Uneducated Preferencing: NTEU/UMR Robopoll

Wirrah Award For Fishy Polling (image source)

This article initially covered the report in the Examiner today of a poll commissioned by the National Tertiary Education Union and said to show first-term incumbent Andrew Nikolic trailing in the federal seat of Bass.  However it has since become clear that this poll is part of a national bulk robopoll of 23 marginal (and in some cases not so marginal) electorates and raises enough issues that I've deemed it necessary to rewrite the article and give it a national focus.

The NTEU is not a slavish supporter of the ALP (for instance endorsing independent Andrew Wilkie at the last election) but it is obviously an opponent of the current government's education proposals.  The poll was conducted by UMR, which is best known as the Labor Party's standard pollster for internals (yet is described by the NTEU as "independent"), as part of a large series of national seat robopolls. The NTEU has now published a full data set for all seats (download from link).  The poll claims to find an average 2PP swing of 11% to Labor in the 23 surveyed seats, from 52:48 to Coalition at the election to 41:59 now.   Simultaneously the NTEU has released a message testing poll taken nationally via online panel sampling also by UMR and taken in late May to early June.  The 2PP in that sample is given as 56% to Labor.

Tas Labor Push-Polling? Not As Such, But ...

Wirrah Award For Fishy Polling (image source)

In the final week of the Tasmanian state election campaign, the Tasmanian ALP has been accused of push-polling.  This follows the apparent leaking, by forces unknown, of an internal Labor UMR poll.

I have also obtained the contentious poll, which was conducted by telephone interviews with a sample size of 300 voters in each of Lyons and Franklin.  The Liberal Party needs to win three seats in at least one of these electorates, and is very likely to do so in Lyons, but lineball in Franklin.

The questions for the two electorates, conducted 5-6 March, appear in a results section entitled "Messaging".  Each question has the opening question "Does the following statement make you more or less likely to vote Labor in the state election or does it make no difference?"  The statements then are: