Resolve Strategic state breakdowns and personal ratings (open thread)

New data on federal voting intention from Western Australia and South Australia, plus personal ratings for 34 federal politicians.

Nine Newspapers yesterday had Resolve Strategic’s quarterly state breakdowns, combined from their past three monthly polls. These aren’t news with respect to the three largest states, results for which are provided with each poll. That leaves fresh results for Western Australia, which show Labor on 30% (up one on last quarter, down from 36.8% at the 2022 election), the Coalition on 37% (up two, up from 34.8%), the Greens on 12% (down four, down from 12.5%) and One Nation 5% (steady, up from 4.0%). and South Australia, which show Labor on 27% (down one on last quarter, down from 34.5% at the election), the Coalition on 34% (down two, down from 35.5%), the Greens on 12% (down two, down from 12.8%) and One Nation on 8% (up two, up from 4.8%). The combined sample for the poll was 4831, with surveying conducted between October 1 and December 8.

Also published on Sunday were familiarity and net likeability results for 34 politicians from the most recent monthly survey. These seem to have elicited rote responses for most of the lower-ranking government ministers, eight of whom scored between between 41% and 55% on name recognition and between minus one and minus five on net likeability. Coalition politicians in the same name recognition range did better, ranging from even to plus seven.

The most instructive results were for those with familiarity scores of 70% and upwards, peaking at 98% for Anthony Albanese (minus 17 on net likeability) and 95% for Peter Dutton (even). Jacinta Price was the most favoured major party politician with 71% familiarity and plus 8 net likeability, though David Pocock and a number of Liberals did only slightly less well with much lower familiarity scores. Labor’s best performer was Penny Wong with 89% familiarity and plus 2 on net likeability. The worst result for a major party politician was Barnaby Joyce with 90% familiarity and minus 22 net likeability.

Jacqui Lambie tops the list, with 80% familiarity and plus 14 net likeability. David Pocock and Zali Steggall’s results were respectively good and mediocre, but otherwise non-major party politicians did poorly, Adam Bandt, Sarah Hanson-Young, Bob Katter and Fatima Payman all landing between minus 11 and minus 17. Worst-rated of all was Lidia Thorpe, whose recent activities have succeeded to the extent of scoring her 73% familiarity, with a net rating of minus 41 presumably demonstrating one point or another.

UPDATE: Further results have been published for age broken down into three cohorts. For 18-to-34, Labor is on 33% (up two from last quarter, steady on what was presumably the pre-election Resolve Strategic poll), the Coalition 27% (up two on both counts), the Greens 23% (down four, down two). For 35-to-54, Labor is on 30% (up two and down four), the Coalition 34% (down two and up two) and the Greens 12% (steady on both counts). For 55-plus, Labor is on 25% (down two and down eight), the Coalition 50% (up three and up four) and the Greens 4% (steady and down one).

German election minus two months

Left-wing parties face a dismal result at the February 23 German elections. Also covered: South Korean and French continuing crises, and a wrap of recent elections.

Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here.

In early November, the German federal governing coalition of centre-left SPD, Greens and pro-business FDP collapsed owing to a split with the FDP. In mid-December, the government was defeated in a no-confidence vote, with new elections to be held on February 23, about seven months before they were due.

Germany uses the Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) system. Voters cast two votes: one for their local MP elected by first past the post, and one for their party. The party vote determines the number of seats each party is entitled to. After the 2021 election, there were 736 MPs owing to “overhangs”. Electoral reforms will limit the next parliament to 630 MPs.

To qualify for a proportional allocation of seats, parties must either win at least 5% of the national vote or three single-member electorates.

Polling has been dismal for the coalition parties since mid-2023, when the far-right AfD moved into second place ahead of the SPD. Current polls have the conservative CDU/CSU at about 30%, the AfD at 19%, the SPD at 16%, the Greens at 13% and the economically left but socially conservative BSW at 6%. The FDP is likely to miss the 5% threshold.

While the CDU/CSU and AfD are likely to easily win a combined majority of seats, the CDU/CSU has said it won’t govern in coalition with the AfD. But forming a government without the AfD is likely to require support from either the SPD or the Greens.

South Korean and French updates

On December 14, the South Korean parliament impeached conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol over his December 3 declaration of martial law by a 204-85 vote, just above the 200 needed for a two-thirds majority of the 300 MPs. The opposition centre-left Democrats and allies have a 192-108 majority, so 12 MPs from Yoon’s People Power Party voted for impeachment. This vote came a week after the first impeachment vote failed owing to a PPP boycott.

After the impeachment vote, Yoon was suspended and replaced as acting president by the PM, a Yoon appointee. The Constitutional Court has until June to decide. It normally has nine judges, but currently only six owing to recent retirements. If the Court upholds the impeachment, Yoon will be removed and new elections required within 60 days. On Friday the PM was impeached over failure to appoint additional judges and replaced by the finance minister as acting president.

On December 13, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed centrist François Bayrou PM after the fall of conservative Michel Barnier’s government nine days earlier. This appointment is unlikely to fix Macron’s parliamentary problems that I covered previously, which are the result of an election he called three years early. Macron can’t call a new parliamentary election until July 2025.

Iceland, Romania, Botswana and Uruguay

The 63 Icelandic MPs are elected by PR with a 5% threshold. At the November 30 election, the centre-left Social Democrats won 15 seats (up nine since 2021), ahead of the conservative Independence on 14 (down two). The Social Democrats formed government with the assistance of two smaller centrist parties. The Left-Green Movement lost all its eight seats after falling below the threshold.

I previously covered the December 1 Romanian parliamentary election. Right-wing to far-right parties made large gains at the expense of the centre-left PSD and conservative PNL, who had been in a coalition government since September 2021. These two parties formed another coalition government on December 23, but also needed the support of the Hungarian minority party UDMR.

Of the 69 Botswana MPs, 61 were elected by FPTP with the remaining appointed. At the October 30 election, the centre-left UDC won 36 seats (up 28 since 2019), the social democratic BCP 15 (up eight) and the conservative BDP four (down 34). The BDP had governed continuously since the first Botswana election in 1965.

At the November 24 Uruguayan presidential runoff election, the left-wing Broad Front’s candidate defeated the incumbent conservative National by a 52.0-48.0 margin. Both parliamentary chambers were elected by PR on October 27, held with the first round of the presidential election. The Broad Front won 16 of the 30 senators (a majority), and 48 of the 99 seats in the Chamber of Representatives, two short of a majority.

Passing the Battin

The Victorian Liberals consummate a messy leadership transition ahead of two important by-elections.

Victoria has a new Opposition Leader in Berwick MP Brad Battin, who as expected gained the leadership from Hawthorn MP John Pesutto after yesterday’s meeting of the state parliamentary Liberal Party. Pesutto stepped down after a motion to spill all leadership positions passed by 18 votes to 10, prompting a three-way contest for the leadership between Battin, Mornington MP Chris Crewther and Kew MP Jess Wilson. With Wilson excluded in the first round, Battin defeated Crewther in the second by 21 votes to 7.

Battin and Wilson each proposed leadership tickets earlier in the week with the other as deputy, with Battin further offering Wilson the position of Shadow Treasurer. But whereas Battin had solid support from conservatives, Wilson’s maneuvering against Pesutto led to a split among moderates, with Brighton MP James Newbury entering a deal in which he would take Treasury and the unaligned Sam Groth would become deputy. Groth was indeed elected deputy unopposed, replacing another moderate, Caulfield MP David Southwick.

The leadership vote was the meeting’s second order of business, the first being the readmission to the party room of upper house member Moira Deeming, whose clash with John Pesutto over her involvement in the Let Women Speak rally in March 2023 was central to his downfall. A week after the party room was deadlocked 14-all over the matter, The Age reports the motion passed “overwhelmingly”, Pesutto having dropped his opposition to the idea in a futile bid to shore up his leadership.

Two electoral tests face the new-look Liberal Party, the first being the Prahran by-election on February 8. This will pit the Liberals against the Greens in the absence of Labor in a seat the Greens won at the last three elections, which had previously been held by the Liberals. A head-to-head contest with Labor will have to wait for another by-election in the western Melbourne seat of Werribee, being vacated by outgoing Treasurer Tim Pallas, on a date to be determined.

Newspoll breakdowns: October to December (open thread)

New polling data suggests Labor has slipped among Victorians, women and low-to-middle income earners.

As well as test cricket, Boxing Day customarily brings Newspoll’s quarterly aggregated breakdowns in The Australian, this one combining 3775 responses over three polls from October 7 to December 6. The state results have it at 50-50 in New South Wales, after the Coalition led 51-49 last time, suggesting a Coalition swing of around 1.5% compared with the 2022 election; 50-50 in Victoria after Labor led 52-48 last time, a Coalition swing of around 5%; a Coalition lead of 53-47 in Queensland, in from 54-48, a Labor swing of around 1%; a Labor lead of 54-46 in Western Australia, out from 52-48 last time, a Coalition swing of around 1%; and Labor leading 53-47 in South Australia, in from 54-46 last time, a Coalition swing of around 1%. The gender gap disappears, with 50-50 results for both men and women, compared with 51-49 to the Coalition among men and 52-48 to Labor among women last time. A 54-46 lead to Labor last time in the $50,000 to $99,000 income bracket becomes 50-50 this time, while a 54-46 lead to the Coalition among those on over $150,000 reduces to 51-49.

Yuletide miscellany: more duelling pendulums, plus preselection and by-election latest (open thread)

The Australian Electoral Commission joins the redistribution wonk party with its own set of estimated margins for the looming federal election.

The Australian Electoral Commission has published its post-redistribution margins for New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, holding off for the time being on the Northern Territory as the redistribution there has not been finalised. This involves two sets of numbers: two-party preferred, which boil the issue down to Labor-versus-Coalition without regard to whether Greens or independents may have been in the mix, and two-candidate preferred, which tackles the sometimes knotty issue of estimating new margins between the parties and independents who actually made the final count at the last election.

The AEC’s report repeatedly observes that its numbers “may differ to the calculations of people external to the AEC”, by which they principally mean Antony Green but also me and Ben Raue at The Tally Room. Links to an extensive accounting of my own estimated margins were provided in an earlier post, which also offered a broad overview of the principles involved in making the calculations. I’m pleased to say my two-party margins are similar to the AEC’s: within 0.2% in 80 seats out of 100, and out by more than 0.5% only in the cases of Hume and Hasluck.

Now more than ever though, two-candidate preferred is a vexed question particularly where independents are involved, as they will not have been on the ballot paper in the parts of the electorate that have been added in the redistribution. Antony, Ben and I are all free to exercise common sense in treating the teals as a collective unit, which at least solves the problem in the cases of Warringah and Mackellar. Not only does the AEC feel it does not have the liberty to make such judgements, but Ben Raue also relates that its system is not designed to combine Labor-versus-Greens results from different electorates, which can readily be used to calculate fresh margins for Wills and Cooper — though not for Melbourne, which absorbs territory from Higgins and Macnamara, both of which had Labor-versus-Liberal two-candidate counts.

Ben Raue identifies the following electorates as ones in which mismatched two-candidate preferred counts must be combined from different parts of the electorate as redrawn by the redistributions (not counting those where the problem can be solved by falling back on two-party preferred, as can always be done where the seat is a “classic” Labor-versus-Coalition contest). These are Bradfield, Fowler, Grayndler, Mackellar, Sydney, Warringah and Wentworth in New South Wales, and Cooper, Goldstein, Kooyong, Melbourne, Nicholls, Wannon and Wills in Victoria. For reasons just explained, people external to the AEC are painlessly able to finesse the issue in Mackellar, Warringah, Bradfield, Cooper and Wills, which undoubtedly makes the non-AEC calculations more instructive in these cases. That leaves nine seats where varying degrees of creativity are required. In Labor-versus-Greens contests, this is a simple matter of estimating preference flows. But estimating support levels for independents in areas where they didn’t run last time is a very considerable challenge.

The differences in the various approaches taken are outlined at length in Antony Green’s post on the subject:

I base my estimates on a comparison of of House and Senate votes. Ben Raue uses an estimate based on the difference between two-party and two-candidate preferred results. William Bowe has not tried to adjust primary votes but rather allocates zero votes to the Independent and applies preference flows on accumulated primaries.

The chief virtue of my own method is the elegance involved in not requiring any data external to how people actually voted for the lower house of 2022, but it comes at the very substantial cost of crediting independents with very small vote shares in the newly added parts of their seats. However, the AEC’s approach is in this respect worse, as it apparently credits the independents with no votes in these areas at all (though I don’t see how that can be the case in Kooyong, where my own estimate for Monique Ryan is lower than the AEC’s). Antony Green’s and Ben Raue’s methods are of more practical value in addressing the task at hand, which is estimating how big the swing will need to be for the seat to change hands. Whether or not this is happening can be determined on election night by comparing the booths that have reported their results with the equivalent results from the previous election.

A few other bits and pieces from the last week or so:

• A second Victorian state by-election looms to go with the one to be held on February 8 in Prahran after Tim Pallas announced his resignation as Treasurer and member for Werribee, which he held in 2022 on a margin of 10.5%. The Age reports the Labor preselection front-runner is John Lister, a local teacher and Country Fire Authority volunteer.

• DemosAU has a poll on the ban on social media use for under-16s, which finds 64% supportive and only 24% opposed, but 53% expecting the law will be ineffective compared with only 34% for effective. The poll was conducted December 5 to 16 from a sample of 809.

• Keith Pitt, who has held the Bundaberg region seat of Hinkler for the Nationals since 2013, has announced he will retire at the election, taking the opportunity to call for the party to abandon net zero emissions targets and support coal-fired power. There has been no indication that I can see of who might succeed him in Hinkler.

• The Nationals have preselected Alison Penfold, senior adviser to party leader David Littleproud and former chief executive of the Australian Livestock Exporters Council, to succeed the retiring David Gillespie in the Mid North Coast New South Wales seat of Lyne. Penfold won preselection ahead of Melinda Pavey, former state member for the upper house and the corresponding lower house seat of Oxley, and Forster accountant Terry Murphy.

• Left-aligned Ashvini Ambihaipahar, St Vincent de Paul Society regional director, Georges River councillor and unsuccessful candidate for Oatley at last year’s state election, has been confirmed by Labor’s national executive as candidate for the southern Sydney seat of Barton, to be vacated at the election with the retirement of Linda Burney. One of those overlooked, former state upper house member Shaoquett Moselmane, resigned from a party position in protest, Elizabeth Pike of the St George Shire Standard reporting rumours he may run as an independent.

James O’Doherty of the Daily Telegraph reports that Warren Mundine will seek Liberal preselection for the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, to be vacated at the election with the retirement of David Fletcher and contested again by teal independent Nicolette Boele, who came within 4.2% after preferences in 2022. Mundine is a former Labor national president turned conservative who ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in Gilmore in 2022, and was the public face of the campaign against the Indigenous Voice together with Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Price.

• Slightly old news now, but it had hitherto escaped my notice that Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Labor member for the abolished Melbourne seat of Higgins, will be making do with third position on the party’s Victorian Senate ticket.

NSW state polls: Resolve Strategic and RedBridge Group

Two more New South Wales state polls crediting the Minns government with unconvincing leads on two-party preferred.

Two concluding New South Wales state polls for the year, neither exactly hot off the press:

• Nine Newspapers’ Resolve Monitor feature has been updated with the bi-monthly state poll result, which doesn’t seem to have been reported on in the pages of Sydney Morning Herald. This has the Coalition steady on 37%, Labor up one to 33%, the Greens steady on 11% and independents down one to 13%, suggesting a Labor lead of around 51-49 on two-party preferred. Chris Minns leads Mark Speakman 35-17 as preferred premier, in from 37-14. The poll combines the New South Wales components of Resolve Strategic’s last two monthly surveys, with a combined sample of 1000.

• As noted here previously, there was a RedBridge Group poll a fortnight ago that had credited Labor with a 50.5-49.5 two-party lead, from primary votes of Labor 37%, Coalition 41% and Greens 9% (down from 9.7%). The poll was also conducted November 6 to 20, from a sample of 1088.

Federal polls: Essential Research and Roy Morgan (open thread)

Little festive cheer for Labor in what may be the last two federal opinion polls of the year.

Two more pollsters get their last results in for the year, one being the fortnightly Essential Research series, which has Labor down two to 30%, the Coalition steady on 35%, the Greens up two to 13% and One Nation down two to 6%, with the undecided component steady at 5%. The pollster’s 2PP+ measure is unchanged at Coalition 48%, Labor 47% and undecided 5%. Also included are the monthly leadership ratings which have Anthony Albanese down four on approval to 39%, his worst result of the term, with disapproval up two to an equal worst 50%. Peter Dutton is up two on approval to 44% and steady on 41% disapproval. A montly question on national direction reverses an improvement last month, with a four point drop in right direction to 31% and three point increase in wrong direction to 51%. The full report features a number of further questions in that vein. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1151.

The weekly Roy Morgan series, which may prove an exception to the rule of pollsters taking a break over Christmas and New Year, gives Labor its worst result of the term with a half-point drop on the primary vote to 27.5% while the Coalition gains three to 41%, with the Greens down half to 12.5% and One Nation down one-and-a-half to 5%. The headline two-party measure is unchanged on 52-48, but Labor does uncommonly well out of its respondent-allocated preference flow: the alternative measure based on 2022 election flows, which is invariably more favourable for Labor, has the Coalition leading 51.5-48.5 after a 50-50 result last time. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1672.

Freshwater Strategy: 51-49 to Coalition (open thread)

One of the final polls for the year records no change in voting intention from a month ago.

The Financial Review reports the final monthly Freshwater Strategy poll for the year (no link as of yet) has voting intention results identical to last time, with the Coalition leading 51-49 from primary votes of Labor 30%, Coalition 40%, Greens 14% and others 16%. Anthony Albanese is at 34% approval and 51% disapproval, up one on both counts, while Peter Dutton is steady on 37% and down one to 40%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister widens from 44-43 to 46-43, but a suite of questions on the leaders’ attributes produces better results for Dutton, including a 44% to 31% lead for being a strong leader. The poll was conducted Friday to Sunday from a sample of 1051.

UPDATE: Presumably paywalled report here. The poll finds 48% expect the Coalition to win the election, 18% in majority and 29% in minority, compared with 39% for Labor, 25% in minority and 14% in majority.

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