YouGov: 52-48 to Labor (open thread)

Another poll finds strong support for the government’s stage three tax cut changes have not shifted the needle on voting intention.

YouGov’s tri-weekly federal poll shows no sign of movement one way or the other in the wake of the stage three tax cuts rearrangement, with two-party preferred unchanged at 52-48 from primary votes of Labor 32% (steady), Coalition 36% (down one), Greens 14% (up one) and One Nation 8% (up one). The poll also has a question on the tax cuts which finds a 69-31 break in favour of the changes over the tax cuts as originally proposed. Anthony Albanese’s lead on preferred premier has narrowed from 45-35 to 45-38 and his net approval rating is out from minus 13 to minus 16, with Peter Dutton in slightly from minus nine to minus eight. The poll was conducted Friday to Wednesday from a sample of 1502.

Some notable electoral happenings at state level:

• There is the possibility of an early election in Tasmania as Premier Jeremy Rockliff pursues a demand that John Tucker and Lara Alexander, Liberal-turned-independent members who hold the balance of power in the lower house, agree not to vote for non-government amendments and motions. Further clarity may be provided after a meeting between the three at 1:30pm today.

• March 23 has been confirmed as the date for the South Australian state by-election in Dunstan, the highly marginal seat being vacated with the resignation on Tuesday of former Premier Steven Marshall.

• I also have by-election guides up for the Queensland state seats of Inala and Ipswich West, which will go to the polls concurrently with the local government elections on March 16.

Weekend miscellany: WA Liberal preselections, Queensland and SA by-elections (open thread)

A comeback lined up for a former WA Liberal Senator, plus candidates in place for state by-elections in Queensland and SA.

The biggest electoral news of the week was probably the annual release of electoral donations disclosures, which has been widely covered elsewhere. From the more narrow concerns of this site, there is the following:

• Ben Small, who served in the Senate from November 2020 to June 2022, has emerged as the only nominee for Liberal preselection in the regional Western Australian seat of Forrest. The seat will be vacated at the next election with the retirement of Nola Marino, who has held it safely for the Liberals since 2007. The West Australian also reports Mark Wales, an SAS veteran, Survivor winner and former McKinsey consultant, plans to nominate for Tangney, a normally comfortable Liberal seat that fell to Labor in 2022. Others known to be interested are Canning mayor Patrick Hall and IT consultant Harold Ong.

• The Liberal National Party has chosen its candidates for the looming Queensland state by-elections for the safe Labor seats of Inala and Ipswich West, respectively being vacated by Annastacia Palaszczuk and Jim Madden: Trang Yen, a 28-year-old public servant in the Department of State Development, and Darren Zanow, president of the Ipswich Show Society. The by-elections will be held concurrently with local government elections on March 16.

• With former South Australian Premier Steven Marshall saying he will formally resign from parliament “in the coming months”, the Liberals have preselected lawyer and former ministerial adviser Anna Finizio for the looming by-election for his seat of Dunstan, which once had the more instructive name of Norwood. Labor is again running with its candidate from March 2023, Cressida O’Hanlon, a family dispute resolution practitioner.

South Australian election minus two-and-a-bit years

An overdue round-up of state electoral developments in South Australia, most of them involving the internal affairs of the Liberal Party.

Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government in South Australia is approaching the mid-point of the four-year term it won in March 2022, and is yet to be tested by an opinion poll. While the government is struggling to deliver on its signature election promise of reducing ambulance ramping, it has otherwise kept out of trouble and presumably remains in the ascendant. Greater clarity about the next election must await a redistribution process that can be expected to begin shortly with a call for submissions.

This site’s last post about South Australian affairs came in July 2022 when Jack Beatty succeeded Vickie Chapman in the by-election for Bragg, where the safe Liberal margin was further whittled back by 2.5% following an 8.8% swing to Labor at the election. Defeated Liberal premier Steven Marshall remains in his marginal seat of Dunstan, but his low-key parliamentary activity and appointment to board and director positions are increasingly attracting comment. Paul Starick of The Advertiser suggests Marshall has “waited to trigger a by-election until the Liberals have a chance of victory”, and that the moment might soon arrive. Positioned to succeed him in Dunstan is Anna Finizio, former solicitor, state government media adviser, public policy and economics manager at PwC and federal candidate for Hindmarsh.

David Speirs has been undisturbed in the Liberal leadership since succeeding Marshall after the election, apart from occasional suggestions he should watch out for Vincent Tarzia and, increasingly, Ashton Hurn (whose prospects were said by The Advertiser’s Paul Starick to have suffered from the party’s growing conservative ascendancy, on which more below). There is also a mounting expectation that former federal Boothby MP Nicolle Flint will seek to recover the rural seat of MacKillop from party renegade Nick McBride at the next election, ultimately in pursuit of leadership ambitions.

The Liberal Party’s conservative turn has been accomplished through a reported surge of 1000 new members, accounting for nearly 20% of the total. Much of this has been attributed to Trump-echoing conservative Senator Alex Antic, who boasts that “the days of the Liberal Party in South Australia being controlled by 25-year-old ABC-watching, Guardian-reading political staffers are over”. David Penberthy of The Australian further notes the moderate establishment that dominated the Marshall government alienated conservatives through abortion and euthanasia reforms, business through land tax reforms, and libertarians through its management of the pandemic.

The following changes in parliament have occurred since the Bragg by-election, only the first involving the lower house:

• MacKillop MP Nick McBride quit the Liberal Party in July, putting the lower house numbers at Labor 27, Liberal 15 and independents five. McBride said he believed his country seat would be better served by an independent, but also complained of “dark forces” who had moved the party from the “broad church” of John Howard and Bob Menzies. The move notably came a fortnight after local party positions were usurped by husband-and-wife Pentecostal pastors Matthew and Janine Neumann. There have been occasional suggestions McBride might form a breakaway rural conservative party with Mount Gambier independent Troy Bell.

• SA-Best MLC Frank Pangallo quit the party on December 1 to sit as an independent, saying he and his sole colleague, Connie Bonaros, “no longer share our once-aligned ideologies”. Paul Starick of The Advertiser reported the two had fallen out after Bonaros threw her support behind government legislation for the merger of University of Adelaide and UniSA, which Pangallo wanted more time to consider in detail. The SA-Best seats are a product of staggered terms and the peak of the Nick Xenophon wave in 2018, which crashed in 2022.

• Labor MLC Irene Pnevmatikos retired in October due to ill health and was succeeded by Mira El Dannawi, assistant director of Modbury Community Children’s Centre. David Simmons of InDaily reports El Dannawi was chosen by Labor’s executive after winning decisive backing from Pnevmatikos’s Left faction, becoming the first Muslim to serve in state parliament.

• Former Health Minister Stephen Wade retired from the Legislative Council in January, with Ben Hood chosen by the Liberal Party to complete the three years of his term. Hood is a former Mount Gambier councillor and unsuccessful candidate for the state seat of Mount Gambier, and the brother of Lucy Hood, the Labor member for Adelaide. He reportedly pursued preselection despite opposition from party leader and fellow conservative David Speirs, who wished for him to continue pursuing independent Troy Bell in Mount Gambier. Hood won 119 votes in the ballot of the party’s state council ahead of 87 for moderate-aligned Leah Grantham, state party vice-president and daughter of former Legislative Council President John Dawkins. An early contender was Hannah March, moderate-aligned former prosecutor and chief-of-staff to Defence Minister Christopher Pyne, but she withdrew amid a bid to expel her from the party and a defamation concerns notice from Senator Alex Antic, who accused her of “bullying”.

Bragg by-election live

Live coverage of the count for South Australia’s Bragg by-election.

Click here for full Bragg by-election results updated live.

Monday

4.50pm. A large batch of 4356 formal declaration votes just got unloaded into the count, and it’s caused my Liberal win probability to go from a shade under 95% to 100%. As compared with the total declaration votes from March, these have actually recorded a 0.6% swing to the Liberals. However, that might well be because these are largely or entirely postals rather than pre-polls, and that the declaration vote swing will move around quite substantially as different types of vote are added to the count.

End of Saturday

Liberal candidate Jack Batty ends the night with a lead of 6531 (50.9%) to 6289 (49.1%), which should be enough — it amounts to a 6.0% swing to Labor on the election day vote, whereas the overall margin is 8.2%. Rechecking will be conducted tomorrow, with the counting of the declaration votes — 5377 pre-polls and what will eventually be about 3500 postals — to begin on Monday. Declaration votes at the March state election favoured the Liberals by 60.1-39.9, compared with 57.0-43.0 for polling booth votes. This included absent votes, which are not a factor at a by-election, but their exclusion isn’t likely to make them any more favourable to Labor. South Australia uniquely does not report different types of declaration vote separately, one of many ways in which its electoral arrangements are badly in need of an overhaul. Another is that pre-polls are still counted as declaration rather than ordinary votes, which is why none of them could be counted this evening.

Election night

8.53pm. All booth results are now in. The swing to Labor is now up to 6.1%, but the Liberals have a raw lead of 0.9%, which will almost certainly increase on postals.

8.09pm. A sixth TCP booth result, not sure which, has nudged the raw Liberal vote up to 51.1%, a little closer to my projection.

8.03pm. All eight booths are in on the primary vote, with three more to come on two-party, which should be all we get for the evening.

7.57pm. Now the projection is behaving as it should be, but a flurry of new results has meant the Liberal scare has passed, at least so far as my projection is concerned. They have their nose in front on the raw count, and postals should increase it.

7.55pm. My projection is still stuck, but the raw TCP result has the Liberal margin down to 0.7%, where is about where it should be.

7.48pm. I believe I’ve worked out the problem, and it should fix the next time I get a results update. For the time being, whereas my projection has the Liberals ahead by 3.2%, it should have them ahead by just 0.4%.

7.45pm. There’s now a TCP result in from Burnside, and whereas I was projecting Labor to get 69% of all preferences, here they have landed 77%, such that Labor has very narrowly won the booth. Unfortunately, my projection is still working off my estimates for some reason. I’ll look into this.

7.30pm. Rose Park now in on the primary vote, making it six out of eight, with the situation otherwise unchanged. The Liberal win probability is creeping up towards 90% as the vote count increases, without the projection of a 3.2% winning margin changing.

7.24pm. Linden Park is the fifth of eight booths in on the primary vote, and it hasn’t changed my projection. Still waiting for a two-party result to give some indication of how accurate my preference estimates are.

7.14pm. Burnside and Glen Osmond primary vote results moderate my projected swing to 5.0%. This is still based on preference estimates though, which are giving the Liberals 20% from the Greens, 70% from Family First, 75% from the Liberal Democrats and 50% from an independent who I don’t know anything about. These will continue to be used until one of the booths reports at two-party preferred result.

7.06pm. Second primary booth result in from Tusmore, and it’s a bit better for the Liberals, with their primary vote down 6.8%.

7.03pm. The Wattle Park booth is in on the primary vote, and the result is big enough to make things interesting: I have the Liberals down 10.5% on the primary vote, which translates to a 7.0% swing to Labor off an 8.2% margin assuming my preference estimates are correct. The Greens are well up on the primary vote, and the other candidates are barely registering.

6pm. Polls have closed for South Australia’s Bragg by-election. Results will appear as they come in on the page linked to above, which features neat and tidy tables and charts, exclusive booth-level swings and a booth results map. There were only eight polling booths in operation today, with three from the March election that were split booths with neighbouring elections out of commission. Since these are all suburban booths that will have traded in large numbers of votes, it will probably be an hour or so before we start to see results. I also have a guide to the by-election profiling the electorate and main candidates and outlining how the by-election came about.

By-elections three

A quick run through the three state by-elections shortly to be held in Liberal and Nationals seats in Labor-run states.

There are now three state by-elections on the way, one imminent, another three weeks away, and a third on a date yet to be determined. I have election guides for the first two of these, linked two below. In turn:

Callide. A by-election will be held for this rural seat in Queensland on Saturday to replace Liberal National Party member Colin Boyce, who has now gone federal as the member for the corresponding seat of Flynn. Labor has not gone the usual path of forfeiting a seat in which it has never been competitive, at least notionally setting up a contest between LNP candidate Bryson Head and Labor’s Bronwyn Dendle. However, there seems at least as much chance that final count will be between the LNP and One Nation, whose candidate Sharon Lohse achieved as much when she ran in 2017. Lohse was also the party’s candidate in Flynn at the recent federal election. For whatever reason, the party sat it out in the seat at the 2020 state election. Also in the field are Legalise Cannabis, Katter’s Australian Party and Animal Justice – but not the Greens, who tend not to trouble the scoreboard much in this part of the world.

Bragg. This blue-ribbon Adelaide seat goes to the polls on July 2 to choose a successor to former Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman, who displeased her party by pulling the plug on her political career shortly after the March election defeat. Here too Labor is gamely taking the field in a seat it has never held, but given the Liberals’ form in comparable seats at the federal election and its all-time low margin of 8.2% after the state election, it’s easier here to see why they might think it worth a roll of the dice. The Liberals could have had particular trouble if disgruntled political staffer Chelsey Potter had followed through on her threat to don the teal independent mantle, but it seems she was persuaded not to. The by-election thus pits Liberal candidate Jack Batty, who until recently worked at the High Commission in London, against Labor’s Alice Rolls, head of policy and strategy at the Australian Pro Bono Centre. The Greens and Family First have also announced candidates; nominations close on Friday.

North West Central. One of only six seats out of the 59 in Western Australia’s lower house not held by Labor, North West Central is shortly to be vacated with the retirement of Nationals member Vince Catania. Catania began his political career with Labor as a member of the Legislative Council in 2005, transferred to the Legislative Assembly in 2008, defected to the Nationals the following year and comfortably retained it through to 2021, when he held out by 1.7% against a swing of 8.4%, one of the lowest in the state. Although anything would seem possible given the loss of Catania’s personal vote, which is of particular significance in a seat where only 8000 voters were cast at the last election, the consensus seems to be that Labor will not field a candidate as it fears a backlash over its one-vote one-value reform to the Legislative Council, expects the seat to be abolished at the next redistribution and already has more MPs than it knows what to do with. The seat could potentially develop into a contest between the Nationals and the Liberals, but the odds on the latter would presumably be rather long.

Honeymoon polling and state by-election news

The first embers of polling since the election record strong support for the new Prime Minister and his agenda.

US pollster Morning Consult, which conducts monthly international polling on world leaders’ domestic personal ratings, has found Anthony Albanese with an approval rating of 51% and a disapproval rating of 25%. Its final result for Scott Morrison was 40% approval and 54% disapproval. The poll was conducted May 23 to 31 from a sample of 3770.

Essential Research published its usual fortnightly poll this week, which had nothing to offer on voting intention or leadership ratings, although it did find that 23% rated themselves more likely to vote Coalition with Peter Dutton as leader compared with 27% less likely. Questions on attitudes to Labor policies found 70% support for increasing the minimum wage and 69% support for a federal Independent Commission Against Corruption, with only 9% opposed in each case. Fifty-two per cent felt Labor should “look for opportunities to rebuild relations” with China, with only 19% favouring a more confrontational position and 12% favouring the current set of policies. Support for the Uluru statement was found to have increased significantly since November 2017, with 53% supporting an indigenous voice to parliament in the constitution.

Some notable state news that got lost in the federal election rush:

• A by-election will be held on June 18 for the Queensland state seat of Callide after its Liberal National Party member, Colin Boyce, moved to federal politics as the Nationals member for Flynn. This is a very safe rural conservative seat, but Labor has nonetheless endorsed Bronwyn Dendle to run against Bryson Head of the LNP, a 26-year-old mining industry geologist. Also in the field are candidates of One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party, Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice.

• The by-election to replace Vickie Chapman in the safe Liberal seat of Bragg in South Australia has been set for July 2. The ABC reports four nominees for the Liberal preselection: Jack Batty, adviser to the Australian High Commissioner in London; Sandy Biar, national director of the Australian Republic Movement and public affairs officer with the army; and Melissa Jones, a law firm director; and Cara Miller, former co-owner of a radiology business.

• Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff has announced he will introduce legislation this year to increase the size of the state’s House of Assembly from 25 seats to 35, reversing a change made in 1998. The move has the support of the Liberals, Labor and the Greens.

Federal election minus 30 days

An audience of undecided voters offers a fairly even verdict following last night’s leaders debate, plus sundry other pieces of polling news and campaign detritus.

Polling and other horse race news:

• The 100 undecided voters selected to attend last night’s Sky News People’s forum included 40 who rated Anthony Albanese the winner compared with 35 for Scott Morrison, leaving 25 undecided.

• A uComms poll conducted for independent Kooyong candidate Monique Ryan credits her with a credulity-straining 59-41 lead over Liberal incumbent Josh Frydenberg. A report in the Herald-Sun relates that primary votes of 35.5% for Frydenberg, 31.8% for Ryan, 12.8% for Labor and 11.7% for the Greens, but there would also have been an undcided component. The poll was conducted last Tuesday from a sample of 847. Conversely, Greg Brown of The Australian reports the Liberals concede a more modest drop in Frydenberg’s primary vote from 47% to 44% over the past three months.

The Guardian reports a Community Engagement poll for Climate 200 in North Sydney found independent Kylea Tink, whose campaign Climate 200 is supporting, with 19.4% of the primary vote to Liberal member Trent Zimmerman’s 37.1%, with Labor on 17.3%, the Greens on 8.7%, the United Australia Party on 5.6% and others on 3.8%, with 8.2% undecided. Respondents were more likely to rank climate change and environment as their most important issue than the economy, at 27.2% and 19.7%, with trust in politics not far behind at 16.2%. The poll was conducted by phone on April 11 and 12 from a sample of 1114.

• The Age/Herald has further results on issue salience from its Resolve Strategic poll, showing cost of living the most salient issue for those under 55 and health and aged care leading for those older.

• I had a piece in Crikey yesterday on the recent history of the gender gap as recorded by opinion polls, and the threat posed to the government by the loss of support by women. Right on cue, Peter Lewis of Essential Research writes in The Guardian today that Scott Morrison’s “low standing with female voters … could well determine the outcome of this election”. It is noted that the gender breakdowns from Essential’s current poll have Morrison at 50% approval and 44% disapproval among men, but 39% approval and 51% disapproval among women. There is also a ten-point gap in its latest numbers for the Coalition primary vote.

Michelle Grattan in The Conversation relates detail on focus group research conducted in Wentworth by Landscape Research, which finds participants tended to rate the government highly on management of the economy and the pandemic, but took a dim view of Scott Morrison and favoured a leadership change to Josh Frydenberg.

Nice-looking things on other websites:

• The University of Queensland offers an attractive Election Ad Data Dashboard that tracks the various parties’ spending on advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Through this medium at least, Labor has thus far led the field with 44.5% of spending since the start of the campaign compared with 26.5% for the Coalition, 12% for the United Australia Party and 10.2% for independents, the latter being concentrated in Kooyong, North Sydney, Wentworth and Mackellar. The $15,000 spend on Josh Frydenberg’s campaign in Kooyong is around triple that of any other Liberal seat. The Financial Review quotes Glenn Kefford of the UQ political science department saying Labor’s 2019 election post-morten was “damning of the digital operation and made it clear that they needed to win the share of voice online if they were going to be successful”.

• Simon Jackman of the University of Sydney is tracking the betting markets in great detail, and translating the odds into “implied probabilities of winning” that currently have it at around 55-45 in favour of Labor. Alternatively, the poll-based Buckley’s & None forecast model rates Labor a 67.2% change for a majority with the Coalition at only 11.1%.

• In a piece for The Conversation, Poll Bludger contributor Adrian Beaumont offers a colour-coded interactive map showing where he considers the swing most likely to be on, based on various demographic considerations.

• A report in The Guardian identifying electorates targeted with the most in “election campaign promises and discretionary grants” since the start of the year had Bass leading the field, with the marginal Labor-held New South Wales seats of Gilmore, Dobell and Hunter high on the list, alongside the seemingly safe Liberal seats of Canning, Durack and Forrest in Western Australia.

Everything else:

• The Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, is standing firm against calls for her to withdraw after her social media accounts turned up considerably more radical commentary on transgender issues than suggested by the initial promotion of her as a campaigner for strict definitions of sex in women’s sport. In this she has the support of Scott Morrison, who decried “those who are seeking to cancel Katherine simply because she has a different view to them on the issue of women and girls in sport” (though Samantha Maiden of News Corp notes she has gone rather quiet of her own accord), together with many of the party’s conservatives. Those who have called for her to withdraw include North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman, New South Wales Treasurer Matt Kean and state North Shore MP Felicity Wilson. A Liberal source quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald dismissed the notion the party had been unaware of her record when it fast-tracked her for preselection last month with the support of Scott Morrison. Barring action by noon today, Deves will appear as the Liberal candidate on the ballot paper.

• An increasingly assertive Australian Electoral Commission has expressed concern about the parties’ practice of sending out postal vote applications and advised voters against making use of them, and establishing a disinformation register responding to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, a number of which are being peddled by One Nation and the United Australia Party.

• Perth’s centrality to Labor’s election hopes has been emphasised by Anthony Albanese’s announcement that the party’s national campaign launch will be held in the city on Sunday, May 1.

Also:

• David Speirs, factionally unaligned Environment Minister in the Marshall government, is the new South Australian Opposition Leader after winning 18 votes in a Liberal party room ballot ahead of moderate Josh Teague on five and conservative Nick McBride seemingly only securing his own vote. Liberal veteran Vickie Chapman has announced she will resign from parliament by the end of May, which will result in a by-election for her safe seat of Bragg.

South Australian election endgame

Some almost-concluding observations on the South Australian election, where only the upper house result remains to be determined.

Counting of votes for the South Australian state election was completed on Monday, which leaves two milestones outstanding: the full preference distributions, which Antony Green relates will be published “at some time in the next week”, and the resolution of the Legislative Council count, which ditto for “around the Anzac Day weekend”. Some summary observations:

• Labor went from 19 seats in 2018 to 27 after recovering Florey from an independent and gaining Newland, King, Adelaide, Elder, Waite, Davenport and Gibson from the Liberals. The Liberals went from 25 at the 2018 election to 16, losing the aforementioned seven seats to Labor, recovering Frome from independent Geoff Brock but losing Stuart to him, and failing to win any of the three seats whose members moved to the cross-bench mid-term, with the incumbents re-elected in Kavel and Narungga and Waite going to Labor. This leaves a cross-bench of four, up from three after the 2018 election but down from six immediately before the election.

• The last in-doubt seat late in the count was Steven Marshall’s seat of Dunstan, where he held out against a 6.9% swing by 0.5%. Contrary to the usual expectation that leaders will abandon parliament in the wake of an election defeat, InDaily reports that Marshall is publicly resolved to serve out a full term on the back bench. For what it’s worth, former Labor Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has related a suggestion that David Pisoni might not stick around in Unley.

• Antony Green relates that Labor won the two-party preferred by 54.6-45.4, entailing a swing to Labor of 6.5%. However, this is presumably an estimate, since to my knowledge there have been no Labor-versus-Liberal results published for six seats where the Electoral Commission’s notional count was between Liberals and independents.

• The Legislative Council result will clearly see the election of the top four candidates on the Labor and Liberal tickets and the lead Greens candidate, leaving the last two seats as a race between One Nation on 0.51 quotas, Labor’s fifth candidate on a surplus of 0.42 quotas, the Liberal Democrats on 0.39 quotas and Family First on 0.37 quotas. It is hard to see the One Nation candidate losing from here, which raises the question of who she is exactly – I included no biographical details of Sarah Game in my election guide since there were none to be found. What’s known is that Game is the daughter of the much higher profile figure of Jennifer Game, who will be the party’s Senate candidate for the federal election, ran in Mawson at the state election, and is active on social media. Antony Green’s assessment is that it’s within the realms of possibility that mutual preference flows between the Liberal Democrats and Family First could push whichever one survives longest ahead of Labor and into the last seat, but a fifth seat for Labor seems the more likely outcome. This would produce a chamber with nine Labor members, eight Liberals, two Greens, two from SA-Best and one from One Nation.

• The result provided the new YouGov-administered Newspoll with a third solid showing at a state election, with the election eve poll recording Labor at 41%, Liberal at 38%, the Greens at 9% and others at 13%, with two-party preferred at 54-46. This compares with final results of Labor 40.0%, Liberal 35.7%, Greens 9.1% and others 15.2%. Another YouGov poll conducted in the second last week of the campaign for The Advertiser had it at Labor 41%, Liberal 33%, Greens 11% and others 15%, with two-party preferred at 56-44. While this is obviously encouraging with respect to the pollster’s credibility ahead of the federal election, Armarium Interreta finds little evidence of a past relationship between Newspoll’s performance at federal and proximate state elections.