DemosAU: Status Quo-ish Poll, But Is There An Elephant Outside The Room?

DemosAU: Liberal 35 Labor 23 Greens 15 IND 17 SF+F 4 others 6

Although poll finds Liberals down five on election, most likely result based off this poll would be no seat change from the 2025 election

The new quarterly Tasmanian state DemosAU poll is out (link to Pulse coverage), with the pollster joining EMRS in regularly canvassing Tasmanian state politics being a most welcome development.  It's my habit to write a separate article for every new Tasmanian poll that appears at least outside campaign season, but I don't have a huge amount to say about this one.  It's actually quite similar to the November EMRS with primaries of 35-23-15-17-10 compared with 34-25-17-19-5.  

The slight improvement of the Independent vote compared to the election is of no consequence given that Tasmanian polls tend to overestimate the Independent vote anyway.  The Liberals have dropped 5% on the primary vote, which on a uniform swing places Braddon in danger to the Greens (given they beat the Greens by 5.3 points there in 2025) but I would expect some of the losses to go to candidates whose preferences would help the Liberals more than the Greens.  As for the Labor primary, hmmm ... 23%, that's not good.  DemosAU does have some tendency in polls elsewhere to have major parties a bit lower than other polls, but at this stage compared to EMRS this is not apparent here.

The most likely upshot based on the vote shares and making the dubious but hard to avoid assumption of uniform swing would be the 2025 election result again: 14 Liberal 10 Labor 5 Green 5 IND and 1 SF+F, with the Greens notionally recapturing their second Clark seat from Helen Burnet.  I have pointed out that the loss of Burnet is a big problem for the Greens (especially if she runs again) but on this particular sample by uniform swing the Liberals would not be threatening their ability to win two seats anyway. Of course, this might be a seat or two out but this poll is not suggesting an election held now would dramatically reshape the parliament.

On leaderships, the poll finds Jeremy Rockliff leading Josh Willie 43-32 as preferred premier, a number that won't keep either of them from sleeping at night.  The poll also finds Jeremy Rockliff as the only one of nine MPs listed to have a positive net likeability score on +2. All of those canvassed are down slightly compared to the November poll except that Dean Winter is up ten points to a still pretty gnarly net -23 as memories of the 2025 post-election phase recede.  

A question many could be asking at this point: what about One Nation?  Although they have stated an intention to run candidates, including potentially as early as the May Legislative Council elections, One Nation are still not at this stage a registered party at state level.  They have, in fact, despite previously being briefly registered, never contested a Tasmanian state electoral contest.  The DemosAU poll presumably for that reason offered respondents the options of Liberal, Labor, Greens, Independent, Shooters Fishers and Farmers, and "Any Other Candidate".  At the least, the number of voters who are so clamouring to vote for One Nation that they will choose the nondescript option without being bothered by thoughts of "hmm, are they actually running?" clearly is not large.

It looks like we will soon get some data on potential One Nation support as now EMRS owner Brad Stansfield has today tweeted "We will be including One Nation at State level. Odd Demos didn’t."  Most likely the next EMRS quarterly poll is not far away (it will be in the field next week, covering both Tasmania state and federal), so it will be interesting to see what One Nation do or don't register.  In Queensland state polling, the presence of a conservative LNP state government seems to be largely suppressing the One Nation surge seen elsewhere.  Is it the same here because the Liberals are actually in government, or is it different because they are so moderate?  Of course, once One Nation do finally get registered here, there will be plenty of time for DemosAU to include them should they choose to do so.  

In any case, at the very least I would expect an even remotely organised (OK that's far from a given) One Nation effort to be a significant threat at any time to the government's fourth seat in Braddon.  The next target after that is the crossbench seats held by George Razay and Carlo di Falco in Bass and Lyons, and of course there is much more that might be possible if the federal malaise gets over the moat.  But all this is potentially years, a redistribution, and perhaps even misguided attempts to change the electoral system away.