Newspoll: More Off-The-Scale Leader Ratings

Newspoll has returned with a second round of the very welcome State Premier approval ratings first seen in late April.  I thought a brief (by my standards) post about the current round of Newspolls was worth putting up overnight as the results are already sparking discussion in Tasmanian politics.

In each case I give the Premier's net rating, followed by the change from April, followed by the satisfied and dissatisfied split.

Gladys Berejiklian (NSW) is on +42 (-4) (68-26)
Daniel Andrews (Vic) is on +40 (-18) (67-27)
Annastacia Palaszczuk (Qld) is on +24 (+8) (59-35)
Mark McGowan (WA) is on +79 (-4) (88-9)
Steven Marshall (SA) is on +52 (+5) (72-20)
Peter Gutwein (Tas) is on +82 (+9) (90-8)

And just for completeness, Scott Morrison (PM) is on +41 (+4) (68-27).

White Goes First, Right Goes Beatup: The ABC Did Not Attempt To Cancel Chess

In recent days I've been involved in a media and social media flurry sparked by the ABC's decision to explore the subject of whether White moving first in a game of chess was in any way connected to race issues.  This claim was once most commonly seen as a spoof of anti-racism campaigns, but these days, a small number of people seem to be actually fearing chess might be symbolically racist.

I appeared on ABC radio and gave an interview that outlined that there is no evidence this is the case.  The host did not try to argue that there was, just mentioned that people on social media have held concerns about the issue.  The mere existence of that interview has triggered a massive backlash from right-wing culture warriors, which had already started before the interview aired.  The thing is, it is unclear that the enemy they're tilting at exists!  The ABC may be guilty of filling up its programs with offbeat fluff on the slender pretext of a few tweets, but that does not mean it was trying to have chess cancelled.

Legislative Council Voting Patterns 2016-2020

Advance summary:

1. This article presents a revised analysis of voting patterns in the Legislative Council (the upper house of Tasmanian Parliament) based on contested divisions involving the current MLCs in the last four years.

2. Although there is a degree of independence in all Legislative Council voting (except among caucusing party MLCs), the Council continues to have a clearly defined "left wing" consisting of the four Labor Party MLCs, and independents Mike Gaffney, Ruth Forrest, Kerry Finch, Rob Valentine and Meg Webb.

3. The two Liberal MLCs and independents Ivan Dean and Robert Armstrong belong to a similarly clearly defined "right" cluster.  Independents Tania Rattray and Rosemary Armitage do not belong to any cluster but currently side somewhat more with the right cluster than the left cluster.  

4. A possible left-to-right sort of the Council is Webb, Valentine, Forrest, the four Labor MLCs (Farrell, Lovell, Siejka and Willie in no particular order), Gaffney, Finch, Armitage, Rattray, the two Liberal MLCs (Hiscutt and Howlett in no particular order), Armstrong, Dean.  However Webb's placement is unreliable because of limited evidence.  

5. Going into the 2020 elections, the left holds an absolute majority in the Legislative Council, normally meaning that the government needs the support of Labor or at least two left independents to win votes.  This will remain the case, the question being the size of that majority.

Unpopular State Premiers Still Have Dire Historic Fates

It's been over a month since I posted a new article on this page, though updates to previous articles have continued, especially Eden-Monaro.  I have some vague idea where that time went (a number of distractions from psephology lately) but there hasn't been a huge amount going on lately and I tend not to write just for the sake of having something up.  There will always be something new here eventually!

This article is another piece where I update a previously published article from some time ago and see whether the pattern described in it is still holding up.  Today's target for an update is Unpopular State Premiers Have Dire Historic Fates, from 2013.  This article was inspired by a bad Newspoll for then Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett.  Barnett had been re-elected with a 57.3% 2PP nine months earlier so it probably seemed adventurous to see a single Newspoll still showing his government in a narrow lead as the first of the circling vultures.  But it was - Barnett survived a leadership challenge in 2016 but was dumped by the voters in 2017 with an enormous 12.8% swing.

He wasn't alone.  Since I released the original article, Campbell Newman was dumped by voters with a massive swing, as was Lara Giddings. Jay Weatherill also lost (albeit with a 2PP swing to him) and Mike Baird, who had been very popular in his first term, became somewhat unpopular in his second and resigned.  The four election defeats for unpopular Premiers helped beef up the evidence that it is the voters, and not just the parties, who tend to show them the door.  In the same time, Premiers who had not polled such bad ratings in their terms were re-elected twice in NSW and once each in Queensland, SA, Victoria and Tasmania, with Victoria's Dennis Napthine (worst netsat -4) the sole casualty to not poll a bad rating.  The chart below (click for larger clearer version) shows the fates of every state Premier who has polled a netsat worse than -10 in Newspoll history (which starts in 1985).  Premiers are sorted by the worst netsat they polled during the term.

Eden-Monaro By-Election 2020: How Loseable Is It?

EDEN-MONARO (NSW, ALP 0.85%)
By-election July 4th
Cause of by-election: resignation (citing health reasons) of Mike Kelly (ALP)
Outlook: It's a weird one, and so anything could happen.  For what it's worth, historical patterns slightly favour Labor.

Welcome to my pre-analysis page for the Eden-Monaro by-election.  I expect to have a live page on election night, but starting late (say 8 pm) because of a clash with something else.

There are two main narratives about this by-election as the parties compete for the role of underdog and try to manage expectations in advance.  The first is that the loss of an opposition seat to an incumbent government in a federal by-election is literally a once in a century event (it happened for the only time in 1920) and that therefore a government win is unrealistic.  The second is that the seat's marginal nature combined with the high personal vote of outgoing ALP incumbent Mike Kelly makes the seat extremely difficult to defend in the current environment.  I argue here that both these narratives are wrong.   The by-election is much more loseable than the "100 years" history suggests, but all of the arguments as to why it could be lost have at times been overplayed.

If you want a go at picking the outcome yourself, there's a Not-A-Poll in the sidebar, running until polls close.  (As of 4 pm 4 July, the average forecast on this site was 50.89% to Labor, ie zero swing, with one voter predicting a non-major party winner. This site's reader base skews fairly heavily to the left.)

Legislative Council 2020: Rosevears And Huon Not Live

Note added August 1: for the real live coverage go here.

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In some alternative universe, the polls will close about four hours from now ...

In the normal scheme of things, today would have been the day for the Rosevears and Huon Legislative Council elections.  I think it is worth a quick post to reflect on that fact and to summarise where things are with the postponement of these elections, which I have also been covering in an article that is now well down the list.

The elections were postponed because of risks associated with the current coronavirus outbreak.  Indeed in recent weeks Tasmania has had the nation's proportionally most severe outbreak of COVID-19, but it has been almost entirely confined to the north-western health system and close contacts of individuals within it.  A very small number of cases within that outbreak have been diagnosed in the North and South rather than the North-West, but beyond that the South has had only two cases in the last month (for one of which on 6 April, no detail ever appeared to my knowledge) and the North has not had any.

Newspoll: Record Premier Ratings And A Very Strange Federal Poll

This week Newspoll polled state Premier approval ratings, but not voting intentions (perhaps because samples by state would have been too small for voting intention sampling).  It was to be expected that several state Premiers would have very high approval ratings given their handling of the coronavirus crisis, but perhaps not that the figures would be quite so spectacular:

Prev = previous poll.  *= As opposition leader.  #=YouGov poll not branded as Newspoll.

As high as Scott Morrison's current net rating of +40 is (more on that later), all the Premiers except Palaszczuk have beaten it.  None of them were coming off a particularly high base, though the most recent polling for Victoria and WA is ancient.  For Tasmania this is the first Newspoll of Premier satisfaction since the 2014 state election.

Why Better Prime Minister/Premier Scores Are Still Rubbish

Advance Summary

The "better Prime Minister" or "better Premier" score in Newspoll polling is a frequent subject of media focus.  This article explores the history of Newspoll preferred leader scores at state and federal elections and during terms and finds that:

* Better Leader scores are skewed indicators that favour incumbents by around 14-17 points at both state and federal level.

* Better Leader scores add no useful predictive information to that provided by a regression based on polled voting intention.

* If anything, Prime Ministers with high Better Prime Minister leads may be more likely to underperform their polled voting intention, but this is already captured in the relationship between polled voting intention and actual results.

* At state level, leading as Better Premier is a worse predictor of election wins or losses than leading on two-party preferred and having a positive net satisfaction rating.  This is because Better Premier is a weaker predictor of vote share than polled 2PP and is also more skewed as a predictor of election outcomes than either.

Morrison Breaks Two Newspoll Records Amid Coronavirus Crisis

The Newspoll just released deserves a special post in the absence of other polling, because of a couple of historic bounces for incumbent Prime Minister Scott Morrison.  It should be stated from the outset that these records have fallen partly because Morrison was coming off a low base.

To give the numbers first, the government now leads 51-49 two-party preferred, a gain of two points from three weeks ago.  The primaries are Coalition 42 (+2) Labor 34 (-2) Greens 13 (+1) One Nation 5 (+1) Others 6 (-2).  (I have a concern that the new Newspoll methods may be overestimating the Greens' vote by naming only them and the majors on the initial screen).  Scott Morrison leads Anthony Albanese 53-29 as "better Prime Minister", up from 42-38 last time, noting that Better PM is an indicator that tends to skew to incumbent PMs all else being equal (so 42-38 was actually a bad result for Morrison).  Morrison has a net satisfaction rating of +26 (61 satisfied 35 dissatisfied), up 38 points from -12 (41-53) last time.  Albanese has a net satisfaction rating of +9 (45-36), up 9 points.

What is notable overall here is that the government has only registered a modest bounce on voting intention but perceptions of Morrison's leadership have been changed dramatically by the crisis. This is indicative of a bipartisan mood where many voters are willing to say that although they support an opposition party, the government leader is doing a good job with this crisis.  (One can hear similar from Victorian Liberal voters regarding Daniel Andrews.)