Rolling Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: The Final Days

2PP Aggregate 51.5 to Labor (by last-election preferences) (-0.3 since last week)
51.1 with One Nation adjustment
Current seat projection approx Labor 79 Coalition 66 others 6 assuming polls accurate.

The end, it seems, is nigh.  If the (ludicrously herded) national polls are right, the Morrison government would need a huge amount of luck to survive a swing of somewhere around 1.3-2.3%, at an election at which it can afford perhaps two net seat losses.  If the polls on the whole are just modestly wrong in one direction, the Government's chances of survival improve greatly, but the other direction leads to a decisive loss.  The most likely path to survival is a Donald Trump style path - a combination of a modest national polling error and a fair amount of luck with the local breakdowns, but if it happens in this case, after everything, it will be very surreal.

Poll Roundup: Make Newspoll Preferences Great Again!

2PP Aggregate: 51.9% to Labor (last election preferences) (-0.5 since last week)
51.6% with One Nation adjustment
Labor is still winning, but at present polls imply only a modest majority (c. 80 seats) 
Betting markets don't think it's that close

I didn't put out a Poll Roundup last week because there were no major polls.  This week there is a lot more to discuss, starting with United Australia.

UAP Surge - Is It Real?  

After languishing at around 1% in those polls that included them until not long ago, Clive Palmer's United Australia Party has made major inroads in polling in the last month, helped by problems for One Nation, which is not running in every seat anyway.  At the current level, team yellow (unless you're in Tasmania where there are two team yellows) isn't threatening to win Reps seats, but it looks very competitive for the Queensland Senate at least.  That said, media are overplaying the value of the very useful Coalition preferences there, since the Coalition might not get that much over two quotas given the added competition from UAP, and only 30% or so of its voters will follow the card anyway.  The surge is being linked to Newspoll switching to including UAP as a distinct option in its results, which is being interpreted as the party being added to the readout (something which has been thought to overestimate minor party votes).

Poll Roundup: Mixed Start To Year For Struggling Government

(17/2: Ipsos update added at the bottom. Also, Not-A-Poll added in sidebar: predict the next Newspoll 2PP)

2PP Aggregate: 53.7% to Labor (last-election preferences) (-0.4 since end of polling season last year)
53.2% to Labor with One Nation adjustment
Labor would easily win election "held now"
Government is now Australia's longest continually-trailing government in polling ever

Time for another roundup of the federal polling picture in the lead-up to an election expected to be held in mid to late May.  At the end of last year the Coalition's polling had been going slowly downhill after the initial recovery from the shock caused by the messy removal of former PM Turnbull.  Early this year there were some early signs things might be improving, but a bad Essential poll this week has somewhat muddied the waters.  In this article I'll just be discussing voting intention and leadership ratings as it is long enough without covering more.

This week has been a dramatic week in parliament and we still have to see how that plays out.  However, a change to laws affecting medical treatment of people on Manus Island and Nauru is not the same thing as an incident like the Tampa, the 2002 Bali bombings and the 9/11 attacks - all of which produced substantial poll movements.  The law change may lead to a major incident (perhaps orchestrated) which could affect polling, but here is how things stand for the time being.

2016 House Of Reps Figures Finalised

I'm not sure exactly when this happened, but sometime in the last two weeks while I have been away overseas, the AEC has released the final detailed set of federal election results.  Although all House of Representatives seat results were already known, the release of final information on two-party preference flows and preference distributions is very useful for many things, including assessing the performance of polls.  Final results are here.  This article is a general roundup of various details, and soon I will be using the figures to conduct an in-depth review of polling accuracy at the election, and after that to start a new polling aggregate model.  There is quite a backlog of other articles that I want to write, so I hope I can get through as many of these as possible in the next three weeks before another round of fieldwork.

The final two-party preferred result is 50.36% to the Coalition to 49.64% to the ALP.  This represented a clear success for the last-election method of preference prediction, which would have predicted a 2PP of 50.53% for the Coalition based on the primaries actually cast.  The respondent-preferences method (on average across polls using it) expected a shift in preferencing large enough to shift the 2PP result by at least 0.6 points (ie Labor would have won the 2PP).  This continues the superior track record of last-election preferences, and I will continue to treat respondent preferences with caution. 

2016 Late Postcount And Expected Recount: Herbert

Yeah OK this is kinda closeish, this one ...

Herbert (LNP 6.2%, Qld)
Cathy O'Toole (ALP) ahead by 8 votes at end (?) of indicative 2PP count
O'Toole provisionally won recount by 35 votes.  
Following distribution of preferences O'Toole has won by 37 votes.
O'Toole will be seated and result can be challenged in court, but will retain seat until court (or by-election called by court) determines otherwise.
At least three incidents in which voters were unable to vote have been alleged.

2016 House of Reps Postcount: Vanilla Reps Seats

Expected final outcome Coalition 76 Labor 68 Others 5 Undecided 1

Herbert: Labor leading, much too close to call, recount very likely (moved to new thread)

Coalition assumed to win: Grey, Dunkley, Chisholm, Gilmore, Flynn, Forde, Capricornia
Labor assumed to win: Batman, Cowan, Hindmarsh, Melbourne Ports (see separate thread)

Note: You can now vote in the sidebar Not-A-Poll on what will be the closest seat!

Introduction

This thread deals with the standard (hence the "vanilla" in title) two-party preferred seats at the 2016 federal election, as distinct from more exotic offerings like Grey and Melbourne Ports which have their own threads.  Usually the Coalition performs slightly better on post-counting than Labor and for this reason I have (for now) not included Robertson, Petrie, Dickson or La Trobe, in all of which the Coalition leads by more than 1000 votes.  Should any of these close up I may cover them. In 2010 and 2013 Labor never won any seat in which the Coalition had more than 50.53% at the end of the ordinary votes.  However with the different mix of postal votes (see below) perhaps Labor might make such a gain somewhere.

Rolling Poll Roundup: ReachTEL vs The Rest?

2PP Aggregate: 50.3 to Coalition (ended last week at 50.6, week before 50.3)

Seat projection for this 2PP: probable Coalition majority (estimated 77-67-6)
(at time of starting this rolling roundup, aggregate was 50.7)

2PP aggregate tracking graph.  Last updated 21 June

As foreshadowed at the end of the previous session I've decided to put out a rolling poll roundup thread to cover the time from the new polls out on Friday night until at least the expected release of Essential on Tuesday.  Updates will be added at the bottom as new polls arrive.

As I write a difference between one poll, ReachTEL, and the other most recently released polls (Ipsos, Morgan and Essential) has developed.  ReachTEL had the Coalition at 50-50 2PP last week and 51-49 this week, using respondent allocated preferences, but if last election preferences are used both polls come out to about 52-48 to Coalition.  Meanwhile Ipsos, Morgan and Essential have all issued headline rates of 51:49 to Labor.  ReachTEL had the Coalition primary on 42.7 last week and 43.5 this week while Ipsos had it on 39 and Essential on 41.  We're still looking for Morgan's primary results and expect to find them somewhere between the black box of MH-370 and the sign that reads "Beware of the Leopard", but the Coalition was probably on 40 or less with them too.