Liberals would be re-elected in minority, probably gaining one seat
A surprise DemosAU Tasmanian state poll has appeared. The government will be grinning with a 17 point primary vote lead. If there is a hostile reception to the coming interim Budget then the grin might not last too long. That said, there have been some advance signs that the medicine won't be too harsh.
This poll was self-initiated (not commissioned by anyone) and taken from Oct 16-27 with a sample size of 1021. DemosAU scrubbed up pretty well in the state election, though not as well as EMRS. They did significantly underestimate the Liberal primary and, like all pollsters, overestimate Independents, but their overall read of Labor's poor prospects in particular was on the money and their individual candidate breakdowns were very handy (for more detail on that see here).
The Independent reading in this poll is noticeably lower than the c.19% readings seen before the election. It's possible the use of both 2025 state and federal election voting as weightings will have toned down any impact of an overengaged sample on the previously over-polled independent vote, but I don't think that's the main reason why independent votes get overestimated in Tasmania anyway. Rather I think some voters are looking for an independent but at state level never find the right one. If that's so, this poll might be taken as pointing to some softening in independent support. The August EMRS had found no such softening; the November EMRS will be interesting in this regard.
Off the primary votes in this poll, by uniform swing the Liberals would gain a 15th seat by recovering their third seat in Franklin at Labor's expense, reducing Labor to nine seats. If I assume the Independent vote is overestimated in this poll then George Razay would probably not retain in Bass, but if I assume it isn't then he might well hold on as his main rivals in the seat are also down on their state election result. If (shudder) another election were to be fought right now, the Liberals would on these numbers be even closer to a majority, but not quite there yet. I don't think there's much point in attempting a detailed projection of the Bass result at this very early stage of the term, especially when the seats should all be redistributed by the next state election anyway.
The other thing to look at here is the personal polling for several MHAs, some of whom don't have much of a polling history. The format of positive/neutral/negative possibly conceals a number of satisfied responses under "neutral" so to get a net plus score in this format is good going. And the Premier, alone in this list, has done exactly that. New Opposition Leader Josh Willie's ratings are a bit meh at this early stage but far from hostile, while Dean Winter cops it for the 2025 election and its aftermath. The poll also shows that some people who have negative views of the Greens (or at least the current leader but I suspect Greens generally) will nonetheless give green-ish independents a pass mark.
Jeremy Rockliff leads Josh Willie 46-34 as Preferred Premier; this is noticeably closer than EMRS's 50-24 but new leaders tend to perform poorly on preferred leader scores and Willie was very new to the job at the time of the EMRS poll.
