2025 Federal Election Pollster Performance Review

Oh no, not again ...

On the day after the 2019 federal election I did the most media interviews I have ever done in one day, eleven.  Eight of those were entirely about the same thing: the polls being wrong.  That day and in the coming days journos from as far afield as Japan and from vague memory Switzerland wanted to know how Australia had gone into an election with Labor unanimously ahead about 51.5-48.5 and come out with the Coalition winning by the same amount. Was this part of a global pattern of polls being increasingly broken and underestimating the right?  (Answers: no and no - it was just a shocker by Australia's high standards).  

The day after the 2025 federal election it was obvious something had gone astray with polling again, and by something near the same amount, but the media reception was muted.  I think I did only one interview where the polling was even part of the report's initial focus.  The ABC did an article about the polling, but it was so quarter-arsed that it omitted four final polls, initially got the 2PPs of four others wrong, and even when "corrected" continues to this day to contain errors about what the final poll 2PPs were.  There were a few other articles that were better.

Poll Roundup: Lukewarm Budget Reception As Coalition Remains Way Behind

FIVE POLL AVERAGE 54.6 TO LABOR
Little evidence of "budget bounce"
Labor would comfortably win election "held now" 

Leads in polling at this stage tend to contract

Herewith a roundup of polling following the Budget.  It's been a long time since I had time for the last federal polling roundup here, so I just want to set the polling scene before moving on, time (what is that?) permitting, to Tasmanian House of Reps seat guides, a Tasmanian Senate guide [EDIT: that will come after nominations are released] and hopefully a general assessment of the prospects for the Senate.  In short, the government's current polling is rather bad, but it is not all over yet.  To take things pollster by pollster, with the three who are Australian Polling Council members at the top and the laggards and backsliders at the bottom:

Curiouser And Curiouser: Recent Queensland Poll And Poll-Shaped Objects Roundup

The Queensland election is six weeks away and there has been no mainstream polling for it since the Newspoll in late July showed the LNP leading 51-49.  There are, however, a number of minor polls flying around and it's time to round them up and put them in a box.  In at least one case, the lid should then be taped firmly shut.

Polls "reported" recently have been:

Australian Institute for Progress (statewide)

YouGov (Currumbin, Redlands and Mansfield)

Omnipoll (Ipswich, Keppel, Mackay, Thuringowa)

Lonergan (Maiwar, McConnell, South Brisbane)

A further poll by AskAustralia Market Research has been reported in field but no results have yet been seen.

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.

Rolling Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: The Final Days

2PP Aggregate 51.5 to Labor (by last-election preferences) (-0.3 since last week)
51.1 with One Nation adjustment
Current seat projection approx Labor 79 Coalition 66 others 6 assuming polls accurate.

The end, it seems, is nigh.  If the (ludicrously herded) national polls are right, the Morrison government would need a huge amount of luck to survive a swing of somewhere around 1.3-2.3%, at an election at which it can afford perhaps two net seat losses.  If the polls on the whole are just modestly wrong in one direction, the Government's chances of survival improve greatly, but the other direction leads to a decisive loss.  The most likely path to survival is a Donald Trump style path - a combination of a modest national polling error and a fair amount of luck with the local breakdowns, but if it happens in this case, after everything, it will be very surreal.

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.

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.

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.

Longman By-Election

LONGMAN (ALP 0.8%)
Cause of by-election: Incumbent resignation (ineligible under Section 44)
Outlook: Your guess is probably as good as mine.

I've finally found the time to write a detailed post about the prospects for the Longman by-election.  This won't be anywhere near as long as my Braddon guide but I think it is worth explaining why we are seeing Labor struggling in the polls, the betting and in commentary perceptions in this seat. (That said quite a few people think Labor will win Longman but lose Braddon instead.)  When I first wrote about these by-elections, I thought national polling gave Labor enough advantage to probably just hold Longman, but since then Labor's national position has declined.  Labor may still win the seat, but their position is quite fragile.

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.

2018 SA Election Late Polls And Other Comments

SA: Newspoll and ReachTEL 34-31 on primary votes to Liberal
No predicted winner - too close to call

On Saturday night I will be attempting to live-comment the SA state election and the federal Batman by-election at the same time starting from 6:30.  Really this shouldn't be too hard, since Batman is just one seat, so I hope it will be useful.  They will be on separate threads and I will be trying to give each about equal attention to start with, though if Batman can be called quickly I will wind it down and switch to focusing purely on South Australia.

Batman: A Unique Federal By-Election

Batman (Vic): ALP vs Green 1.0%
Ged Kearney (ALP) vs Alex Bhathal (Green)
Incumbent David Feeney (ALP) resigned over eligibility issues
Outlook: No reliable data basis for predicting this seat.  

A by-election will be held for the Victorian seat of Batman in the near future after David Feeney became the first confirmed Labor casualty of the Section 44 citizenship fiasco.  Feeney threw in the towel when he was unable to find any positive evidence that he had renounced his UK citizenship circa 2007. Some Labor insiders believe the seat is now unsaveable while some are more upbeat that they may just hold it.

This could be the last time we'll be referring to the seat by the name "Batman".  There's a significant campaign to rename it after Simon Wonga, but that won't be decided until the redistribution process concludes later this year.

The heavy lifting by way of preview has already been done at Tally Room and Poll Bludger with their excellent by-election guides.  The seat's dramatically split voting pattern was laid out by Michael McCarthy in his pieces (here's the latest) on the "hipster-proof fence" (aka Tofu Curtain, Great Wall of Quinoa, Corduroy Line) around Bell Street, which divides the Green-friendlier and Labor-friendlier sides of the electorate.  Also of interest may be Kosmos Samaras' analysis of why Labor is getting trashed by the Greens in inner-city seats like the state seat of Northcote (the southern half of Batman) and (see also Tim Colebatch on this) what they can try to do about it.  A convenient step-up in attacks on the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland probably isn't it (at least, not by itself).

Queensland 2017: Final Results And Polling Accuracy

Queensland: ALP 48 LNP 39 KAP 3 PHON 1 GREEN 1 IND 1
2PP Estimate 51.2 to Labor (+0.1 from 2015)

It's taken a while but I've finally found some time to put up something about the final results of the 2017 Queensland state election.  I try to always put something out on Christmas Day, though last year nasty weather interfered with that plan.

In a nutshell, the 2017 Queensland election was one where a great many dramatic things could have happened, but virtually none of them did, as the following sections explain:

Hardly any seats changed hands

You don't turn 89 seats into 93 without breaking a few eggs, but the level of seat transfer between the parties at this election was remarkably low.  On a notional basis and ignoring retirements and mid-term defections, just nine seats changed hands at this election, most of them marginal anyway.  The Liberal National Party lost Redlands (1.2%), Gaven (2.8%) and Aspley (3.2%) to Labor, and would have lost Maiwar (3.0%) to Labor as well but the Greens snatched it instead.  Labor lost Bundaberg (0.5% and which was a freak win last time anyway) and Burdekin (notionally theirs by 1.4% but LNP-occupied) to the LNP, and might have lost Mirani (3.8) to the LNP had not One Nation helped itself to its only win.  The LNP also dropped Noosa (6.6) to independent Sandy Bolton, and Hinchinbrook (3.4) to KAP's Nick Dametto.  In Hinchinbrook, Dametto (who according to his party had only been campaigning for four weeks) pulled off a duplicate of Andrew Wilkie's Denison 2010 winning method of coming third and getting everyone's preferences.

New England Washup and Bennelong By-Election Preview

I've decided to combine some post-result comments about New England with an overdue preview of the Bennelong by-election, which will be updated for any further polls that are published.  It's really not possible to talk about Bennelong now without talking about the former and whether anything seen in New England does or does not apply.

New England: Barnaby Bolts Back In

While Barnaby Joyce's re-election was always extremely likely given the lack of serious opposition, the scale of it surprised me.  Currently Joyce has 64.6% of the primary vote, a 12.3% swing to him, and a 73.6% two-party vote against Labor, a 7.2% swing to Joyce.  It seems that Labor are second, although in theory independent Rob Taber might overhaul the 4.4-point gap on the 17.2% of minor-candidate preferences.  Even if he does, his two-candidate result against Joyce won't be much better than Labor's.

My pre-election expectation was that Labor would not get much 2PP swing and that there would probably be a modest 2CP swing away from the result achieved by Tony Windsor in 2016, but that the gaggle of candidates running against Joyce might be able to take him to preferences and delay the result.  Instead Joyce has picked up a primary vote swing compared even to his 2013 result, when Tony Windsor wasn't on the ballot paper.

Seat Betting Improves, But Still No Miracle, At The 2016 Federal Election

Advance Summary

1. Seat betting markets, sometimes considered to be highly predictive, returned another modest result at the 2016 federal election, predicting thirteen seats incorrectly.

2. Seat betting markets did however improve as a predictor of total seat wins compared to the 2013 election, at which they greatly overestimated the Coalition's winning seat margin.

3. Seat betting markets also performed impressively in their predictions of "non-classic" seats, getting only one (Cowper) wrong.

4. Overall the predictions of seat betting markets were extremely similar to those of poll-based projections.

5. Large swings to Labor in outer suburban and low-income seats, generally missed in public seat polling, gave seat betting markets an opportunity to show superior insight.

6. That chance was, however, generally missed, showing that seat betting displays no superior insights.

7. In terms of seat totals, individual seat markets again showed no notable insights, and were again outperformed by betting markets dealing specifically with the number of seats won.

Rolling Poll Roundup: ReachTEL vs The Rest?

2PP Aggregate: 50.3 to Coalition (ended last week at 50.6, week before 50.3)

Seat projection for this 2PP: probable Coalition majority (estimated 77-67-6)
(at time of starting this rolling roundup, aggregate was 50.7)

2PP aggregate tracking graph.  Last updated 21 June

As foreshadowed at the end of the previous session I've decided to put out a rolling poll roundup thread to cover the time from the new polls out on Friday night until at least the expected release of Essential on Tuesday.  Updates will be added at the bottom as new polls arrive.

As I write a difference between one poll, ReachTEL, and the other most recently released polls (Ipsos, Morgan and Essential) has developed.  ReachTEL had the Coalition at 50-50 2PP last week and 51-49 this week, using respondent allocated preferences, but if last election preferences are used both polls come out to about 52-48 to Coalition.  Meanwhile Ipsos, Morgan and Essential have all issued headline rates of 51:49 to Labor.  ReachTEL had the Coalition primary on 42.7 last week and 43.5 this week while Ipsos had it on 39 and Essential on 41.  We're still looking for Morgan's primary results and expect to find them somewhere between the black box of MH-370 and the sign that reads "Beware of the Leopard", but the Coalition was probably on 40 or less with them too.

Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Fear Of A Hung Parliament Edition

2PP Aggregate: 50.2 to Labor (unchanged)
Seat projection for this 2PP: probable narrow Coalition win, not necessarily with majority (estimate 76-69-5)

As usual, this roundup is quite long so feel free to just read whichever bits interest you.

======================================================================
It may as well be a recorded message: for the eighth (!) week in a row national 2PP voting intention has been around 50:50 and there has been no significant movement in the 2PP at all.  Excitable noises are made about moves of 1-2 points this way or the other in this poll or the other (typically by the media those polls are associated with) but it is all meaningless babble as nothing has actually happened.

This week Newspoll came out at 50:50 following four weeks of 51:49 to Labor.  Ipsos, which has tended to lean slightly to the Coalition but is bouncy because of its smaller sample size than other pollsters (and lack of artificial bounce-retardants, I suspect) raised the odd eyebrow with a 51:49 to Labor (by both kinds of preferences).  Essential went to 50:50 after being 51:49 to Coalition last week and ReachTEL went to 50:50 as well.  The two-point move in ReachTEL was mostly caused by volatility in their respondent-preference sampling; by last-election preferences the Coalition improved by only 0.7 points.

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch: Not Even A Dead Cat Bounce

2PP Aggregate: 50.0-50.0 Dead Heat (-0.1 for Coalition since end of last week)
Coalition would probably win with small majority if election "held now" (seat projection 78-68-4)
No significant move in voting intention detected in the past six weeks

This was a week in which it seemed like things might be starting to happen! First Peter Dutton said some rather provocative things about (supposedly) illiterate refugees.  This was widely regarded as a Lynton Crosby "dead cat" maneuver. The idea of that is that if you are hopelessly losing the argument, just say something ridiculous and disgusting and then everyone will talk about that instead of the issue you were losing.  A tiny minority of calmer voices pointed out that there was no need for Dutton to "throw a dead cat" since there had been nothing happening in the campaign worth distracting attention from, and suggested instead that Peter Dutton was just being Peter Dutton.  But still, perhaps all this was something voters would react to?

Then there was the NBN raid on ALP offices, a seemingly juicy matter that raised questions about the possible politicisation of policing referrals, and made people wonder whether the Prime Minister knew it was coming, and if he didn't know who knew, and who they told or didn't tell.  This, the commentariat told us, could only end badly for the Government, since at worst it looked like an unAustralian denial of fair play to a party in the middle of an election campaign, and at best it still focused attention on the government's failure to even deliver a second-rate NBN for anything near what they said they would.  Perhaps this then would finally set the polls alight?