Victoria Lower House 2022: Final Days Rolling Poll Roundup

2PP Polling Aggregate (not necessarily accurate) 55.0 to ALP (last-election preferences).

Aggregate of pollster-released 2PPs (ditto) 54.1 to ALP.

Labor appears overwhelmingly likely to win.

Labor majority more likely than not if past polling/results history holds up

This post will track polling for the Victorian election released in the final week of the campaign.  A section dealing with each new poll that I see will be added to the top of the post, however polls will not be added during the day on Thursday because of a field trip.  As I start there is only one poll two polls to discuss, following the common second-last-week drought in state elections, but I am sure more will be added in coming days minutes and that one poll is interesting enough to be worth putting out an article based on it alone.  

Until the release of this week's Resolve poll there had been nothing significant since my previous roundup.  There had been an odd Lonergan poll for the Victorian National Parks Association (incidentally the sponsors of the most accurate poll in 2018, a ReachTEL) but that poll with a Green vote of 19% cannot be taken seriously as a voting intention poll.  Firstly the poll did not ask voting intention questions first up but asked them "Immediately after main body questions", the main body questions covering a series of environmental issues and hence being very likely to skew the voting intention questions in favour of the Greens.  Secondly it is not clear whether the voting intention results reported are those weighted by "Age x Gender, Location" or were reported simply as sample size information.  

I have added a #pollshapedobjects section at the bottom to cover any even more useless offerings.

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.

Recent State Election Polling Does Not Skew To Labor

Advance Summary

1. A major polling failure in the 2019 Australian federal election has been attributed to unrepresentative sampling, coupled with inadequate reweighting, that produced a large skew in primary vote and 2PP estimates in Labor's favour.   

2. A recent report argues that a skew in federal 2PP polling was present throughout the period 2010-2019 and was not specific to 2019.  

3. If this was the case, and was so for the same reason, then a skew to the ALP should also be expected from the much larger sample of state-level final polls taken over the same period.

4. However, state level polls in Australia from 2010-2020 do not display any overall two-party skew to the ALP.

5. Also, while federal polling for 2010 overestimated Labor, final 2PP polling at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections was mostly very accurate.

6. While federal polls overall (not all specific polls) do have a record through recent decades of on average overestimating the Labor 2PP, this record is much inflated by a single pollster (Morgan).

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Field Guide To Opinion Pollsters: 46th Parliament Edition

It's a tradition on this site to nearly always release something on Christmas Day, but for those who are done with polls after this year's failure, I realise this gift might fall under the heading of "worst present ever".

Just before the 2013 election I posted a Field Guide to Opinion Pollsters, which has become one of the more enduringly accessed pieces on this site.  However, over time parts of its content have become dated or specific to that election, and with more and more pollsters emerging as others disappear, the thing has got too long. So now I post a new edition early in the life of each parliament, editing it through that parliament as the need arises.  Pollsters not expected to be active in the life of the current parliament will be removed, but the old edition text will remain on the previous page.  For the 2016-2019 parliament see 45th Parliament Edition.

There are a lot of polls about in Australia these days.  But how do they all work, which ones have runs on the board and do any of them deserve our trust at all? This article describes what is known about each pollster and its strengths and weaknesses and includes extensive coverage of general polling issues.

2019 Federal Election: Pollster Performance Review

Welcome (belatedly) to another of my regular pieces that I do after all the election results are finalised and, um, we can't really give this one its usual title this year.  Normally it's called "Best and Worst Pollsters" (see the comparable articles for 2013 and 2016) but this year that title isn't really appropriate.  This year was the year of the great Poll Fail, and when it came to final voting intention polls at least, they all went down together.  The story for seat polling turns out to be a little less clearcut, but not that much.

For all the complaints about "too many polls", the frequency and diversity of Australian polls had been declining at state and federal level in the four years leading up to this election.  At this election there were only five poll series conducting national polls, and of these two were conducted by the same pollster (YouGov-Galaxy conducts both Galaxy and Newspoll polls).

I usually include three categories but this time I'm not going to take tracking too seriously.  As usual the first cab off the rank is ...

Least Worst Final Poll

I usually say the final poll should be the easiest one for the less accurate pollsters to get right, because pollsters can look over each others' shoulders and consider corrections if everybody else is getting something vastly different.  Thus there have been some prior cases where polls that differed from Newspoll for some time have jumped into line with it in their final poll.  This year unfortunately it seems that some pollsters may have taken this concept a little too far - either that or multiple pollsters got to around the same 2PP coincidentally and then decided to self-herd from that point.

Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: The Polls Are Getting Closer (To Each Other)

2PP Aggregate 51.8 to Labor (2016 preferences) (-0.1 since last week)
51.4 to Labor (with One Nation preference adjustment)
Current seat projection assuming polls are accurate c. 80 Labor 65 Coalition 6 crossbench (+/- lots!)
Polls appear to be "herded" which can increase risk of error

Time for another instalment of the week in polling and seat betting, delayed slightly by an interstate trip.  As of last week the United Australia Party were going through a bit of a purple patch, polling 5% in Newspoll and above their 2013 result in a bunch of seat polls.  This hasn't lasted; all their poll results this week have been in the 3-4% range, and in three WA YouGov-Galaxy seat polls they did worse than their 2013 results (in one case much worse; the other two only very slightly.)

This week's action in the minor party primaries came from the Greens who polled 14% in Ipsos, 11 in Morgan, 12 in Essential and 9 in Newspoll.  Ipsos (especially) and Morgan have form for exaggerating the Green vote and Essential's reading of the Green vote lately has been quite volatile, but even so the party doesn't seem to be in too bad shape, with the issues mix at this election helping it (that is an understatement.) That said, the Greens have finally struck the candidate problems that have hitherto affected everybody else.

Batman: A Unique Federal By-Election

Batman (Vic): ALP vs Green 1.0%
Ged Kearney (ALP) vs Alex Bhathal (Green)
Incumbent David Feeney (ALP) resigned over eligibility issues
Outlook: No reliable data basis for predicting this seat.  

A by-election will be held for the Victorian seat of Batman in the near future after David Feeney became the first confirmed Labor casualty of the Section 44 citizenship fiasco.  Feeney threw in the towel when he was unable to find any positive evidence that he had renounced his UK citizenship circa 2007. Some Labor insiders believe the seat is now unsaveable while some are more upbeat that they may just hold it.

This could be the last time we'll be referring to the seat by the name "Batman".  There's a significant campaign to rename it after Simon Wonga, but that won't be decided until the redistribution process concludes later this year.

The heavy lifting by way of preview has already been done at Tally Room and Poll Bludger with their excellent by-election guides.  The seat's dramatically split voting pattern was laid out by Michael McCarthy in his pieces (here's the latest) on the "hipster-proof fence" (aka Tofu Curtain, Great Wall of Quinoa, Corduroy Line) around Bell Street, which divides the Green-friendlier and Labor-friendlier sides of the electorate.  Also of interest may be Kosmos Samaras' analysis of why Labor is getting trashed by the Greens in inner-city seats like the state seat of Northcote (the southern half of Batman) and (see also Tim Colebatch on this) what they can try to do about it.  A convenient step-up in attacks on the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland probably isn't it (at least, not by itself).

How Accurate Was The Same-Sex Marriage Polling?

The abrogation of responsibility and waste of resources that was the Marriage Law Postal Survey has now concluded with a Yes vote of 61.6%, based on a very high turnout of 79.5%.  Every Australian poll on same-sex marriage in the last ten years has shown more voters supporting same-sex marriage than opposed, with the exception of a single fledgling ReachTEL in 2011, so this has been seen initially as another good result for Australian polls.  In contrast, non-polling "big-data" approaches based on social media analytics failed completely, with the EqualityPulse site mostly favouring the No vote until after the polls had closed and a Griffith University study bombing embarrassingly.  (Be wary of anyone who claims their methods predicted Trump would win - most who predicted him to win did so because they wrongly expected him to win the popular vote.)

This is being taken as another strong result for Australian polling, but the reality is not so snazzy, and more consistent with experience elsewhere.  Below are all the final poll results by each pollster that I could find.  (Some pollsters conducted several polls, typically finding little variation through the survey period.) The polls vary in methods - some asked about results based on those who had voted, some asked about the votes of those who intended to vote and some just asked a basic question about support or opposition to same-sex marriage.  One (Ipsos) appears to have asked about voting intention among those certain to vote only.  In many cases, inadequate public documentation means that it is not entirely clear what the pollster did.

Field Guide To Opinion Pollsters: 45th Parliament Edition

This is an outdated guide version which has been superceded by the 46th Parliament Edition.

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Just before the 2013 election I posted a Field Guide to Opinion Pollsters, which has become one of the more enduringly accessed pieces on this site.  However, over time parts of its content have become dated or specific to that election, and with more and more pollsters emerging as others disappear, the thing has got too long.  I've decided therefore from now that I will post a new edition shortly into the life of each parliament, editing it through that parliament as the need arises.  Pollsters not expected to be active in the life of the current parliament will be removed, but the old edition text will remain on the previous page.

There are a lot of polls about in Australia these days.  But how do they all work, which ones have runs on the board and which ones can you trust the most? This article describes what is known about each pollster and its strengths and weaknesses and includes coverage of general polling issues.

The gold standard for success for an opinion pollster is seen to be that its polls at election time get the result as close to right as possible.  However, some pollsters are little-tested against actual elections, and getting a specific election right is a combination of skill and luck.  In elections where there is a swing on the last day or two of the campaign, a pollster that is actually not polling correctly may have its errors cancelled out by the swing, and hence record a lucky hit.  There is more to being a good pollster than just getting it right at election time - a good pollster should also provide useful data between elections and do so using well-designed questions that are easy to interpret.  And a pollster should also present their data in a way that makes sense and isn't misleading or confusing.

Federal Election 2016: Best And Worst Pollsters

It's been a long time coming but the recent finalisation of the 2016 House of Reps election results means it's time to present my in-depth review of how the various pollsters did.  At the 2013 election there was a widespread belief that the polls might be totally wrong, but it turned out they were accurate.  Since that election there has been a massive turnover in Australian polling methods and companies (such that only two pollsters went to this election doing the same thing as last time) and there were more reasons for concern, but the miracle has continued.  Australian national opinion polls have again proved highly accurate.  However, the picture in individual seat polling was not such a pretty story.

As usual I will present my awards in three categories.  This article is quite numbery of course, and is rated 3/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch: National Poll Drought Edition

2PP: 50.3 to Coalition (same as end of last week, +0.5 in two weeks)
Coalition would probably win election if everyone voted now, probably with small majority (seat projection 78-67-5)

The 2016 federal election is underway! Prepoll voting has already started and we're just sixteen days away from the main game.  And yet, courtesy of a long weekend and perhaps media disinterest in splashing out on polls this time around, the evidence of what is going on in nationwide voting intentions is very limited indeed.  (We do have evidence of who is paying attention though.  Check out Morgan's very believable list of the most and least engaged electorates.)

For all that trendy stuff about how we're being swamped with polls, as I write we have just one national sample that is entirely less than one week old, and that will stop being true some time tonight.  Unless the overdue Morgan finally appears (which apparently it will sometime), we may be left with the infamously trend-averse Essential as the only poll with any data less than one week old until ReachTEL and Ipsos come along on Friday night.  The non-appearance of Newspoll this week makes this the first time since 1990 that the Newspoll brand has gone this late into a campaign before switching to weekly polling.

So if federal voting intention has changed significantly in the last week, we may well not even know. It doesn't seem like it has based on seat poll results and murmers from party insiders, but it's hard to tell which of these sources of knowledge is least reliable.

Polls ... you don't know what you've got til its gone! (I dislike that song, by the way.)

Poll Roundup: The Dog Ate My Recovery

2PP Aggregate: 53.4 to ALP (+0.3 since last week)
ALP would easily win election "held now"

It's over a month now since Bronwyn Bishop resigned as Speaker, more or less ending an entitlements scandal that had provoked a polling blowout of about one and a half points against the Abbott Government.  It might have been expected (and indeed I rather did expect) that this was a blip and that once all the shouting had died down the government's polling would improve.  However this week's results show that it hasn't improved at all, and again we see bad, but not quite panic-station, results for the government continue to hang around. Ahead of the Canning by-election (which is covered on a separate rolling thread) this is not what the government wants to see.

A significant debacle for the government in the last fortnight was the Border Force press release which stated that Border Force intended to stop people more or less randomly for visa checks.  This was apparently never the actual intention but social media outcry resulted in the intended joint operation with Victoria Police having to be cancelled.  This epic stuffup can't have helped the government's latest attempts to repair its image.
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New South Wales: Final Lower House Results And Poll Accuracy

The New South Wales Legislative Assembly election is fully counted.  The Coalition government led by Mike Baird has retained office with 54 seats to 34 for the ALP led by Luke Foley, 3 for the Greens and 2 Independents.

Many basic details of the results were covered in my day-after wrap Decisive Win For Coalition. Apart from Lismore falling back over the line on declaration votes and because the preference flow to the Greens was weaker than that to Labor, no seats have changed hands in the postcount, and in the end the swing did not increase significantly in the postcount.

Vote Share, 2PP And Preference Change

The primary votes were 45.63% Coalition, 34.08% Labor, 10.29% Green and 10.00% Others (including 3.24% Christian Democrats and 2.02% No Land Tax with most of the rest for independents).  The 2PP was 54.32% to the Coalition, a 9.9% swing.

Antony Green has posted a lot of goodies about the result including a very comprehensive new pendulum format that deals well with the three-cornered contests.

Underwhelming Result In Wilderness Poll

Porcupine Fish Award for Ultra-Fishy Polling (image credit)

Advance Summary

1. Recent media articles have carried some reports of a poll said to show support for protection of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, and at least partly commissioned by the Bob Brown Foundation.

2.  Such limited details of the poll as are available show that the poll wording was ambiguous and implied unfounded conclusions in a way that probably pushed respondents towards certain beliefs.

3. Also, the details of the polling thus far publicly released are insufficient to be sure that prior questions were not used to train responses to later questions.

4. The result for protecting wilderness is in my view surprisingly low, and might be explained by negative reactions to the use of unsavoury styles of polling.

Victorian Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Sandbelt Edition

2PP aggregate of recent Victorian state polling:  ALP leads 53.2-46.8

"Nowcast" seat estimate based on this 2PP: ALP 49 Coalition 39

It's taken a while for enough polling to build up to justify another Victorian pre-election roundup to follow last fortnight's, but that point has been reached with the belated release of results for the Fairfax-Ipsos poll taken last weekend.  Why it has taken the Age until Friday to get this data out there is anyone's guess, but at least we have it now.

If you followed the media comments about the unreliable mutterings of both parties about internal polling and the like, you'd have seen claims from both sides that things have tightened up through this week.  These claims always need to be treated with caution, since the side in the lead has an incentive to make them to discourage complacency, while the side trailing has an incentive to make them to discourage despair.   They might turn out to be true, but with no data fresher than Monday, we'll need to wait for more polling to be sure.

Based on where things stood early this week, there would have to be a lot of improvement to make a serious difference to the picture of a very likely change of government.  At that stage the gap was, if anything, widening slightly, but the broader picture is a lack of any major change for quite a while. 

Poll Roundup: National Polling All Over The Place

Poll Aggregate: 51.2% to Labor (update: 50.4% on 18 March)
Labor maintains narrow lead held since December

Nielsen 52-48 to Coalition? Newspoll 54-46 to Labor?  These two results just one week apart - what could it mean?

It's about time to have another of my irregularly scheduled roundups of the national polling picture and how the not quite so new Abbott government is travelling.  My last federal roundup of sorts was a month back in the Griffith article.  At the time Labor seemed to be starting to drop off a little, and the lukewarm by-election result seemed consistent with that.

Shortly afterwards we had the 52-48 to Coalition from Nielsen.  At the time some dismissed it as a rogue, but it also seemed it could be a harbinger of a return to a Coalition lead.  There was some support for this from a Morgan which gave Labor a wafer-thin 50.5:49.5 lead by last-election preferences (equivalent to a thin Coalition lead given the apparent house effect of Morgan's methods).  Also, two weeks of 51:49 to Labor from Essential proved little, since we know Essential can be contrary to, or lag, the trend of other polling.

2013 Federal Election: Best And Worst Pollsters

Ideally I would have written this article a few weeks after the election, while debates about the quality of polling before the election were still fresh in everyone's minds.  It seems a world away now but earlier this year there were actually plenty of people arguing that the day of the landline was done, that online and mobile polling were the way to go and that Palmer and Katter supporters would preference Labor in droves thus making the election much, much closer than all those pesky polls said.

But now ...

This was, in general, a pretty good election for the pollsters (most of them anyway) and a bad election for those who wanted to outguess them.  

For basic information about the different polls and their methods, and a lot of general stuff about polling methods and debate surrounding them, you may find the recently updated Field Guide To Australian Opinion Polls useful. 

I'll consider pollster quality in three categories:

Saturday (Final!) Federal Election Projection Model and Seat Betting Roundup

Note: I will be at themercury.com.au on election night.  A pointer to the coverage will be here.

PROJECTION 10 AM SATURDAY(FINAL)
COALITION WINS ELECTION (probability >99%)
SEAT TOTAL PROJECTION 95 COALITION 52 LABOR 3 REST
(This is an approximate projection only.)

Finally the time is reached for pollsters to release their final polls, modellers to release final projections and politicians to make final attempts to woo the "undecided vote" (which is usually, in real terms, a lot smaller than a lot of people think.)

Late And Final Polls

Essential was first of the regular pollsters to release what seems to be its final result, a 52:48 based on 1035 interviews from Sep 1-4.  If the result for Labor is benign or even an improvement compared to current polling by other sources, Essential will look very good, but if election day is a rout then there will be questions asked about going too early, using a smallish sample and the pollster's trending behaviour relative to others. Galaxy has released what seems to be a pretty safe 53:47, again showing statistical properties more akin to an aggregate than a poll; most likely if they're wrong at all it won't be by much (I am unsure if that's their final offer.)  ReachTEL is providing useful daily tracking and finals from Newspoll, Nielsen and others will arrive later today.  Morgan has released a multi-mode with respondent preferences at 53.5:46.5 (54:46 by last election); they will have a final poll tonight. (Update: this turned out to be just extra data for 54.5: 46.5)

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch: Ghost of '75 Edition (20 August - Updates Added)

TASMANIAN POLLING COMING: Check here on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 9 am and there will be extensive commentary on state and federal results.  ReachTEL are in the field tonight and I was even polled! Questions are federal voting intention, preferred PM, issue importance, state voting intention, and rate the performance of the state government.

(Apologies to Tas Times readers looking for that stuff; I send the wrong link!  Correct link goes here)

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2PP Aggregate (Tuesday 20 August): 52.0 TO COALITION (+0.5 since last week)
Individual Seat Betting: Labor favourites in 61 seats (-2, Forde and Moreton)
Seat Total Market: Labor 63 seats (-2) (This figure is probably slightly skewed by longshot bias.)

In this issue:
* Newspoll to a place no-one has won from.
* Is Essential just a Poll-Shaped Object?
* Robopolls: confessional for homophobes #
* Why Rudd Is Not The Electorate's Dumped Ex-Girlfriend
* Non-zero estimate of Labor's chances!
* Ghosts of 93 ... and 75.
* ALP not favourites in any Coalition seat.
* Betting Market Debate: Do Punters Just Dawdle Like Sheep?