EMRS: Liberals Slip But Labor Again Doesn't Pick Up The Scraps

EMRS Lib 34 ALP 25 Green 17 IND 19 others 5

Seat estimate off this poll if election "held now" Lib 13 (-1) ALP 10 Green 6 (+1) IND 5 SFF 1

Highest Green primary since November 2017

Another EMRS poll is out though at this stage the online documentation seems a little sparser than the usual.  I've seen a tweet and various secondary reporting, but not yet the usual poll report. The poll is also missing the usual preferred Premier figure as a result of a "coding error".  My understanding is the error was the inclusion of Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff in at least the online component of the poll.  (EMRS used to do three-way preferred Premier up til 2014 but it tended to be misleading because of splitting of left respondents between the Labor and Green leaders, making it hard to compare to similar polls interstate).  

After pretty good numbers in the previous EMRS and the recent DemosAU this one would come as a bit of a downer for the government.  But in a movie we've seen quite a few times before, when the government takes a hit in the polls it's mostly not the Labor Opposition that mops up the slops, instead it is somebody else.  In this case it's the Greens, and I was surprised to find that the last time EMRS had the Greens on 17 or above was in November 2017.   In those days EMRS tended to overestimate the Greens at election time, something that became less apparent following significant methods changes in 2017.  The poll also has a high, though probably inflated, independent vote (we saw at the state election that 19% independent in generic polling is worth about 15 at the ballot box).  

With the splintered state of Tasmania's non-government forces at the moment we're increasingly seeing a broad green left (Greens plus greenish independents, who are most of the "independent" vote) outpolling the official Labor opposition.  

This poll also includes net likeability scores, in which Premier Rockliff has taken a tumble back to net -1 from net +18 three months ago.  Josh Willie has also dropped, from net +4 to net -4.  I don't at this stage have more detailed breakdowns.  

As a seat projection, in an election "held now" if this poll was accurate, the Greens would gain a seat from the Liberals in Braddon.  I wouldn't expect any change elsewhere as the Liberals were not far from winning in most of the remaining seats.  In Bass, the swing from the Liberals to the Greens would significantly change the exclusion order, pushing the second Green above George Razay at the point where they were excluded, but I suspect that Razay would overhaul them on preferences from fellow Independents and SF+F then go on to win anyway.  (If one allows for the Independent vote being overstated then Labor has slightly more votes than at the state election, but the Greens have significantly more, which also helps Razay if he is over them.)

What has happened here?  The changes from the last poll aren't massive, only just outside the in-theory "margin of error" and maybe the high Green vote is a blip.  But this poll does tie in with something seen in the state election campaign, that when the Macquarie Point stadium proposal dominates the news cycle, the government's polling tanked.  Whenever the government was talking about anything else, yes even TasInsure, things got better.  There might also be some sense of anticlimax that the Budget isn't any different on the debt front than its maligned predecessor, and the government did also encounter what should have been a scandal last week, but I am doubtful these were major factors.  

There's also still the possibility that EMRS's new half-online half-phone methods could have some impact on their results.  The EMRS online panel is opt-in and probably has a lot of politically engaged voters.  However the dual method was also used in their internal Liberal polling for the state election, which was accurate.  So I'm going with stadium fatigue as my primary hypothesis for this one!