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.