2025-2028 2PP Aggregate Methods Page

Because I have way too many things to do right now I decided in my usual fashion to do one more that isn't any of them!  Introducing my 2025-2028 federal 2PP polling aggregate, which at this very early stage sits at 56.3 to Labor, with an overall pattern of basically no 2PP movement since it had enough data to wake up on 29 June.  The above is a 7-day smoothed aggregate though it has been as high as 57.2 on individual daily readings, and as low (a 0.8 point outlier lasting one day only!) as 55.5.  By the end of the term who knows if 2PP will even still exist the way the Australian right are going after this year's drubbing, but for the meantime, here we are.  Differences will be detected with aggregates that use pollster-released 2PPs (these tend to have Labor losing support more quickly) and also my estimate is currently running about a point below Bludger Track but with a similarly flat trajectory.  

The aim of the aggregate is to present a frequently updated figure for what the current polls should be taken as saying collectively about the state of the two-party preferred contest.  This is never a prediction or a statement that the polls are right, it is just putting a number on where they're at. 

This aggregate works quite differently from previous aggregates that had a simple 5-3-2-1 week of release formula, and does so mainly because of the increasing frequency of polls with long in field periods or late releases.  The mathematics are kept simple enough that I should be able to understand if something is going wrong (edit: indeed I fixed one glitch overnight after two August polls were found to have been entered as July; it made very little difference), but are no longer readily hand calculable to make my treatment of data less chunky and arbitrary.  The working of this year's aggregate is below:

Poll Roundup: Coalition In Freefall

2PP Aggregate: 52.3 to ALP (+1.2 in two weeks)
With One Nation adjustment (optional) 51.7 to ALP
If polls are accurate, Labor would win if everyone voted now, with a slim majority or close to it

(Figures above updated for YouGov)

The election has started already (people are now voting by post, even if the Greens HTV website doesn't seem aware of that) and the Coalition campaign appears to be in big trouble.  The polling swing back to Labor that started in late January and became more noticeable in late February has accelerated in the past two weeks and Labor is now polling majority government numbers from several pollsters.  It's too early to be confident that that will be the result, since elections are on average closer than even the final polls have it, but what we are seeing at the moment is a polling meltdown.  The Coalition primary vote is plummeting, and while this may yet turn around or be underestimated they now face the reverse version of Labor's problem during Labor's long decline last year.  There will be a bottom to this somewhere but no-one yet knows if this is it or where it might be.  By the time an underdog effect kicks in (if it does) will it be too late?

Poll Roundup: Labor Loses The Lead!

 

All things must pass.

2PP Aggregate (Last Election Preferences) 50.1-49.9 to Coalition (+0.4, first Coalition lead of term)
With One Nation adjustment 50.6-49.4 to Coalition

Election "held now" could leave Labor with about 70 seats

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It finally happened!  After endless months of Labor's 2PP lead being painfully whittled towards zero, last weekend's Newspoll finally put the Coalition into the lead on my last-election 2PP aggregate.  It is true that I said they were eight weeks away from breaking Kevin Rudd's record for the longest aggregated 2PP lead since there was nothing much to aggregate, and they actually lasted nine.  So there is that, but it's not much consolation, and a lot of the other aggregates flipped two or three months back anyway.

Historically, it's no big deal, and perhaps not even a medium one.  Almost every government falls behind in polling at some stage in every term, except the first Hawke government which went to an election not long after the half-time siren.  Governments, albeit the other side's are better at it, have frequently recovered from being well behind and tend to poll badly in the last year before elections.  Labor has the benefit of a friendly pendulum from last time and the Coalition needs to win a lot of seats in some very different places to get another sniff at government in 2025.  

2PP Federal Polling Aggregate Relaunched

Introduction (December 2023)

In recent weeks I've relaunched the 2PP aggregate on the sidebar that was a feature here between mid-2013 and the 2019 federal election.  The aim of the aggregate is to present a frequently updated figure for what the current polls should be taken as saying collectively about the state of the two-party preferred contest.  This is never a prediction or a statement that the polls are right, it is just putting a number on where they're at.  A couple of things encouraged me to do this and the first one was a desire to have an up-to-date figure readily available to media now that things are actually happening (my 52.9 estimate from this article was being quoted after my estimate had fallen below 52.)  

2022 Federal Polling Year In Review

2PP average for year 54.9 to Labor.
Labor led on 2PP in all 87 polls released this year.

At the end of each year I release an annual review of federal polling. See the 2021 edition here and/or click the annual poll review tab for articles back to 2014.

I'll start by saying this was a great year for polling generally with a good industry result in the federal election (after a famous failure in 2019), a very good result for final polls in the Victorian state election, and YouGov/Newspoll performing very well in South Australia.

How many polls?

Once again the business of counting how many polls there have been is complicated by Morgan's habit of often releasing only the 2PP from a poll sample.  In all I count 87 readings, the most since 2017, from what I consider to be mainline pollsters: 

* 12 Newspolls before the election and four after.  The dramatic slowing in release of Newspoll post-election makes me suspect YouGov had a contract for sixteen (the same number as 2021).

* Six Resolves before the election and five after, however only two of the pre-election polls and none since had a pollster-derived 2PP (I've calculated last-election preferences for those that didn't)

* 14 Morgans before the election and 30 Morgan readings post-election, however nearly all the Morgans since the election have been 2PP only.

* Nine Essential readings before the election and two afterwards.

* Four Ipsos polls before the election

* One Freshwater Strategy poll this month

There may be more pre-election Morgan readings that I missed. I have not included Dynata (lobby group poll) or anything from KORE (panel survey with numerous red flags) or ANUPoll (wildly inaccurate with incomplete data).

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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Essential's New 2PP Plus - What Is It And Does It Make Any Sense?

Following the 2019 polling failure, Essential Research has taken a very long time to return to voting intention polling.  Two weeks ago in an action that some might think was trolling the pollster (but I couldn't possibly comment) I took the unweighted voting intentions data from over a year of Essential polls and converted them to a pseudo-poll series.  I showed that this unweighted data series followed some of the patterns seen in the public polling by Newspoll and the sometimes-public-at-the-time polling by Morgan, with all these series showing ALP leads during the summer bushfire disaster, switching to Coalition leads as the COVID-19 situation came to dominate politics.

I showed that in the unweighted data Labor had had rather large leads briefly during the bushfires, switching to substantial and steady Coalition leads from late April onwards, but I suggested that there were various reasons why these large leads might not survive the application of weighting.  Nonetheless the broad patterns in the data seemed worth keeping an eye on.

It's presumably coincidence that just two weeks after I released this piece, Essential have finally returned to the voting intentions fray, but they have done so in a unique manner.  This article discusses what they've done and why, and their just-released results.  I think what they have done is interesting but I disagree with nearly all the reasons they have so far advanced for doing it.

What Might 2PP Voting Intention Have Really Looked Like In The Last Federal Term?

(An update was added to this article on 2 July 2020 - scroll down.  The original text has not been revised.)

The 2016-2019 parliament saw Australia's worst failure of national opinion polling since the early 1980s, a failure that was not just a combination of normal errors and a reasonably close election.  Aggregated polling had the Coalition behind for the entire term, at no stage better than 49% two-party preferred, and yet the Coalition won with 51.53% of the two-party preferred vote.

The view that the polls were in fact right all along but voters changed their minds at the last moment (either on election day, or on whatever day each elector voted) fails every test of evidence that it can be put to.  The difference between voting intention for voters voting before election day and on election day is similar to past elections, and if anything slightly stronger for the Coalition.  There was no evidence in polling of change in voting intention through the final weeks, as would have been expected as voters who had already voted reported back their behaviour if the polls were at all times accurately capturing the intentions of the person being polled.  Also if those who had already voted had shifted towards the Coalition as they made their final decisions while those who had yet to vote were yet to do so, there would have been polling gaps of several points between those who had already voted and those yet to do so; this was not the case in the released evidence either.  

Oh No, This Wasn't Just An "Average Polling Error"

As previously noted, Australian opinion polling has just experienced its first clear predictive failure, in pick-the-winner terms, in a federal election since 1980.  Every campaign poll by four different pollsters (one of them polling under two different brands) had the Labor Opposition ahead of the Liberal-National Coalition (as it had been for the entire term), and yet the Coalition has won an outright majority.  Moreover, polls in the final weeks were extremely clustered, with 17 consecutive polls (plus an exit poll) landing in the 51% to 52% two-party preferred range after rounding, a result that is vanishingly unlikely by chance.  No pollster has yet made any remotely useful contribution to explaining this clustering - those who have even commented have generally said they didn't do it and it must have been somebody else.

The general reaction has been dismay at this unusual level of pollster error in a nation where national polls have a proud record of accuracy.  The Ninefax press, as I call them (SMH/The Age), have even announced that they now have no contract with their pollster, Ipsos, or with any other pollster.  (This may just be for show, since in the past Fairfax often took long breaks in polling after elections.)  News Corp is, for now, standing by Newspoll.  The Association of Market and Social Research Associations has announced a review, although this may be of little value as its only member who is involved is Ipsos. 

EMRS: Liberals Crash, But Hodgman Still Clobbering Green

EMRS Feb 2017: Lib 35 ALP 29 Greens 19 Ind/Other 11 One Nation 6 
On these numbers a hung parliament would be inevitable (approx 11 Liberal, 10 Labor, 4 Green, though one more Liberal seat might fall to One Nation or the Greens)

EMRS Nov 2016: Lib 40 ALP 28 Green 18 Ind/Other 13 (One Nation not in readout)
On these numbers most likely result would have been a hung parliament (approx 12 Liberal, 10 Labor, 3 Green)

Current seat aggregate of all polls: Lib 12 ALP 10 Greens 3

Note: EMRS tends to skew to Greens and Others and against ALP.  No evidence on skew for or against One Nation is known.

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Once again, Tasmanian phone pollster EMRS has released two of its quarterly polls, for November and February, in a single release.  See also the trend tracker, which shows that the Liberal vote has been falling for four years now.

For the first time, One Nation has been included in the readout, and immediately the Hodgman Government has lost five points to 35%, its worst position of the term.  Even the Roy Morgan series, which was obviously skewed against the Government (and hasn't been seen since October) never had it below 37.

New Tasmanian State Poll: Rolling Comments

ReachTEL Liberal 45.6 Labor 30.9 Green 15.1 Other 8.4 (Undecided removed)
On raw numbers, it is a tossup whether Liberals would just retain majority (c. 13-10-2) or just lose it (c. 12-10-3)
Adjusted for house effects, Liberals would be likely to retain majority (13-10-2)

Introduction (15 Nov)

A new Tasmanian ReachTEL poll of state voting intention, with a large sample size, is about to be released by The Mercury.  As noted in the teaser, the poll points to the probable loss of two or three seats if the government were to face the music today.  A loss of two seats would leave the government with a majority of one while a loss of three would create a hung parliament.  This will be familiar territory for those who have followed my state polling coverage in the term, as my aggregated polling model has pointed to either 12 or 13 Liberal seats for a long time now.

Polling in Tasmania was inaccurate at the federal election, and has shown large pro-Liberal house effects at both the last two federal elections (but not at the 2014 state election) so there will always be some room for doubt about it.  Another important factor is the potential for a tactical bandwagon effect as seen in the 2006 election - if one party has a realistic chance of majority government and the other does not, voters may gravitate to that party.  While polling says the government's majority would be touch and go if an election were "held now", that assessment has very little predictive value because of this kind of strategic voting.

I have seen some of the results for the purposes of expert comment, but a recent business model change by The Mercury means I will be going about posting analysis of this poll in a slightly different manner.  As I understand it, many of the results will be released behind a paywall in the first instance and then published in the print edition the next day.  I won't be posting analysis of the results until they have appeared in the print edition, at least in basic form, or been freely reported.

As results are revealed over the next several days, in-depth coverage will be posted below.

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 2PP Aggregate Methods (45th Parliament)

This is the methods post for the 45th Parliament edition of the aggregate (sometimes nicknamed "Aggedor") that I post in the sidebar of this site, and which will form the basis for Poll Roundup posts and, later, my attempts to forecast the next election.

The current version is essentially the same as the version running at the end of the 44th parliament, with some minor changes to the weightings and the interpretation of Newspoll.  One substantial methods change was made half-way through the 44th parliament, which was to switch from just using the 2PP figure supplied by pollsters using previous-election preferences, to using a hybrid of the supplied figure and a figure calculated from their primaries.

A simpler version ran before the 2013 election and fluked getting the 2PP exactly right as a result of a preference shift cancelling out a possible late swing to the Coalition.  The 2013-6 version had a final error of 0.4 points, almost half of which resulted from slight shifts in preference flow patterns.

The aggregate is mostly a weighted average of two-party preferred polling derived from all recent polls of sufficient standard.  The 2PP figure assigned to each poll is multiplied by various weightings based on the poll's recency, accuracy and other issues, and the sum of the multiplied poll scores is divided by the sum of the weightings.

The aggregate is designed to be transparently checkable in theory and to use basic mathematics only.  However, it is not entirely codified in advance.  Decisions will be made on issues of pollster weighting and house effects, and possibly other matters, and will be updated to this page at the bottom when made.

Poll Roundup: Turnbull Bounce Finally Peaks

2PP Aggregate: 53.4 to Coalition (-0.5 in a week)
Coalition would win election "held now" with similar majority to 2013

Almost three months since Malcolm Turnbull took over from Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, the massive surge in Coalition polling has finally hit its first speedbump.  The odd behaviour of a couple of pollsters compared to the rest has made it hard to say exactly when this happened, but my figures now have the Coalition peaking at a revised 54.0% two-party preferred at the end of the week before last.  On that basis I estimate that the Coalition gained 7.6 points over ten weeks.  I have this as the second largest polling surge in such a period in Australian polling history (the largest being at least ten points in a couple of months for the doomed Whitlam government during the lead-up to the 1975 dismissal).

Poll Roundup: Investments Attack On PM Fails

2PP Aggregate: 52.5 to Coalition (+1.4 in a week*, +6.1 since Abbott)
(Highest value since Turnbull became PM*)
Coalition would comfortably win election held now

(* Changes based on revised figures for previous weeks)

This week we've seen three new regular polls plus a partial result from another, and I've made some new decisions on how to deal with the recent behaviour of Morgan polling, so it's time to update my assessment of how the Turnbull bounce is going again.  This was a week in which new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was attacked over the failure of his large financial investments collection to entirely avoid connection to the Cayman Islands.  It was pointed out (among the fine details of the Cayman situation) that this was also true of investments held by Labor politicians, leaving it unclear what exactly Labor was saying other than that the PM is rich.

Whether it was seen as grubby class warfare as has been widely alleged, whether it was actually paying the PM's economic skills a backhanded compliment, whether no-one can actually follow it all or cares, whether maybe even Labor had some kind of point buried somewhere but the commentariat weren't interested - for whatever reasons the attack has done no immediate polling damage, with no net change in two polls and what looks like an extremely good result in a third.

ReachTEL: Liberals Narrowly Holding In Bass And Lyons

ReachTEL: Bass Liberal 51% 2PP (-3 since election) Lyons Liberal 53.2% 2PP (+2) (2PP estimates mine)

Analysis: Poll consistent with other polls showing small net swing to Labor in Tasmania, but not clearly sufficient for seat gains

The Examiner has commissioned a ReachTEL of the marginal Tasmanian federal seats of Bass (LIB, 4%) and Lyons (LIB, 1.2%) (see report here).  At this time the full data are not available online but they are present in the paper edition, albeit in a slightly garbled form.  The format of the polling is also unusual and requires some further discussion.  The poll has been reported as showing that Andrew Nikolic (Bass) and Eric Hutchinson (Lyons) would have been "comfortably returned" in an election held on Thursday.  My analysis agrees with the "returned" but disagrees about the "comfortably".

Poll Roundup: Abbott, Shorten Racing To The Bottom

2PP Aggregate: 52.5 to Labor (+0.2 in a week, highest for ten weeks)

Labor would almost certainly win election "held now" with small to modest majority

This week has seen the debut of the new Galaxy-run Newspoll, a hybrid robopoll and online poll with a sample size of over 1600.  There's also been another Fairfax-Ipsos, the usual Essential and far too many dodgy skew-polls, so there's more than enough for another poll roundup.

Not much changed in as week in the media issues mix, with the government sinking further into the mire of internal confusion on both same-sex marriage and, of all things, Q+A.  The week has seen an open clash between frontbenchers Abetz and Pyne over Abetz's controversial same-sex marriage comments (for my own, entirely critical, view of which see here).  

Same-sex marriage is not an issue that normally drives voting intention, but it may be one that discourages people from changing their vote when they otherwise would have done so (for "Republicans" there read "Liberals" here in Harry Enten's take on the US situation)  . It's also one that can cause damaging public schisms on both sides of the chamber.  The PM's own tactics on the issue are mysterious - it seems he will at least go through the motions of opposing it, but opinions vary wildly as to whether he is doing his utmost to prevent it from passing, or trying to secretly engineer its passage.  Some within the Coalition are totally fuming about the latter possibility, but as Paula Matthewson points out, if it is true, what can they do?  

Wonk Central: Morgan's Tasmanian State And Federal Sampling

Advance Summary:

1. Roy Morgan Research has issued five recent Tasmanian SMS state polls with small but usable sample sizes in which the Labor Opposition has small primary-vote leads over the Hodgman Liberal Government.

2. Both state and federal evidence suggests these samples have house effects in favour of Labor and the Greens and against the Liberal Party and that Labor's "lead" is therefore probably not real.

3. While pro-ALP house effects are seen in Morgan's federal polling (which partly uses a face-to-face component known to skew to Labor), they are not clearly apparent in Morgan's state SMS samples in other states.

4. Morgan's release of a two-party preferred estimate for Tasmania is misleading, since most Green preferences are never distributed in the state, and even if they were they would not flow as strongly as Morgan's model suggests.

5. If Morgan's recent state samples were actually repeated at an election, the result would be not an easy Labor win as Morgan says, but a hung parliament in which the Greens would determine who governed.

6. Given the dissenting stance of current Greens leader Kim Booth during the previous Labor/Green coalition government, it is not clear who would govern in the event of another hung parliament.

7. An aggregate of all recent Tasmanian state polling does not currently point to a hung parliament if an election was held "right now", but is extremely close to doing so.

(Warning: This piece is very "numbery" and is rated Wonk Factor 4/5.)

Federal 2PP estimate feature added

 (Note: This article documents the experimental phase of the aggregate, which ran from February to September 2013.  For transitional arrangements post the election see here.)

I've just added a subjective two-party-preferred vote (2PP) estimate feature on the sidebar.  The reason I have added this feature is that I commonly get involved in discussions on various sites in which someone is making claims about the likely state of the national 2PP that aren't even remotely credible, or just getting confused about all the different polls and the strange range of values they spit out.  I think a fair few people will from time to time be interested in my view of where things are at, especially when having those kinds of debates while I'm not around.  There are some handy formal aggregators about, but they often take a few days to update and I often find my view a little out from theirs (and usually somewhere in the middle of them all), typically because everyone has slightly different views on the best underlying assumptions.  When I can, I'll be aiming to update this estimate quickly.

The 2PP estimate is not a fully formalised aggregator and is not a scientific test. I'm not at the point of being ready to attempt something like that yet, and while I have a long-running Newspoll rolling-average of sorts for historical comparison purposes, I've only recently developed an interest in trying to gauge the picture across all federal pollsters.  It's just my hopefully informed opinion on the basis of an informal and at this stage loosely defined aggregation process.  The rough assumptions I make in thinking about the national 2PP are as follows.  (Note: Article has been edited to give the current version.  Legacy text appears at the bottom so people can see how this model has developed.)