2025 Federal Election Pollster Performance Review

Oh no, not again ...

On the day after the 2019 federal election I did the most media interviews I have ever done in one day, eleven.  Eight of those were entirely about the same thing: the polls being wrong.  That day and in the coming days journos from as far afield as Japan and from vague memory Switzerland wanted to know how Australia had gone into an election with Labor unanimously ahead about 51.5-48.5 and come out with the Coalition winning by the same amount. Was this part of a global pattern of polls being increasingly broken and underestimating the right?  (Answers: no and no - it was just a shocker by Australia's high standards).  

The day after the 2025 federal election it was obvious something had gone astray with polling again, and by something near the same amount, but the media reception was muted.  I think I did only one interview where the polling was even part of the report's initial focus.  The ABC did an article about the polling, but it was so quarter-arsed that it omitted four final polls, initially got the 2PPs of four others wrong, and even when "corrected" continues to this day to contain errors about what the final poll 2PPs were.  There were a few other articles that were better.

Federal Election 2022: Pollster Performance Review

In 2019 the Australian polling industry had a disaster after decades of reliability - every final poll had the wrong two-party winner, the final polls were bizarrely clustered around the same wrong result, many final polls were individually wrong by more than their claimed margins and the lack of transparency in the industry was such that it was difficult to understand just why it had happened.

Fortunately 2022 has not been a repeat.  The fallout from 2019 saw a great increase in polling transparency, especially via the formation of the Australian Polling Council (though unfortunately not all pollsters have been on board with that) and also more diversity in polling approaches.  No one poll has ended up nailing the remarkable results of this year's election, but collectively, federal polling has bounced back and done well.   This is especially so on two-party-preferred results, where a simple average of the 2PP figures released in the final polls is pretty much a bullseye. The primary vote results were a little less impressive.

Here I discuss polling in several categories.  Overall YouGov (which does Newspoll) made the most useful contributions to forecasting the result, Redbridge's performance in publicly known niche polling during the campaign was very good, and Resolve Strategic's final poll was a useful counterpoint to Newspoll.  The other major polls were so-so on the whole, and many minor pollsters were wildly inaccurate.