2021 Tasmanian State Election Polling Drought

One of the regular services I've provided on this site and, before that, on Tasmanian Times, is polling-based forecasting of Tasmanian elections.  At all elections since 2006 there have been multiple public polls that have allowed me to do this, and some of these polls have had very good sample sizes indeed. However this year (link to my 2021 guide main page) we have had no public polling since February.  By public polling, I mean a poll either released by a polling company off its own bat, or commissioned by a media outlet that is always going to publish the results.  We have had a single commissioned poll with voting intentions data released (uComms commissioned by the left-wing Australia Institute), and some rumours about party polling.

I would like to be able to present a forecast and say that it should be as reliable as in previous years, but with such a low level of polling data I can't do that.  There might be more voting intentions polling to come, but I don't have any specific reason to expect any.  This especially follows the news that EMRS, who last polled in February, will not bring forwards their May omnibus to include a poll for this election.  

Before I get into some fine detail about the maths of such a lack of polls, I want to cover some general points: how did we get here and why does it matter?  The tail end of this article is more technical and gets up to around 3/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.  

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: 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.

Victoria 2018: Final Lower House Results, Poll Performance and 2PP Pendulum

LABOR 55 SEATS COALITION 27 GREEN 3 IND 3
There is no single method of calculating 2PP for this election.  The following are examples of possible figures:

57.57% to Labor (Uniform swing applied to Richmond - probably fairest method)
57.84% to Labor (Richmond treated as 100% to Labor)
57.30% to Labor (Richmond excluded)

With two-party results for all Lower House seats now available it's time to wrap up my Victorian election coverage for 2018, on a high because at least that's the one house where I can talk about the results without constantly losing my temper at the system.  The article again includes a 2PP pendulum.  While this will be of less use for the future than the 2014 one was, given that there is a major redistribution coming, I think it is still useful for looking at the results, and especially at whether the Coalition was lucky not to lose even more seats than it did.

2018 Victorian Final Polls

Galaxy 53-47 to Labor, ReachTEL 54-46 to Labor

Current primary vote aggregate ALP 40.7 L-NP 39.4 Green 11.0 Other 8.9

Polls could be underestimating Labor 2PP vote slightly and may be overstating Greens primary

Seat projection estimate ALP 48 L-NP 36 Green 3 IND 1

This post will update all polling news in the final 24 hours of the Victorian campaign.

If the latest polls are right, yesterday's token post about Lower House modelling might not be quite so token after all. What we've seen in the Herald Sun's YouGov-Galaxy (53-47 to Labor) and Fairfax's ReachTEL (54-46 to Labor) suggests that the net effect of the last few weeks of campaigning has been more or less zero.  The polling would not have to be wildly wrong for an unlucky distribution of seats to leave Labor short of a majority, but it would have to be very wrong indeed for the Coalition to win the election in any way.

A Token Post About Modelling The 2018 Victorian Lower House

VICTORIA (ALP 45 COALITION 38 IND 3 GREEN 2)

Seat modelling on assumed 2PP of 53.4 to Labor currently gives estimate around ALP 47 Green 3-4 LNP 36 IND 1-2 
On current numbers Labor are very likely to win, but at some risk of doing so in minority

Contest badly lacks sufficient recent polling data so any modelling is unreliable

State opinion polling aint quite what it used to be.  At this stage of the 2014 Victorian state election, there had been twelve statewide voting intention polls by six different pollsters released in the previous two months.  This time it's four by either two or three (depending on how you treat Newspoll/Galaxy) and the most recent one was commissioned.  Over a million voters have voted already (including those whose votes are in the mail) and yet so far this month the only statewide poll we've had is a ReachTEL for the Victorian National Parks Association.  There may well be a flood of polling in the final days, but at this stage, those of us trying to predict what might occur have not a lot to work with.

Wentworthless: Another Epic Seat Poll Fail

The failures of seat polling have been a common subject on this site this year.  See Is Seat Polling Utterly Useless?, Why Is Seat Polling So Inaccurate and How Did The Super Saturday Seat Polls Go?

The recent Wentworth by-election was difficult to poll because of a late strategic-voting swing of probably a few to several points from Labor to the winner Kerryn Phelps.  All seven polls that polled a Liberal vs Phelps two-candidate preferred vote did actually get the right winner.  But that is all the good news that there is.  In so many other respects, the seat polls for the historic Wentworth by-election, perhaps the most polled seat in Australian history, were way wrong. And like other recent seat poll failures in such seats as Bass, Macarthur, Dobell, Lindsay and Longman, the failures were characterised not just by the polls being very wrong, but also by them tending to be wrong in the same direction.  The problems go beyond small sample size, and beyond even the tendency of seat polls to be less accurate than their sample sizes say they should be.  They point to systematic errors not random ones, and in this case, I suspect, to the oversampling of the politically engaged.

2018 Victorian State Election Intro

It's very close to the 2018 Victorian state election for me not to have written a thing yet about it!  Largely this has been because my analysis model needs polling to work, and (in common with other recent state elections) there's hardly been any of it.  Anyway, this is an opening offering on some general issues in trying to forecast this election

Let's start with the important bit.  If voting in the Legislative Council (upper house) in Victoria, vote below the line for candidates, not above the line for parties.  You only have to choose five candidates for a valid vote, though you will make your vote a lot more powerful if you number a lot more.  If you vote above the line, your vote will be at the mercy of your party's decisions about where to send your preferences, and they may well choose to send it to a party who you'd be totally opposed to.  Unfortunately, Victoria is one of the two remaining states that has not got rid of the Group Ticket voting system.  Keep control of your own vote and say no to preference-harvesting which can lead to unknown parties electing unaccountable candidates off tiny percentages of the vote.

Wentworth By-Election: Prospects And Polls

WENTWORTH (Lib vs ALP, 17.8%)
Cause of vacancy: Resignation of Malcolm Turnbull

A by-election for Wentworth has been set down for Saturday 20 October following the resignation from parliament of the former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.  This post will give an assessment of how this by-election stands in history and will also comment critically on polling. As I start it on 14 Sep I won't be brave enough to predict the winner yet, but I may do so later [edit: as of the final week I am not liking the Liberals' chances of holding off Phelps at all].  This post will be updated with new polls and changed assessments through to polling day.

By-elections often produce big swings against governments, but surely 17.8% is safe?  After all, there has only been one larger swing in federal by-election history (20.1% in Wakefield, 1938).  In fact there are at least two reasons not to take the seat's safety for granted.  These are the historic circumstances of the by-election and the prospect of losing the seat to an independent.  While I've seen some spinning suggesting that a double-digit swing should be viewed as a shocker for the Liberal Party even if they don't lose the seat, I think the circumstances are so unusual that they'd take a win by any margin now.

How Did The Super Saturday Seat Polls Go?

With final results for the Super Saturday by-elections now available, including preference flows, it is worthwhile reviewing the accuracy of the seat polling for these by-elections.  Recently I have posted a few times here about seat polling - see Is Seat Polling Utterly Useless? and Why Is Seat Polling So Inaccurate?  The preferencing results of the Longman by-election are also of special interest to the debate about Newspoll preferences, as the first test of Newspoll's changed methods at any federal election.

We can put that one to bed right away: the preference flow from One Nation to the Coalition in Longman was a massive 67.74%.  This should not be taken as a sign of quite how strongly One Nation preferences would flow nationally, since they did preference the LNP in this seat but would not necessarily do so in every seat, and since LNP preferences flowed strongly to One Nation in the area at the Queensland election even in the seat where the party preferenced Labor.  But it does show that it is entirely reasonable for pollsters to assume that 2016-election preferences can't be trusted in the case of One Nation.

Rolling Poll Roundup: Early Morrison Polls

2PP Aggregate: 56.1 to Labor (+3.3 since last week) by last-election preferences
55.5 with One Nation adjusted preferences
Labor would win an election "held now" in a landslide with a seat count around the high nineties.

This post will follow polls released with Scott Morrison as PM for at least two weeks.  I would have called this post "Early Morrison Era Polls" but I'm not sure he'll be there long enough (this time anyway) to qualify as an "era". My commentary during the spill can be found in the amazingly titled Spill! thread, and my post-spill comments can be found in Australia - So What The Bloody Hell Was That?

Spill!

(This article will serve as rolling coverage of spill-related polling and other items.)

Tuesday morning

It's on! Turnbull vs Dutton.  Unfortunately because they are already in the party room, we don't get the wonderful drama of retinues of supporters walking the corridors behind their leader and so on.

Turnbull has defeated Dutton 48-35 but generally a margin that small is not sufficient to ward off a future challenge, which in this case could well happen soon.

Julie Bishop has been retained unopposed as Deputy Leader.

It is worth bearing in mind that with the exception of Malcolm Fraser (who was unsuccessfully challenged by Andrew Peacock) no Prime Minister who has faced a spill has remained in the job until the next election.  (Fraser lost).  Other PMs who have been challenged have all failed to make it to the next election: Gorton, Hawke, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott.  In four of these five cases it took two goes to get rid of the incumbent (it is little-known that Gorton was unsuccessfully challenged after winning the 1969 election with a disappointing margin).

Poll Roundup: Here We Go Again?

2PP Aggregate: 52.8 to Labor (+1.2 since last week) by last election preferences
52.2 to Labor with One Nation adjustment
Labor would comfortably win election held "right now"

That escalated quickly ...

Last night's Ipsos poll has produced a big blowout in my polling aggregate, wiping out all the Coalition's gains since June. However, Labor had already made modest gains in the wake of the Super Saturday results even before that.

Normally I put out a Poll Roundup every second Newspoll.  Last week's Newspoll had some points well worthy of comment so I was considering bringing this one forward (but got distracted by another issue).  Now with this extreme Ipsos result hitting the stands, I think it's worthwhile going one week early - especially with the noises being made in media and a feeling about that leadership problems could blow up into a challenge quickly.  Whether or not that happens, at the least we have another round of serious leadership speculation, and even if the Ipsos was twaddle it will probably turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Events have developed quickly, with the PM shelving emissions targets in the National Energy Guarantee on Monday followed by news of possible Section 44 issues for Peter Dutton, which it seems the Dutton backers are intent on ignoring.  As I write the word is that Dutton backers think they have enough support and are deciding whether to go right away or wait until September.  In the past these things have often come to a head very quickly.

Why Is Seat Polling So Inaccurate?

The accuracy of Australian seat polling has been an important topic lately, especially given the coming by-elections.  By-elections are very difficult to forecast.  Even after throwing whatever other data you like at them (national polling, government/opposition in power, personal vote effects, state party of government) they are less predictable than the same seats would be at a normal election.  So it would be nice if seat polling would tell us what is going to happen in them.

Unfortunately single-seat polling is very inaccurate.  I discussed this in a recent piece called Is Seat Polling Utterly Useless?, where I showed that at the 2016 federal election, seat polling was a worse predictor of 2PP outcomes than even a naive model based on national polling and assumed uniform swing.  The excellent article by Jackman and Mansillo showed that seat polling for primary votes was so bad that it was as if the polls had one sixth of their actual sample size.  It doesn't seem that seat polls are useless predictively, but we certainly can't weight them very highly.

Is Seat Polling Utterly Useless?

Advance Summary

1. Seat polls have received bad publicity because of poor results at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections, and in some other recent elections such as the WA Darling Range state by-election.

2. Because it is clear that seat polls are not very accurate, it is common for posters on social media to dismiss them out of hand as useless or so misleading as to be worse than useless.

3. Indeed, seat polls at the 2016 federal election shows they were so inaccurate that they had greater average 2PP errors than simple models based on uniform swing and national polling.

4. However, in 2016 hybrid models combining seat polling and uniform swing would have been more accurate than either seat polling or a uniform swing model alone.

5. The correct use of publicly available seat polling seems to be not to ignore it entirely, but rather to aggregate it with other sources of information including national modelling.

6. Seat polling should be most useful for races that are difficult to predict by normal means, but seat polls may be unusually inaccurate in those races too.

7. The biggest problem with seat polling is the reporting that treats unreliable seat polls as definitive verdicts that one side or the other is "winning".  In fact they are weak indicators and need to be reported in the context of other evidence.

Poll Roundup: Unwanted Records On Both Sides

2PP Aggregate: 52.3 to Labor (last-election preferences) 
51.8 with One Nation adjustment 
Coalition has improved 1.2 points in last eight weeks and now in best position since late 2016
However Labor would still almost certainly win election "held now"

It's been a little while since the last federal poll roundup (highlighting the major issue of Newspoll preferencing changes); I meant to do one in Budget week but was simply too busy with other things.  In the last five weeks the Turnbull government has kept the modest improvements in national polling that it made during April, but there has not been clear evidence of anything more.  Despite a lot of media excitement about the possibility of a quick election off the back of some possible success in the Super Saturday by-elections on July 28, we are so far not seeing anything in aggregated polling to get so excited about.

The recent national polls have been:

* Two Newspolls with headline figures of 51-49 then 52-48 to Labor.  As the previous article notes there has now been official confirmation that Newspoll is using a preference distribution for One Nation that is derived from recent state elections.  My aggregate's headline figure uses last-election preferences, and on that basis I aggregated these at 52.1 and 52.9 to Labor respectively.  The 51-49, as with the previous 51-49, was off primaries that would have normally come out to 52.4 by last-election preferences, but the fact that the published 2PP was 51 again suggested something a bit closer.  (An alternative view is that Newspoll might have changed methods twice, but we can't conclude that reliably off just two polls if so.  Also, this week's difference between the two methods was "only" 0.9).

EMRS: No Real Change Since Election

EMRS: Liberal 47 (-3.2 from election), Labor 30 (-2.8), Green 14 (+3.7) Ind/Other 8 (+1.2)
Interpretation: Liberal 49.5 (-0.7) Labor 31.5 (-1.3) Green 11 (+0.7) Ind/Other 8
Outcome if election "held now" based on this poll: Liberal majority government (c. 13-9-3)
However it is unlikely in practice Greens would be in a position to regain Bass so quickly.
Poll provides no evidence that any party's support has changed.

The December 2017 EMRS poll, taken three months out from the 2018 state election, proved to be completely unpredictive of the outcome.  It had a 17% swing against the Government (the actual swing in the end was 1%), a 3.2% swing to the Greens (the actual swing was 3.5% against) and an 8% vote for the Jacqui Lambie Network (who in the end got 3.2).  If a poll taken three months out is predictively worse than useless, what can we say of one taken two months into an expected four-year term?

Poll Roundup: Number 29

2PP Aggregate: 53.3 to ALP (-0.3 since last week)
Labor would easily win election "held now"

This week's federal polling coverage was dominated by Malcolm Turnbull slipping another Newspoll closer to the dreaded number 30.  Although there may be minor signs of improvement, it would be highly surprising to see the Coalition's 2PP jump to 50% in two or three weeks' time.

Since the last poll roundup, we've had two Newspolls (both 53-47 for Labor), three Essentials (53-54-52 for Labor), and two ReachTELs, one in late February and one today.  The ReachTEL was 54-46 by respondent preferences, but I estimated 55.5-44.5 by last-election preferences, which made it the single worst poll of this government's term in my aggregate (though not by much).  The March ReachTEL was also 54-46 but in this case I got 54.2-45.8 as a last-election estimate.  Oh and there's also, to my great surprise, been a Morgan, and that gets a section of its own below.