Australia compared with 29% for the Coalition. Questions on individual policies are favourable to the Coalition to the extent of recording a net plus 47% for a 25% cut in the permanent migration program and plus 39% for fast-tracking new gas projects. Views are less favourable on reducing the public service by 41,000 at plus 5%, and less favourable still for ending public servants’ work from home arrangements, at minus 5%. The poll had an unusually long gestation period of March 8 to April 1 and a sample of 1006 (UPDATE: The report turns out to be in error – March 8 should read March 28).

A garden variety federal poll from YouGov, as distinct from its massive MRP endeavour last week, finds both major parties down on the primary vote since the last such poll a fortnight ago: Labor by one to 30% and the Coalition by two to 35%, with the Greens and One Nation steady at 13% and 7% respectively, Trumpet of Patriots up from 1% to 2%, and independents up two to 10%. Labor has recovered a 51-49 lead it lost with a return to 50-50 at the last poll, based on a respondent-allocated preferences split that makes use of the voluminous data from the MRP polling.

The poll adds to the marked downward trajectory of Peter Dutton’s recent personal ratings, his approval down four to 38% and disapproval up six to 53%. Anthony Albanese is up three to 44% and steady on 50%. There is nonetheless only a modest change on preferred prime minister, with Albanese’s lead out from 45-40 to 45-38. The poll was conducted Friday to Thursday from a sample of 1622.

Looming polls that I’m aware of include a YouGov poll that should be out early tomorrow and the latest instalment of the RedBridge Group marginal seat tracking poll to follow the next day. Before proceeding with a post covering miscellaneous bits and pieces from the federal campaign, some further recent posts for your consideration: one on the resolution of the Western Australian election count; one on state polling in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland; and a guest post from Adrian Beaumont on developments in Canada and the United States, including yesterday’s high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

• Paul Sakkal of The Age reports “senior Labor figures” in Macnamara (one of whom would seem to be former state minister and vocal Israel supporter Philip Dalidakis) are advocating “open ticket” how-to-vote cards offering no recommendation beyond the first preference, rather than favouring the Greens over the Liberals. At issue is the Greens’ stance on Israel in a seat whose 10% Jewish population ranks second in the country behind Wentworth, where Labor’s handling of the Greens is of little consequence. Ballot paper and preference flow data suggests that around 30% of Labor voters follow the how-to-vote card, and three-quarters of those who don’t put the Greens ahead of the Liberals of their own volition. With Labor accounting for roughly 30% of the vote in the seat, an open ticket would provide about 2% of a required Liberal swing of upwards of 10% if they are to defeat the Greens. That would only apply if Labor incumbent Josh Burns ran third in a seat where there was little to separate Labor, Liberal and the Greens on the primary vote in 2022. If Burns did make the final count, it would take a swing of around 12% to dislodge him he faced the Liberals, and around 6% if he faced the Greens.

• Mayo MP Rebekha Sharkie became the first cross-bencher to offer any indication as to which party she would likely support in the event of a hung parliament, saying her constituents would favour the Coalition. She based this on the complexion of the state seats corresponding with Mayo, notwithstanding that Labor won the two-party preferred count in Mayo ahead of the Liberals by 51.6% to 48.4% in 2022. Sharkie qualified this by saying she would “absolutely talk to both sides but it would ultimately depend where the numbers sit and who can form stable government”.

• Perhaps by way of pushing back against last week’s JWS Research poll in the News Corp papers showing Liberal candidate Tim Wilson with a 54-46 lead over teal incumbent Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, Climate 200 has provided The Australian with a uComms poll showing exactly the reverse. The only information provided on the primary vote in the report is that Wilson had more of it than Daniel, as indeed he did when Daniel defeated him in 2022. The poll was conducted March 18 to 25, and follows a similar poll from late February that had Daniel leading 52-48.

• Nine Newspapers has a useful feature highlighting the movements of the two party leaders, and Crikey has something similar tracking electorates that have been targeted with locally specific election promises (pork barrelling, if you will).

Some late-starting candidates of note:

• The Liberal candidate for Chris Bowen’s seat of McMahon will be Carmen Lazar, who until last September was a Labor member of Fairfield City Council. Lazar criticised the party’s failure to support a local push for an MRI machine at Fairfield Hospital at the time she stood aside from council. Paul Karp of the Financial Review further reports she was aggrieved that David Saliba won Labor preselection ahead of her for the state seat of Fairfield.

• Labor’s candidate in Forrest is Tabitha Dowding, policy adviser to state Agriculture Minister Jackie Jarvis and granddaughter of former Labor Premier Peter Dowding.

• Andrew Thaler, who has gained some notoriety as a Snowy Monaro Regional councillor, is running as an independent in Eden-Monaro.

Before we proceed with squeezing some last juice out of the post-budget polling, note that there are two other fresh posts below this one: one a guess post from Adrian Beaumont on Canada and the United States, the other a summary of recent state polling from New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.

Part of the latter is a new DemosAU poll from New South Wales encompassing federal as well as state voting intention. The federal voting intention numbers have the Coalition leading 51-49, compared with 51.4-48.6 to Labor at the 2022 election, from primary votes of Labor 30% (33.4% in 2022), Coalition 38% (36.5%), Greens 12% (10.0%) and One Nation 9% (4.9%). The poll also finds Anthony Albanese leading Peter Dutton 39-38 on preferred prime minister, and 31% holding that Australia is headed in the right direction compared with 52% for the contrary view. The poll was conducted last Thursday to Saturday from a sample of 1013.

The full results from the Essential Research poll included results on the budget, including a finding that less attention was paid to it than the last two, with 36% saying they paid a lot of attention (down four on last year and nine on the year before) and 15% that they had paid no attention (up four on last year and three on the year before). Forty-one per cent felt the budget would be good for the well off (down five on last year and unchanged on the year before) and 27% felt it would be good for those on lower incomes (down three last year and fourteen on an unusual result the year before). A question on the Trump administration’s tariffs finds 37% holding that Australia should look for new trade relationships, 29% that retaliatory tariffs should be imposed, and 35% that the priority should be to remain on good terms with the US and seek exemptions.

Now for a closer look at Newspoll’s budget responses, which maintain a consistent set of such questions that the pollster in its various incarnations has been posing after each budget since 1988, encompassing 39 budgets overall. The minus 10 rating for last week’s budget in terms of its impact on the economy was the fourth worst result yet recorded, surpassed only by three successive Hawke-Keating government budgets in 1991, 1992 and 1993 (the latter was in a league of its own at minus 42, the budget in question being remembered for its breach of Paul Keating’s “L-A-W” tax cuts promise). The minus 19 rating on impact on personal situation, by contrast, rates around the middle of the field.

The chart below records how each budget scored on the two measures. While respondents invariably score budgets more favourably on economic than personal impact (last year’s two-point differential was the closest any had yet come to breaking the mould), the trendline points to a tendency for budgets to be generally perceived either as good or bad, reflected in relatively strong or weak results for both measures. Last week’s budget is the one marked in red – its placement below the trendline indicates that, as mediocre budgets go, respondents felt this one relatively better for themselves than for the economy.

Lest anyone overestimate the electoral significance of this result, the best result of plus 48 was at the budget preceding the defeat of the Howard government in 2007. Perhaps more to the point, the minus 11 rating on the question of whether the Coalition would have done better is part of the course for a Labor budget (overall average minus 10.4%) – consistent with the fact that the Coalition generally does better on economic management polling, their budgets tend to do better on this question than Labor’s (average of minus 17.3%, the overall overage being minus 14.2%). Another reason to doubt the budget’s electoral impact is the one just noted by Essential Research – that voters were unusually disinterested on this occasion, which does not factor in to Newspoll’s calculations.

Finally, some more on YouGov’s MRP poll, which didn’t get the attention it warranted amid the Sunday polling avalanche. Even more so than the first wave in late January and early February, the second wave from March was distinctive in suggesting that Labor is actually holding up well in Victoria – so much so that the lineball Liberal-held seat of Deakin is rated “toss-up Labor”, while the two seats rated more likely than not to be Liberal gains in the first wave, Chisholm and Deakin and now rated “lean Labor”. Even with five seats in the state now back in the their column, New South Wales continues to be rated the most troublesome state for Labor, being home to all four of the seats likely to be lost.

Since the post-stratification approach leans heavily on demographic variables in estimating seat-level results, I have made an effort to identify the underlying changes in the survey that have yielded the movement from the first wave to the second, which ranges from five points towards Labor (in Bean and Canning) to three points towards the Liberals (in Watson). This has been done through a linear regression analysis that uses the change in Coalition two-party preferred from one wave to the next as the dependent variable, with predictor variables of state/territory, AEC seat classification (inner metropolitan, outer metropolitan, provincial or rural) and four census demographic variables yielded through trial and error.

The demographic variables found to be highly significant (as indicated by the three asterisks) are Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage, which is an Australian Bureau of Statistics measure of general affluence that avoids the pitfalls of income-based measures; the percentage of the population aged 55 and over; the percentage of the 18-plus population with trade certificates; and the percentage who primarily speak a Chinese language at home. The negative coefficients indicate that electorates scoring high on these measures tended to move most strongly to Labor from the first wave to the second. Conversely, the state/territory and AEC region classification variables prove not to be too illuminating. Keep in mind that what’s being measured here is change between wave one and wave two, not swing since 2022 – a potential subject for a future post.

Following on from the Sunday night polling avalanche, the two pollsters that usually report at this time: the weekly Roy Morgan and the fortnightly Essential Research. Courtesy of The Guardian, Essential Research has Labor up a point to 30%, the Coalition down one to 34% and the Greens steady on 12%, with undecided at 5%. The pollster’s 2PP+ measure has Labor poking its nose in front, up one to 48% with the Coalition steady at 47% and the remainder undecided, without fundamentally upsetting a fine balance that has prevailed in this series for nearly a year.

A semi-regular question on leadership attributes records improvements for Anthony Albanese since February, sustantially so for “out of touch with ordinary people” (down six to 57%), and marginally for decisiveness (up one to 44%) and trustworthiness (up two to 44%). Peter Dutton is up two on out-of-touch to 57%, down three on decisive to 53%, and down one on trustworthy to 41%. In defiance of broadly improving signs for the government, the regular question on national mood finds only 32% rating the country as headed in the right direction, down three on a fortnight ago, with the contrary view up four to 52%. The sample for the poll was 1100 – field work dates and other results will have to wait for the publication of the full report later today.

Roy Morgan’s weekly federal poll series maintains its recent run of strong results for Labor, who lead 53-47 on the headline respondent-allocated two-party measure and 53.5-46.5 based on 2022 election preference flows. The primary votes are Labor 32% (down half), Coalition 35% (down half), Greens 13% (up half) and One Nation 5.5% (up one-and-a-half). The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1377.

Nine Newspapers also has further results from yesterday’s Resolve Strategic poll showing 60% now believe Donald Trump’s election win has been bad for Australia, up from 40% immediately after his election in November, with only 15% rating it good, down from 29%. Numerous further questions point to a weakening of confidence in the alliance: 34% agreed that Australia should pause or withdraw from the nuclear submarines deal, with 25% disagreeing; 42% agreed Australia should rethink plans to host US nuclear submarines at Australian basis, with 24% disagreeing; 50% said Australia should avoid taking sides in a conflict between the US and China, with 18% disagreeing; 46% felt Australia should retaliate against US tariffs, with 18% disagreeing. Only 35% were clear that China (on 31%) and Russia (on 4%) posed the greater threat to Australia: 17% rated the United States the bigger threat, and 38% opted for “all equally”.

An avalanche of federal polling should start rumbling early this evening, as every significant player unloads with helpfully timed polls that would have been conducted in any cause to gauge reaction to the budget. Until then, today’s post offers some snippets of party intelligence to filter through the media, plus some candidate news of varying degrees of freshness.

• James Campbell of the Herald Sun reports Liberal sources saying polling has them “in the hunt” in the north-western Melbourne seat of Gorton, where Brendan O’Connor is taking a 10.0% Labor margin into retirement, but seemingly behind in the West Gippsland seat of Monash, where Liberal-turned-independent member Russell Broadbent “is polling well enough to retain the seat with Labor and independent preferences”.

• Linda Silmalis’s The Source column in the Daily Telegraph relates a Liberal source saying their polling “could be better” in Bradfield, where Gisele Kapterian hopes to succeed the retiring Paul Fletcher in the face of a challenge from teal independent Nicolette Boele.

• The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks round-up of Queensland political news reports data on Labor’s campaigning operation indicates it is putting its most determined efforts into Leichhardt (5179 phone calls and 1549 door-knocks last week), Blair (4533 and 1400) and Brisbane (4483 and 1406). A Labor source is quoted saying the party’s numbers have improved in Blair after early showing them to be in “real danger”, with Anthony Albanese’s intervention to protect the preselection of incumbent Shayne Neumann likely to make the difference.

Much of what follows came as news to me while I was updating the federal election guide:

• A number of former parliamentarians are making comeback attempts under new guises in the Senate. Having cycled through the United Australia Party and One Nation after his breach with the Liberal Party, former Hughes MP Craig Kelly is running for the Libertarian Party in New South Wales, at the head of a joint ticket in alliance with the vaccine-skeptic HEART party and ex-Liberal National Party Senator Gerard Rennick’s new People First party. The Legalise Cannabis candidate in Victoria is Fiona Patten, who founded the Australian Sex Party in 2009 and its successor Reason Australia in 2018, representing both in the state upper house region from 2014 to 2022. Bernie Finn, the former radio broadcaster who served on-and-off as a Liberal in state parliament from 1992 to 2022, and unsuccessfully contested the 2022 election with the Democratic Labour Party, is Family First’s lead Victorian Senate candidate. Another former Liberal parliamentarian running for Family First is Elizabeth Kikkert in the Australian Capital Territory.

• Fremantle retailer Kate Hulett, who came within 424 votes of unseating state government minister Simone McGurk in the state seat of Fremantle three weeks ago, has announced she will now run in the federal seat of Fremantle.

• Hunter will be contested for One Nation by Stuart Bonds, the mining mechanic and cattle farmer who polled 21.6% as the party’s candidate in 2019. Bonds returns to the party after a less successful run for the seat as an independent in 2022, when he polled 5.7%. The seat is also being targeted by the “prime ministerial candidate” of Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots, Suellen Wrightson.

• Queensland’s Liberal National Party eventually got around to choosing David Batt, state member for Bundaberg from 2017 to 2020, as its candidate for Hinkler, which has been left vacant since Keith Pitt’s retirement in January. The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks column reports Batt won a late February preselection ballot by a final round margin of 72-43 over over Bree Watson, chief executive of Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers and unsuccessful candidate for Bundaberg last October.

The ball is now officially rolling on a campaign for a May 3 election, with nominations to be declared in two weeks and a not-quite-two-week early voting period starting on Tuesday, April 22. The latter reflects the interruption of Easter, extending from April 18 to 21, with Anzac Day presenting a further interruption on April 25. Some attractions to make a visit to Poll Bludger part of your daily routine during the campaign period:

• I may regret saying this, but I will at least aspire to publish posts on a daily basis, which will either break news of major polls as soon as they report, or appear overnight to summarise developments of the previous day and the contents of the morning newspapers.

• The Poll Bludger election guide, which I’ve spent much of the past week bringing up to speed, offers an overview page reviewing the electoral terrain and summarising the seats to watch, and detailed interactive guides to all 150 lower house seats and eight state and territory Senate contests,

• The BludgerTrack poll aggregate tells you as much in one glance about the state of federal polling as any sensible person needs to know, and uniquely offers regularly updated trend measures at state level.

• Come the big day and the weeks to follow, the site will offer live results reporting that will wipe the floor with all comers, as an examination of its Western Australian state equivalent should readily attest. Innovative features include a model for calculating win probabilities three ways in complex contests and a new colour-coded results map feature along the lines of that recently added for the Western Australian results.

Show-don’t-tell time:

• A new poll from RedBridge Group, conducted March 13 to 24 from a sample of 2039, has Labor leading 51-49 on two-party preferred, unchanged from the previous poll of March 3 to 11. The primary votes are Labor 34% (up two), Coalition 38% (up one), Greens 11% (down one) and others 17% (down two). The Coalition continues to do better among those who profess themselves “solid” in their choice, leading 54-46 among that group. Twenty-nine per cent felt themselves able to name something the Albanese government had done that had made their lives better (electricity rebates being most cited), compared with 54% who couldn’t; 23% reported themselves more or less in favour of tariffs, with 35% more or less opposed; and 68% registered concern about Chinese naval vessels off the coast, with 24% less or not at all concerned. The addition of the voting intention numbers to BludgerTrack has lifted its reading of the Labor primary vote by a grand total of 0.1%, and left all other indicators unchanged.

• Thursday’s Herald Sun had JWS Research polling from the two teal-held seats in Melbourne, conducted “a fortnight ago” from samples of 800 each for Australian Energy Producers. The results have Zoe Daniel trailing Liberal challenger Tim Wilson 54-46 in Goldstein, compared with her 52.9-47.1 win in 2022, with Wilson on 44% of the primary vote (40.4% in 2022) to Daniel’s 24% (34.5%), Labor on 21% (a somewhat counter-intuitive improvement on their 11.0% in 2022) and the Greens on 5% (7.8% in 2022). Monique Ryan is credited with a 51-49 lead over Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer in Kooyong, likewise compared with a 52.9-47.1 win for Ryan in 2022, from primary votes of 40% for Hamer (42.7% for Josh Frydenberg at the 2022 election) and 32% for Ryan (40.3% in 2022), with Labor on 11% (6.9%) and the Greens on 9% (6.3%). Peter Dutton was credited was leads over Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister of 51-35 in Goldstein and 40-36 in Kooyong.

• The Australian National University’s Centre for Social Policy Research has results from the second wave of a series tracking changes in attitudes ahead of the election, the first having been conducted from October 14 to 25 from a sample of 3622, this latest having run to January 29 to February 12 with a sample of 3514, 2380 of whom also participated in the first wave. On this occasion there is no straightforward reading of voting intention, but it finds confidence in the federal government fell from 52.9% in its honeymoon period to 33.7% in the latest survey. Satisfaction with democracy “remains relatively stable at 66.2%”, and there has been a general decrease in sentiments associated with populism from August 2018 to January 2025, such as a drop from 67.9% to 61.3% in the share of respondents who felt “government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. Nonetheless, “life satisfaction” has been on a downward trend since pre-pandemic, which has resumed since 2023 after recovering from a slump while it was on, and the percentage reporting financial difficulty stabilised in the low thirties in 2024 after a steady ascent from late 2020.

• The Tasmanian government announced earlier this week that the periodic Legislative Council elections, which this year encompass the seats of Nelson and Pembroke, would be postponed from their usual date in the first week of May to May 24, to exclude the possibility of a clash with the federal election.

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.