RESOLVE PM (Victoria state) Labor 37 Coalition 36 Green 9 IND 12 Others 5
2PP Estimate 54-46 to Labor. If numbers repeated at election, Labor would win easily (c. 50 seats)
"Independent" vote very likely to be overstated
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I've had too little time for writing here in recent weeks, largely because of a backlog of contract work that I had to clear after it built up during the Tasmanian snap election. There are a few pieces I have been working on that I do hope to finish some time but they will be well behind the news cycle should they actually appear. However, I wanted to make some comments about reporting of today's Resolve Political Monitor poll of Victorian state election voting. This furthers a concern I have had about some responses to the 2019 federal polling failure - that some media sources that commission or work with polls have responded with trendy solutions that lose information and then lead to worse reporting of what polls are actually claiming to show.
In my initial coverage of Resolve's entry to the major polling markets I noted that fingering two-party preferred figures as a major culprit in the 2019 federal polling failure was simply incorrect: polls were wrong overwhelmingly because their primary votes were wrong, with errors in preference estimation making only a small contribution to the failure. I doubted the claims that this would deliver readers "something deeper" than "the “horse race” nature of the way we reported the results of TPP questions" and suggested that what this would actually lead to was journalists reporting the horse race off primary votes. In the case of the reporting of this specific Victorian poll, the horse race commentary hasn't gone away, it's just got worse. It's like being told just the relative positions of the horses near the end of a race without being told one of them is flagging and the other is charging home strongly.
