Poll Roundup: The Long Slow Slide Continues

2PP Aggregate (Last-Election Preferences) 50.6 to Coalition (+0.3 this year)
With One Nation Adjustment 51.1 to Coalition

If polls are accurate, either side could win election "held now", most likely well into minority

We've had quite a few pollsters out early with 2025 being an election year and the nine federal polls so far provide plenty to talk about for a roundup piece.  There have been four weekly Morgans plus one each from Newspoll, YouGov, Freshwater, Resolve and Essential.  All nine have had the Coalition ahead on their headline 2PP measure, and six have had the Coalition ahead on my estimate of respondent preferences.  Nonetheless my own estimate still has the last-election 2PP rather close.  

Voting Intention Fine Details

This section has a little more wonky detail than usual, mainly to explain the ins and outs of why my aggregate is better for Labor than the headline preferences in the current batch of polls, but also to explain why it could easily be a bit worse.  While I have Labor on 49.4 by last-election preferences, it could arguably be 49.2.  

Going The Distance: Federal Seats That Do And Don't Make It To The Final Two

Recently I had this question on the website formerly known as Twitter.  

I thought this was a very interesting question because while whether a seat comes down to the final two or not doesn't have much to do with how close the seat is, it's something we don't think about much in federal elections.  Every vote is thrown by the AEC to the final two candidates, but in some cases it doesn't reach the final two until after the seat has already been decided because a candidate has crossed 50%.  Indeed, in a rapidly reducing number of seats the contest is decided on primary votes and the preference throw is entirely academic to the result.

Contests don't get thought about in these terms so much because every vote is present in a notional final two soon after it is counted via the notional two-candidate preferred.  This gives a single indication of the margin of victory.  It obscures the nuance that a candidate who finishes on 54% of the final two-candidate preferred might have even crossed 50% before the last exclusion then done badly on the last lot of preferences, while another candidate might have needed a trickle of preferences to get over the line yet got so many preferences that they finish up with a 2CP of 68%.

Prahran and Werribee By-Elections

In a nice appertiser for the federal election year, Victoria has a couple of unusually interesting state by-elections coming up on February 8, which I intend to cover on the night.  One is especially interesting because it's a more or less stock-standard test for the theory that the a government is in trouble, the other because of its uniqueness.  This is a preview post for these by-elections where I look at some factors that might affect the results; I will add notes on polling if I see any.  

Prahran (Green vs Lib 12.0%, 3CP Green vs ALP 5.8%)
ALP not contesting
Vacancy for: resignation of Sam Hibbins (Grn/IND) following personal scandal

Prahran is a unique seat to begin with, and this by-election is even more of an oddity because of the decision of the Allan Labor government to not turn the rock over.  Labor cited the fact that they had not won the seat since 2006 and didn't need it as pretexts for not having a go.  Winning would have been challenging because the standard anti-government by-election factor would have made it hard for them to get over the Greens even with the loss of Hibbins' personal vote.  On the other hand with the government currently not polling well there could have been fear of a really bad result (such as being jumped by some indie and finishing fourth).  If Labor could have won the by-election they may well have been in a better position to hold off the Greens at the next general election, but unlikely to happen and not to be.