The New Newspoll And The 2019 Polling Failure

This week has seen an important development in the Australian polling industry's response to the polling failure with the release of the new-format Newspoll.  Two months ago YouGov Australia announced that it would soon abandon the mixed robocall/online format that it (including under its former name Galaxy) has used to conduct Newspoll since mid-2015, and switch to exclusively online polling.  Not only that, but the new online polling methods were to use additional weighting methods and "the synthetic sampling procedures we use globally so that our samples are as representative as possible before analysis."

Following that announcement, a further three Newspolls were released using the same method mix that succeeded spectacularly in 2016 but failed badly in 2019. This appeared to be an exercise in going through the motions while the new poll was set up and there was no reason to take those polls all that seriously.  Now the new version is out, together with some new comments about the poll's direction.