Five years ago I debunked a drippy poll denial video by the supposedly left wing West Media. Now here from Topher Field (not that he deserves that link) is the nearest right-wing equivalent to West's cavalcade of cluelessness. In a video entitled "Preference Discipline is EVERYTHING" but advertised with images that say "THE POLLS ARE WRONG [AND WHY YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT]" Field, a glibertarian, sets out to show that polls that estimate One Nation vs Labor "2PPs" are underestimating One Nation. The funny thing is that there are quite strong arguments that that is true. He doesn't make them. Within the first ninety seconds, Field has already showed he is totally out of his depth.
Field Doesn't Know How Polls Work
While talking in front of tweeted results of recent Redbridge and Morgan polls, Field says that these pollsters - and not just these pollsters but all the national and state polls - are using out of date data or guesses to calculate preference flows. But in the case of One Nation vs Labor, neither of these pollsters does this. Both calculate their preference flows simply by asking respondents which party they would preference higher. This is hardly obscure information either - Morgan prominently states it uses this method in all its weekly polling reports, and reports on Accent Research's website make it very clear for Redbridge/Accent (see p. 3 on this one, where both methods have results shown for Coalition vs Labor but only respondent for One Nation vs Labor). The funny thing is that very briefly some pollsters were attempting to use 2025 House of Reps preference flows but were dissuaded from doing so after I and others pointed out that this would make the flows to One Nation too high.
Currently five federal pollsters are releasing One Nation vs Labor federal shadow-2PPs - Morgan, Redbridge/Accent, YouGov, Spectre and Fox&Hedgehog. All of them use respondent preferences. Respondent preferences are actually problematic for estimating One Nation vs Labor because close to half of Coalition voters conventionally copy how to vote cards. So if the Coalition recommends preferences to One Nation again then many of the Coalition voters who say they will preference Labor will actually end up preferencing One Nation. This is the argument Field should be making if he wants to have a go at pollsters' One Nation vs Labor figures, but he hasn't bothered to do the most basic reading on how polls are actually working so he cannot do that.
He's therefore tilting at a strawman when he claims at around 2:20 that old preference flow data can't be valid when One Nation's primary has jumped fourfold, but even then he misses his imaginary opponent. In the South Australian election despite the massive primary vote shifts, the flow of preferences involving the Coalition and One Nation was largely as expected based on modelling off the 2025 Senate election where One Nation polled a way lower vote. And the reason his claim here is wrong is that while Coalition voters who used to rank Labor above One Nation could have become more inclined to put the now more popular One Nation ahead of Labor, that can easily be cancelled out by the Coalition voters who used to rank One Nation above Labor becoming straight 1 One Nation voters. Every time a voter flips from the Coalition-ON-Labor ordering to ON-Coalition-Labor, the overall preference flow from the Coalition to One Nation vs Labor weakens. Some people are quite obsessed with the idea that this means the Coalition to One Nation flows will actually be much weaker than implied by past Senate flows - as if only moderates are still voting Liberal - but I'm extremely unconvinced of that. I think the two things roughly cancel out.
If Field had actually bothered to learn how polls actually do the One Nation vs Labor figures, he would have seen that a voter for some other party who had switched to putting One Nation above Labor without switching to voting 1 One Nation would have actually been picked up by the pollster based on the methods the pollsters are actually using. And he would have realised that the fact that pollsters get relatively weak flows to One Nation - even if they are wrong in so doing because of how to vote cards - is actually fatal to his argument about why flows should have shifted. So three minutes down, and two complete blunders by Topher.
Field Doesn't Know How Preferences Flow
From the fourth minute of the video he is going to tell us that the Secret Harbour results show that preferences are now flowing from the Liberals to One Nation in "unprecedented percentages". This is in spite of the general psephosphere reaction to this by-election having been that the preference flows to One Nation were actually somewhat weaker than we were expecting! (Something that may have been explained by many things including the Liberals having the donkey vote which flowed to Labor on a long ballot paper, overlapping federal MP Andrew Hastie's criticisms of One Nation, the Liberals picking up votes from Labor that then returned to Labor as preferences, the One Nation candidate being a former cocaine user and so on ... the reason doesn't matter, what does is that nobody has previously claimed the preference flow to One Nation from the Liberals was strong.)
He claims he'll do this (while boasting about being "nerdy" - no mate, nerds don't get their numbers wrong, this is the difference between nerds and cranks) by comparing the data from Secret Harbour to data from Farrer to show that things are quickly changing to One Nation's benefit.
After a few minutes of waffling Field claims that in Secret Harbour One Nation got about 89% of the preferences from the Liberals, Libertarians, Australian Christians and Shooters Fishers and Farmers combined. Where did he get these numbers? He's actually done this - and please remove any sharp objects from a radius of 20 metres before you read the next bit as you could well roll at least that far on the floor laughing - he's observed that One Nation went from 39.04% primary to 57.15% 2CP, a gain of 18.11 points. He's observed that those parties together got 20.31% of the vote. And he's divided one by the other!
That would work if every other parties' preferences flowed 100% to Labor. But they don't, and if Field had bothered letting even the slightest research get in the way of his theory he would have, like, looked at past elections to see what they do - just like he looked at Farrer. So in Hunter 2025 Stuart Bonds (who scraped into the top two against Labor) got 48.5% of Legalise Cannabis voter preferences and 12.6% from the Greens. But Field has set these both, as well as Animal Justice, four independents and even the fairly right wing Western Australia Party, all to a flow rate of zero!
Suppose I set the flow rate from the Greens and Legalise Cannabis at the same as Hunter and implausibly assume everyone else flowed 70-30 to Labor, then suddenly Field's 89% preference flow from the mainly Liberal right wing sources falls to 69%. Before too long we will see an actual preference flow from the Liberal exclusion point (which includes voters for other parties who put the Liberals above One Nation and Labor) and it will be nothing like 89% to One Nation.
The Problem With Poking The Bear
And oh dear. I didn't know this was coming when I drafted the above text but eight minutes in Field has mentioned me, at length! He starts by claiming that a psephologist is "an election forecaster and political pundit", which suggests he didn't do his work on that bit either - most of psephology is not forecasting, and all of it is the opposite of punditry.
He then goes on to dispute my twitter bio claim to have "no party loyalties" but becomes yet another person to misunderstand it. Amazingly it means exactly what it says: that I am not loyal to a party. It doesn't mean that I am politically neutral, or have no views against any parties, or regard all equally. If I meant to say "apolitical" I would have said it. As I noted on the recent Poll Position pod, which Topher could have watched if he was so fascinated by me or had the slight interest in not making an even further twit of himself, the point of that line is just to warn people who are followers of any party that sooner or later I am going to have a go at it. Some parties more than others of course, and currently One Nation about a dozen times a day, but you get that. So Topher, you can take your advice about how to act while claiming to be neutral and give it to someone who actually makes that claim; I don't. What I do claim is that I can have political views while also delivering neutral and accurate analysis of election results. But thanks at least Topher for publicising my views, in particular on the rampant sookery of One Nation and the problem of fake patriots!
(He also suggests I treat Crikey as a reliable source. In fact I treat all its pieces like any other media on their merits; he should see what I've said about Bernard Keane lately.)
Topher gets so fired up about his misinterpretation of three words in a microblogging bio that after a few minutes of this nonsense he declares that he has "no respect for [me] as a human being"! Oh no I am so wounded, as if I would want the respect of anyone who is unable to read. And then he declares I haven't done the work to understand myself, when he has so far showed that he has not done the work to understand: pollster preferences, the preference shift argument he is using, how preferences actually flow in elections, or what I mean by a term that actually means what it says. And that's all in the first eleven minutes! To be accused of intellectual laziness by Topher Field, well ...
Now we're on to Field's next blunder. Having blathered on about owning biases while failing to disclose that I have criticised him in the past and somehow ended up residing rent free in his head - accuses me of attempting to "control the narrative coming out of the Secret Harbour by-election" about One Nation's preference flows. For some reason he does this by highlighting a tweet where I'm pointing out that One Nation's preference flows were actually not so bad as it looked earlier in the night, which is hardly the action of someone hellbent on claiming that their preference flows were crap. Also if he actually bothered to read more of what I had said about the by-election, then far from using Secret Harbour to build a narrative of weak flow to One Nation, he would see I have repeatedly disputed attempts to generalise from it to predicting flows at other elections, and rejected calls to weaken flows in my own model because of it. So again, Topher cannot read, he doesn't do his research, and he doesn't care if he represents people he is criticising accurately.
He goes on with some pseudomathematical babble about the 49% flow of preferences to One Nation being a supposed irrelevant denominator. After several minutes of him again pretending to be a nerd with a brief break for flogging his merch, his complaint about this is that I am talking about an overall preference flow. At present it's the only flow we have. The fact is that overall flow to One Nation was somewhat lower than I would expect based on how the preferences of all the parties contesting have flowed in other contests. And it's not just me who got that either - all the sources doing on the night projections were expecting the overall flow, given who the primary votes were for, to be over 50%. In doing those models we were all already factoring in that voters for the Greens have very strong "preference discipline" to Labor. But very strong is not 100%, or even nearly 100%, and even the difference between 100-0 and 90-10 can be a big deal in these cases. As for the rest of the left, only Victorian Socialists nationally really display similar preference flows to the Greens. Animal Justice were only 66% to Labor vs Coalition at the last federal election, Legalise Cannabis only 61% (and there is a lot of overflow between their support base and One Nation's, so the figure to Labor vs One Nation is probably weaker) and so on. So Field just doesn't have a clue because, again, he hasn't done his research. He has also chucked all the very random independents in this seat and even the WA Party in with the "left".
He gets back to Farrer where he claims the flow of 38.1% of preferences at the 3CP point from the Liberals to Michelle Milthorpe ahead of David Farley is evidence of preference indiscipline on the right. But Farrer is a very local electorate and some people may have chosen the order Liberal-IND-ON based on which candidates they knew. Another factor here is that the Liberals drew top spot on the ballot and the donkey vote flowed to Milthorpe. Some Liberals may have been unconvinced that Farley was a real right winger anyway. Candidate gender could have affected preference flows especially with Farley's past comments about Julia Gillard. And so on. Eventually he admits to some of these factors in one of the video's few moments of passing sanity, as well as noting that Farrer was independent vs One Nation and not a valid baseline for a Labor vs One Nation flow. So, why did he even mention it? I should also note on Farrer that breakdowns of preference flow by party voted for exist (and show the 1 Liberal flow to Farley was only 59% while the 1 Nationals flow was 69%); there is no need to just use the Liberal 3CP flow to talk about these things.
26 minutes in he spells out what I'd already worked out - that he has assumed every single one of the preferences received by One Nation came from the right, although this assumption is patently ludicrous and shows him up as someone who should just shut up about election statistics forever.
Field then gets back to the Morgan poll. He takes the 29.5 for Labor and adds the 13.5 from Greens (with their alleged 100% preference flow) and gets 42 (it's actually 43). Then he queries where Labor gets the rest from. And here he makes a still further blunder in thinking that Others is entirely other parties (left and right). He ignores the fact that much of it is independents (or the ex-independents in Community Strong), whose preferences flow increasingly to Labor. Indeed if he was being consistent with his Secret Harbour methods he would give Labor all the independent preferences, at which point Labor are getting more like three-quarters of others and even off his (wrongly low) 11% off the right Labor would get to something around 55-45 vs One Nation anyway. Field wants to have his cake and eat it too - he wants to give Labor 8.8 points out of 11.8 for Others in Secret Harbour on a platter (a flow of at least 74.5%) but when it comes to the national polls he suddenly wants to cut Labor's flow from others down to half because he's forgotten that teals exist.
This whole video by Field is a self-parodying shambles but it has somehow had a hundred thousand views. I previously reviewed one of Field's marbles videos on here and while it had some serious flaws I think I gave it a fair go, and pointed out that Field at that time wasn't being angry and dumb about preferences and was at least trying to do the right thing by the so-called freedom movement. But his latest video is angry and dumb about everything it touches and strongly recalls the crankery of the failed 2012 US Unskewed Polls movement - and such a waste when there was actually a valid point that was begging to be made against respondent preferencing. Not one that would lift One Nation to victory at the moment, but one that could be worth, say, two points for them nationwide compared with the average of the respondent polls.
Libertarians for Fascism Unite!
One final thing I will say here. I may not have that many libertarian bones in my body these days, but I do still have a lot more than One Nation. And one thing I remember about this movement is that you're not supposed to hand it to the fash, or anything resembling fascism in any way. A week after One Nation were whinging about the PM calling them dangerous, and on the same day of Topher's latest drooling about the rise of this party who he considers to be mostly freedom's friends, Cory Bernardi ripped off Trump (again) and tweeted "We will end the transgender movement." Many within Australia's struggling libertarian movement made common cause with the alt-right and the far-right during the lockdowns. If they are to stand true to the principles they claim they need to unmake it and fast.
