2024 Site Review

Bring Back Universal Analytics Again!

As in my 2023 review, I again open this annual site review by expressing my disgust at Google stuffing with the continuity of my previous site stats by replacing Universal Analytics with GA4, which is not only apparently worse and different but also very hard for me to understand.   Anyway, again, on with the show as best I can ...

The dotted top line of the graph below shows activity in 2024 in the form of user numbers per week.  There is a big spike on the left caused by the Tasmanian election buildup and post-count, and a substantial spike on the right for the overlapping ACT and Queensland elections.  Other spikes correspond to the Tasmanian Legislative Council counts in May and the NT election in late August.  

Site engagement as measured in total events was up 84% on 2023, making 2024 as best I can determine the second-biggest year for the site after 2022.  That said, the new Analytics version seems to show high levels of site activity relative to activity on specific posts when compared to the old one, so I am not sure that is reliable.

In 2024 I released 79 articles, up 13 on 2023.  This included 27 articles about the snap Tasmanian election. There were also six articles about the Queensland election, five for the 2024 Tasmanian Legislative Council election and four federal poll roundups.  

Invisible cities

I usually list all the titles of stuff I haven't got around to finishing here as teasers to what might have been.  2024 was a pretty productive year in terms of finishing pieces I started but the following have not yet made it out of the nest:

Why I'm Sceptical About The Push For Truth In Political Advertising Laws (again, maybe this year ...)
Field Guide To Opinion Pollsters: 47th Parliament Edition
New About Page (again!)
No Whinging Candidates Policy!
Lambieda: The Forbidden Dance
Councillor Elliot Is Suspended And We're Not Allowed To Know Why

(Some content from the last two was incorporated into other pieces)

The Leaderboard

Because neither the Users stat nor the Views stat capture what I want in terms of an article's level of attention, I've come up with a compound stat that approximates Unique Views for most articles, this being Users + (Views/4).  On this basis the following were the ten most visited articles this year, a list greatly dominated by the Tasmanian state election:

1. 2024 Tasmanian State Election Guide Main Page 

My usual main guide and hub link page for a Tasmanian state election; attracted fewer views as recorded by GA4 than the Braddon postcount but significantly more distinct viewers.  On my conversion formula above, comes in tenth in site history on a leaderboard dominated by 2022 federal election articles.

2.  Tasmania Embraces Chaos: 2024 Election Tallyboard And Summary

This article followed the initially uncertain aftermath of the 2024 Tasmanian election including Labor's decision-making about whether or not to pursue minority government (they didn't.) Also acted as a summary page for the five electorates.

3. 2024 Tasmanian Postcount: Braddon

A cracking and unprecedented Hare-Clark postcount race with independent fisherman Craig Garland, after initially seeming fairly unlikely to do so, overhauling the Greens on minor party/candidate primaries and leakage then beating the Liberals on Green preferences.  There was also a very close race between two Liberals over what turned out in the end to be nothing.  

4. 2024 Tasmanian Postcount: Franklin

The Franklin postcount attracted interest mainly because of a possibility that the Greens' Jade Darko (who outperformed the Greens' endorsed #2 candidate Gideon Cordover) could beat one of the Liberal contingent of Jacquie Petrusma, Nic Street and Eric Abetz.  (In the end the even spread within the Liberal ticket helped the Liberals ward off this possibility, and the Greens were plagued by leakage).  There was also an intra-party race on the Labor side, won by new MP Meg Brown.

5. 2024 Tasmanian Postcount: Lyons

The Lyons postcount featured a Labor vs JLN race for a seat, in which JLN became clear favourites after leakage from Labor leader Rebecca White's surplus.  Interest then diverted to a close within-ticket JLN race between Andrew Jenner and Troy Pfitzner, won by Jenner.  

6. 2024 Tasmanian State Election Guide: Clark

Guide page for my home seat of Clark, with a massive 35 candidates and some prominent independent campaigns; also covered the Clark-specific University of Tasmania move issue.

7. 2024 Tasmanian Postcount: Clark

The postcount race for Clark saw the Greens win a historic second seat for Helen Burnet, quite easily holding off Labor and independent Sue Hickey.  There was also a within-ticket Liberal battle where Madeleine Ogilvie maintained and slightly extended her lead over Marcus Vermey.

8. How To Best Use Your Vote In The 2024 Tasmanian Election

Voting advice resource page for the state election.

9. Dunkley By-Election Live

A solid result for federal Labor early in the year, holding Dunkley with a minor swing against after the death of incumbent Peta Murphy.  

10. Queensland 2024 Postcount

Not that many seats were in doubt in the Queensland election postcount but there were quite a few thrills and spills including exclusion order issues in Mulgrave and South Brisbane (the latter the first ever Greens loss of an Australian state, federal or territory single-member seat won at a previous general election), a very close hold for Labor in Aspley and postcount corrections fishing Labor out of the slop in Pine Rivers. Also the 1000th post on this site!

Other stats

The ten biggest days of the year (in terms of "session starts") were mostly Tasmanian-election related: Mar 24, Mar 23, April 4, April 5, Mar 25, Mar 22, April 3, Mar 2 (Dunkley), Oct 26 (Queensland) and April 2.

The most visited pages published before this year were Australian Polling Denial and Disinformation Register, 2PP Federal Polling Aggregate Relaunched, the Tasmanian stadium polling page, the ancient bio page and Not Again: Oppositions That Went Backwards Twice In A Row.

The most clicked tags were Tasmania 2024, Tasmania, Prosser, pseph, Hare-Clark, Legislative Council, debunkings, ACT, EMRS and Not-A-Poll.  I'm gradually decommissioning the "pseph" tag by removing it from older articles and many of the hits for it here were probably mine from that process.

I've switched to "engaged sessions" for overseas visits and on this basis the most visiting countries were Australia, UK, USA, NZ, Canada, Indonesia, France (+3), Germany (+1), Netherlands (-2), and Singapore (-2).  

141 "Google countries" visited in 2024 and at least 186 have now visited in all.  Apparently new customers in 2024 were British Virgin Islands, Chad, Liechtenstein and Palau, though some of those might have visited before then dropped off the old scoreboard.  With Chad now ticking the box with a solitary visit, the most populous countries that have never visited are now Niger, North Korea and Burundi.  

The ten most visiting cities were Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Canberra (+2), Adelaide, Perth (-2), Central Coast, Rockhampton (new) and Cairns (new).  

The top hit sources were: Twitter, Google, Poll Bludger, Facebook (+2), Reddit (+3), Bing (+1), Threads (new), The Conversation (-3), DuckDuckGo (re-entry) and BlueSky (new); I suspect many Bluesky hits don't get counted as such.  Ignoring search engines the next three were Crikey, Inside Story and Tally Room.  Wikipedia dropped off the list from fourth (my Voice aggregation articles were prominent links there last year).

Orders of the year

It's a federal election year so that will be a big one sometime in the first year of the term, but that's not all.  There is also a WA state election slated for March (it might get moved a little bit), including the first post-reform election for the WA Legislative Council, which will be fascinating.  I may not be able to do live coverage for WA because of a clash, but will be following the postcount.  Also, Tasmanian Legislative Council elections are up in May for Montgomery, Nelson and Pembroke.  Nelson, held by left-wing independent Meg Webb, is one the Liberals badly want to recapture for the conservative side and that's going to be a big one.   Montgomery sees the Liberals' Leonie Hiscutt retiring and endorsing her son (an independent) but the Liberals would like to keep it.  Pembroke is Labor's Luke Edmunds' first defence and he has a big margin.  

There are at least two significant Victorian by-elections coming up in Prahran and Werribee; I intend to cover both of these live and probably with a joint prospects page.  No-one would be greatly shocked if there were more in the wake of the Victorian Liberals' leadership carnage late this year.  The back end of 2025 could be quiet - or not.  (One can never be sure the current Tasmanian Government will last the year, for example.)  But all the elections in 2025 are insignificant compared to the real question of the year: will this be the year Victoria finally gets rid of Group Ticket Voting?  

In terms of federal election night 2025 sadly I've had to give up working for the Mercury   A detailed call for expressions of interest in my federal election night professional services will be posted around the end of January if nothing else happens in that regard before then.  

Twitter Vs Bluesky And The Psephosphere

Last year's introduction will do just as well for this one.  It's an almost annual tradition on this site to release something every Christmas Day.  Click the Xmas tag for previous random examples.  Why do I do this?  Partly it's a present for those who like Christmas, which in a very low-key non-religious fashion includes your host, but it's also a present for those who don't want to deal with this particular Christmas or even generally cannot stand Christmas and just wish it was a normal day when normal things happened.  And what could be more normal than niche meta-psephology?  Therefore, the campaign against compulsory Christmasing brings you ... whatever this is.  

As the owner of X, which I still call Twitter, continues to run it into the ground both by making almost invariably bad changes to the website and by generally being himself, interest in alternative microblogging websites has grown.  In June 2023, with Twitter appearing in some danger of permanent technical collapse, I signed up accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads to cater for those fleeing the mothership, and as an insurance in case Twitter died or downgraded its features to a point where I wanted to leave it.  Microblogging sites are very important to my work, both as a place to obtain news about electoral matters but also as a place to make people aware of newly released posts on here (given how irregularly I post them.)

Until recently my activity on Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads has been mostly a secondary service with links to articles on this site posted; sometimes I will crosspost a debunking of some particularly bad poll-shaped object, and usually I will reply to questions when I can.  However this changed in the wake of the 2024 US election, when there was a mass exodus of Twitter users to BlueSky as a result of Elon Musk's active support for the return of Donald Trump.  Over the coming weeks my total Twitter following dropped from about 16900 to 16400 as some of the refugees deleted their Twitter accounts.  At the same time my Bluesky following rose within a week from around 950 to over 2000, even though I was not initially posting that much there, and it has now reached nearly 4000.  Clearly plenty of account holders have become active on Bluesky without deleting Twitter, though some may have stopped posting actively on the latter.

2024 Federal Polling Year In Review

 2PP Aggregate Average For 2024: 50.9 To Labor (-3.9)
Labor lost aggregate lead late in the year

It's the time of the year when most busy pollsters take a few weeks off and I bring out an annual feature, a review of the year in federal polling.  Click here for last year's edition and for articles back to 2014 click on the "annual poll review" tab at the bottom of this one.  As usual if any late polls come out I will edit this article to update the relevant numbers.

2024 was another strong year in results terms for the Australian polling industry.  Pollsters came out in good numbers for the early 2024 Tasmanian election and did pretty well in a very hard to poll election, although the lobby group(s) that commissioned two Freshwater polls contemptibly failed to ensure the release of definitive results of either, leaving poll-watchers to play jigsaw puzzles with incomplete media reports. Polling for the Queensland election was mostly excellent though no one pollster nailed the result, and a mini-cluster of close-ish polls at the end led to some misreads of what in the end was not a close election.   Despite this there are storm clouds about in federal polling in the form of inadequate transparency from several pollsters and a somewhat suspicious level of clustering of results, especially at a stage in the cycle where that doesn't usually happen.  (More on the latter later).  US polling this year wasn't as bad as 2020, but didn't quite get the real story in part because of the latter issue.

Media Fail Again Over MRP Reporting

Redbridge/Accent MRP model projects Coalition would be likely to have the most seats if the federal election was held now.  

It does not say Coalition would be likely to have a majority.

It does not predict the result of the election.

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I thought an article was in order to unpack some of what is going on with the recent Redbridge/Accent MRP model and the woeful reporting of it by pretty much every outlet that has so far mentioned it.

MRP models (stands for Multilevel Regression with Poststratification) are not the easiest to explain to lay readers at the best of times, but what we have seen from several media sources reporting on this one goes beyond understandable confusion and into the realms of reckless innumerate false reporting.

What a MRP model does is to build a picture of how certain types of seats are likely to vote based on small samples of all 150 electorates.  Although each seat's sample is uselessly tiny by itself, by assuming that seats that resemble each other in ways that affect voting intention will vote similarly, one can smooth out a lot of the rough edges in the sampling, and samples of a few dozen voters per electorate can build a model that's about as good on a seat-by-seat basis as if those samples were actually a few hundred.  That still isn't very good on a seat-by-seat basis, but on a nationwide basis, the model could capture some general trends about the kinds of seats where each party is likely to be doing well or badly, and about how a party might be going in converting vote share to expected seats.