Category: General

Time again for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly donation drive, which is especially deserving of your generosity if the degree of effort I’ve been putting in is thought to have any bearing on the matter. Since the last instalment at the end of the last year, this site has published two giant election guides, one for next Saturday’s state election in Western Australia and the other for a federal election on a date to be determined, though it remains the press gallery consensus that it will be called shortly after the WA poll for April 12.

There were also the two Victorian state by-elections earlier this month, which provided an opportunity to iron some bugs out of the site’s famous live results feature. This has gained an extra layer of complexity through an innovative three-candidate preferred model, providing win probability calculations accommodating the increasingly common circumstance where more than two candidates are in the race. Prodigious labours are under way to prepare this for WA election night next Saturday, at which I’m very confident it will run more-or-less smoothly. If that weren’t enough, the size and frequency of blog posts has increased as the imminence of a federal election brings ever more news to relate, and BludgerTrack continues to be maintained as the internet’s favourite one-stop shop for those sensible enough to want a general idea of how the polls are heading without getting bogged down in the weeds.

If any or all of that strikes you as deserving of a contribution, these can be made through the “become a supporter” buttons at the top of the page and the bottom of each post.

Time for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly appeal for donations, for those of you with any spirit of giving left to spare after the demands of the festive season. Donations are gratefully received through the “become a supporter” buttons at the top of the site and the bottom of each blog posts.

Some particular reasons you might think reward is due for my recent efforts:

• A comprehensive Western Australian state election, with the usual charts, maps and written summaries for all 59 seats plus the upper house and a general overview, will be along very shortly – possibly even later today. UPDATE: Here it is.

• It will be followed at some point over the next month by the similar but far grander exercise for the federal election, with its 150 seat profiles and guides for all eight state and territory Senate contests.

• Somewhere in the midst of all this, I hope to relaunch the BludgerTrack poll aggregate to include separate readings for the five mainland states. UPDATE: Here it is.

• There will also be two Victorian state by-elections to deal with in the midst of all this, which will get the usual election guides along with the much-admired Poll Bludger live results features.

Time for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly appeal for donations. This one follows a month of prodigious efforts on the Queensland election, which so far at least have not attracted anything out of the ordinary on the revenue front. The election results system that eventually started working about 45 minutes into the count continues to tick over, and I’m hard at work on a more elaborate three-candidate preferred model that will make sense of the increasingly common circumstance in which the two leading candidates cannot be confidently predicted in advance. A case in point is the current situation in South Brisbane, where the Greens’ slim hopes of holding on depend on who finishes second out of Labor and the LNP. Hopefully the new system will be ready to go for a looming by-election in South Australia, and then for the big events that loom in the new year – Western Australia’s state election in March, followed by a federal election that I hope and expect will be held in May.

Time to dig deep-ish for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly appeal for contributions, which can be done through the “become a supporter” buttons at the top of the site and the bottom of each post. This follows a month in which I’ve devoted many long hours to the site, thanks to the Northern Territory election and its accompanying election guide and live results feature, without to this point having a whole lot to show for it on the donations front. Many more long hours will be put in over the coming weeks and months to bring you such delights as a comprehensive seat-by-seat guide to the October 26 Queensland state election, plus a reupholstered and better-than-ever live results facility featuring an innovative new approach to projecting three-party contests; ditto for the Australian Capital Territory election a week earlier; and an expanded BludgerTrack that will feature the return of state-level polling trends.

Time for the EOFY edition of the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly request to the site’s valued readers for contributions, which can be made through the “become a supporter” buttons that you can find at the top of the site and the bottom of each post. This also doubles as an opportunity to relate what the site has been update lately, and will be up to in the months to come.

So far as donations are concerned, this has been a particularly lean period since a helpful little flurry at the time of the Dunkley by-election at the end of April, last month especially having been something approaching an all-time low. While events such as last week’s Northern Tablelands by-election in New South Wales inevitably failed to generate much excitement, getting the live results feature up and running was no less laborious for the fact that very few were interested.

I also had to grapple simultaneously with the thankless task of stitching the site back together after a back-end meltdown caused by an errant WordPress plug-in (the one that results in numbered navigation links appearing at the top and bottom of comments threads). Further labours will be forthcoming in the months ahead to deal with the Northern Territory election on August 24, the Australian Capital Territory election on October 19, and the Queensland election on October 26.

It’s time (past time, actually) for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly (in the once every two months sense of that ambiguous term) undignified hustle for donations. After what I must confess was a pretty good month on the donations front in March, thanks to the Dunkley by-election, the month of the Cook by-election proved quite a bit less productive. So if you’re an occasional donor (and with due regard to the fact that I say this quite often), now would be an opportune time to exercise your valued generosity.

These posts are also a good opportunity to call attention to looming electoral events, starting with this Saturday’s periodic Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, which will elect three of that chamber’s 15 members. These are often sedate affairs, but this year’s round is unusually interesting: former Greens leader Cassy O’Connor will seek to win the party’s first ever seat in the chamber for the seat of Hobart, and former Labor leader Bryan Green is on the comeback trail in the seat of Prosser, where he faces competition from the Liberals.

Beyond that, we can start to look at the end of an election drought that was relieved only by the surprise early Tasmanian election on March 24, with the Northern Territory going to the polls on August 24, the Australian Capital Territory doing so on October 19, and then Queensland’s big day a week later on October 26.

Time for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly attempt to keep the donations meter ticking over at a tolerable pace, which you can help with through the “become a supporter” buttons that can be found at the top of the page and the bottom of each post. It also allows a chance to highlight the work I will be doing for your donation dollar, of which there is presently a very great deal:

• The Dunkley by-election will be held on Saturday, and this will hands-down be the best place to follow the action. All the proof you need for this can be obtained from any one of my live results pages, which will (I do believe) exclusively feature booth results, in both tabular and mapped (see at the bottom of the page from the above link) form, together with an equally exclusive running probability estimate of the final result, and less exclusive but still highly instructive swing and result projections. You can also see my guide to the by-election here.

• Another fortnight hence comes the turn of Queensland with its two state by-elections, for which see my guides to Inala and Ipswich West, and local government elections including that for Brisbane City Council, the nation’s biggest municipality with its most partisan elections, for both the lord mayoralty and the 26 council wards. My intention is also to provide a live results facility for each (which on top of anything else will prove a useful test run for the October 26 state election), although getting all that in place may be a bit a scramble.

• No sooner will that have been mopped up than we will have, one week later, the Tasmanian state election, my guide for which can be found here. I ran a live results feature for the state’s 2021 election most successfully, which as with the federal jurisdiction was the only place where booth results were published (including, to be clear, the electoral commission) – I am unsure at this stage if that will be true again.

• On the very same day there will be a by-election for the South Australian seat of Dunstan, being vacated by former Liberal Premier Steven Marshall, which will be a very interesting barometer from a state that hasn’t a single opinion poll of any significance since the election in March 2022. There is a guide to the by-election here and there will, you guessed it, be live results on the night.

Time for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly appeal for donations, on this occasion coinciding with the lean period of Christmas and New Year, when interest in politics is diminished and potential donors tend to find more pressing demands on their charitable dollar. If that tugs at your heart strings, of if you have perhaps simply enjoyed a good week at the track, donations are as ever gratefully received through the “become a supporter” buttons that can be found at the top of the page and the bottom of each post.

These posts also offer an opportunity to promote what lies on the horizon for the site, which in the coming year will include an end to an electoral drought going back to the New South Wales state election in March. The Brisbane City Council election on March 16 will get the famous Poll Bludger live results treatment, with a Queensland state election scheduled for October 26; the Australian Capital Territory goes to the polls a week earlier on October 19; a Northern Territory election will be held on August 24; and there currently looms a very interested federal by-election in Dunkley and a rather less interesting Queensland state one in Annastacia Palaszczuk’s seat of Inala, both on dates to be determined.