Not-A-Poll Reset Time: Marshall Defeated

Following the emphatic defeat of the Marshall Liberal government in South Australia it is time to again reset the Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll.

These were the previous round's results.

Steven Marshall was a distant but substantial second in the round in which he was eliminated, so the Not-A-Poll is now batting 0/2 in terms of the plurality picking the next to depart.    

Scott Morrison led very strongly out of the blocks in this round.  Through much of February Marshall was getting around 40% of votes, which jumped to over 80% immediately following the release of the late February SA Newspoll.  This continued through the campaign but Morrison had too many votes in the can already to be caught.  Whatever the result of the next round, it will suprise me greatly if Morrison does not top the next round as well; indeed I expect he will get an outright majority.  (Weirdly on SA election day there were still five votes for Morrison and one for McGowan.)

Steven Marshall's defeat has resulted in an unusual piece of political trivia.  His is the first Australian state, territory or federal government to leave office since the previous South Australian election that brought him to office in 2018.  For one jurisdiction to see two changes in government without any other jurisdiction seeing one in between is actually very unusual.  There was a case of sorts in the ACT with the relatively short-lived Kaine Liberal Government in 1989-1991.  However even that is debatable because Trevor Kaine came to office after the fall of the Follett Labor Government on the floor of the house on 5 Dec 1989.  The Russell Cooper led dregs of the Joh era had lost the Queensland election on 2 Dec 1989, but the new government under Wayne Goss did not take office until 7 Dec.  For cases before that debatable one, we have to go back to instability in Victoria 1950-1952, Victoria 1943-1945 and NSW 1920-1922.  (In all those cases the government of one state changed multiple times without any intervening changes federally or in other states.)  

Marshall's demise also ends the fifth longest spell in the last 100 years without a change of government anywhere in the country. There were longer gaps in 1935-41, 1959-65, 1983-8 and 2002-7.  (For the records at leadership level see the previous post.)

At the time of writing it is not clear Marshall will even retain his seat in the parliament; he is a shaky favourite to overhaul Labor's present lead once prepolls and postals are added.  However if he does, and if he then resigns and causes a by-election, there would have to be a serious chance of Labor winning it.  

After implementing a Whitlam Clause for the previous edition (ie a defeated PM staying on as Opposition Leader doesn't count) I've decided this was too counter-intuitive and to take a more populist road in future.  So now if a PM loses then the poll pays out at that point, and even if they become Opposition Leader, they still count as having been the leader to go.  However if an Opposition Leader ceases to be such by becoming Prime Minister, that doesn't count.  

South Australia 2022: Final Newspoll And Other Comments

Time for a short post ahead of tonight's South Australian state election, which I will be covering live on here from the close of polling and, as time permits, through the postcount over coming weeks. 

This has been another state election to have seen remarkably little polling.  The only statewide public polls have been two Newspolls by YouGov and one self-branded YouGov poll (the two versions employing different weightings).  The first Newspoll had a 53-47 Labor 2PP lead, the final Newspoll had 54-46 (41 Labor 38 Liberal 9 Green 12 Other), and the YouGov in between had 56-44.  There is very little sign of life for the Marshall government in all this, but it's still within the reach of polling error that it might lose the 2PP more narrowly (or if it's a big error, get around 50-50) and then, perhaps, get lucky enough with the distribution of votes to hang on in a hung parliament.

Using the 54-46 Newspoll as an input, my conditional probability model (see previous article) suggests that Labor would win the 2PP in around 26 seats to 20 for the Liberals (Mount Gambier is excluded from the model).  However, there is a widespread expectation (including some remarkably short betting odds) that the ex-Liberal independents will all be re-elected despite the clouds hanging over all of them except Dan Cregan.  That would end up with a 26-17-4 parliament.  The seat model can't reliably predict which of the seats on 6-10% margins would fall, other than that on a 6% swing enough of them would be close enough to going that Labor should pick up a couple just by luck.  A similar outlook is seen in betting odds, which continue to have Labor favourites in the low-hanging fruit of Adelaide, Newland, Elder and King, but not in any other Liberal seats.

South Australia 2022: Can Even COVID Save The Marshall Government?

We're just three weeks away from the 2022 South Australian election and the first Newspoll of the campaign has just given a reminder of how challenging the Marshall Liberal Government's task is.  The poll has the Coalition trailing 47-53 off primaries of Coalition 37 Labor 39 Greens 10 Others 14.  Strikingly, Marshall trails Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas 39-46 as Better Premier (an indicator on which opposition leaders rarely lead unless governments are in big trouble).  Marshall's own rating is a shadow of its former COVID-boosted self at a still reasonable net +1 (48-47) but Peter Malinauskas is doing much better at +20 (51-31).

Perhaps the latter offers some hope for the Liberals since they may be able to dent the Opposition Leader's image, but that the Marshall Government appears struggling to avoid a first-term defeat at this stage is not historically surprising.  Firstly, the government was elected with a small majority and is federally dragged, so it would be expected to more likely than not lose some seats.  Secondly federal drag also predicts how state governments will go compared to their leadup polling, which for the SA Liberals wasn't crash hot anyway.  Thirdly the government has lost a majority it started with, and this is often associated with defeat (though I am a little more cautious about this at present given that voter contempt for hung-parliament games has seemed in recent years to be rising, both in Australia and the UK.)  At some time analysts were wary of predicting state governments would lose after a single term, but first-term losses in Victoria 2014 and, far more spectacularly, Queensland 2015, reminded us that it does happen.  

Newspoll: More Off-The-Scale Leader Ratings

Newspoll has returned with a second round of the very welcome State Premier approval ratings first seen in late April.  I thought a brief (by my standards) post about the current round of Newspolls was worth putting up overnight as the results are already sparking discussion in Tasmanian politics.

In each case I give the Premier's net rating, followed by the change from April, followed by the satisfied and dissatisfied split.

Gladys Berejiklian (NSW) is on +42 (-4) (68-26)
Daniel Andrews (Vic) is on +40 (-18) (67-27)
Annastacia Palaszczuk (Qld) is on +24 (+8) (59-35)
Mark McGowan (WA) is on +79 (-4) (88-9)
Steven Marshall (SA) is on +52 (+5) (72-20)
Peter Gutwein (Tas) is on +82 (+9) (90-8)

And just for completeness, Scott Morrison (PM) is on +41 (+4) (68-27).

Newspoll: Record Premier Ratings And A Very Strange Federal Poll

This week Newspoll polled state Premier approval ratings, but not voting intentions (perhaps because samples by state would have been too small for voting intention sampling).  It was to be expected that several state Premiers would have very high approval ratings given their handling of the coronavirus crisis, but perhaps not that the figures would be quite so spectacular:

Prev = previous poll.  *= As opposition leader.  #=YouGov poll not branded as Newspoll.

As high as Scott Morrison's current net rating of +40 is (more on that later), all the Premiers except Palaszczuk have beaten it.  None of them were coming off a particularly high base, though the most recent polling for Victoria and WA is ancient.  For Tasmania this is the first Newspoll of Premier satisfaction since the 2014 state election.

2018 SA Election Late Polls And Other Comments

SA: Newspoll and ReachTEL 34-31 on primary votes to Liberal
No predicted winner - too close to call

On Saturday night I will be attempting to live-comment the SA state election and the federal Batman by-election at the same time starting from 6:30.  Really this shouldn't be too hard, since Batman is just one seat, so I hope it will be useful.  They will be on separate threads and I will be trying to give each about equal attention to start with, though if Batman can be called quickly I will wind it down and switch to focusing purely on South Australia.