Queensland 2020 Live

LABOR HAS WON THE QUEENSLAND ELECTION

EXPECTED RESULT (APPROX) ALP 50-52 LNP 34-36  KAP 3 GRN 2 PHON 1 IND 1 

LABOR 2PP LIKELY TO EXCEED 53%

Seats expected to change hands:

Whitsunday (NQF loss, probably to LNP)

South Brisbane (ALP loss to Greens)

Caloundra (LNP trailing ALP)

Pumicestone (LNP trailing ALP)

Incumbents struggling:

Bundaberg (LNP trailing ALP)

Hervey Bay (LNP trailing ALP)

Nicklin (LNP slightly trailing ALP)

Labor appear likely to beat Greens in Cooper and McConnel as difficult for Greens to bridge gap to second, but will look at this in more detail on Sunday.

Queensland 2020: Rolling Final Days Roundup

I'll be covering the Queensland election here on election night and in detail throughout the postcount, though on some days I may be busy with other things during the day.  

Another Queensland election count is a day and a bit away and there's a distinct lack of data for the usual polling aggregation/modelling type game, so I've decided to start a rolling roundup article which will cover a number of possible themes.  When new polls appear - assuming they do - new sections covering them will be posted at the top of the article. I also have a new article in The Guardian.  I should clarify that I didn't speak to any of the nameless insiders personally, and was going off other media reports.  There were reports since I filed that one that unnamed Labor insiders were more confident yesterday because internal polls had supposedly shown an uptick following one of those debates that nobody much watches.  This narrative was gleefully and even gullibly snapped up by Sky, perhaps because it was useful for attacking Gladys Berejiklian.  The NSW Premier will doubtless be scapegoated in the event of an LNP loss even if there is nothing special in the early/late voting history to justify such a charge.

Post-Budget Federal Polling Roundup

I haven't done a federal polling roundup for a long time, because most of the time at present we are only getting Newspoll.  However, last week saw the quarterly batch release of Essential's new poll results and there is actually enough information out there to make it worth sneaking in a general if slightly dated polling review in the small window of spare time I have between the ACT and Queensland election counts.  My previous comments about federal polling (or mostly, the Australian's lousy coverage thereof) were here.

This year we saw very little of a common polling trope in previous years - fevered speculation about whether the government of the day would get a "Budget bounce".  Actual budget bounces are rare, but the extremely well-received 2019 Budget not only saw an immediate lift of about 0.6% in aggregated polling for the Coalition, but also either coincided with or kickstarted a longer recovery that continued through the campaign.  We now know that all that polling was wrong, but we don't know if it was wrong by the same amount all along.  In any case, 2019 was another example of the strongest evidence (such as it was, since it could be coincidence rather than causation) for the Budgets that most help government polling usually occurring in a Coalition government's election year.  

Newspoll recently recorded a 51% 2PP for the government before the Budget and a 52% after it, which people unfamiliar with the idea of random statistical noise may have taken as evidence of another Budget bounce.  However, the evidence from Essential weakens if not completely negates the evidence for the bounce, depending on how Essential is interpreted.

ACT 2020 Final Results Review: How Did The Greens Win Six Seats?

The ACT election is over and the Labor-Green government has been returned.  Predictions that the Liberals would get even remotely close - based in many cases on unsound analysis - have been squelched, with the Liberal Party dropping to nine seats out of 25, the party's second-lowest seat share since Hare-Clark was adopted for the 1995 election.  

In an election that saw relatively minor vote swings (2.9% against the Liberals and 3.2% to the Greens) the most striking result was the Greens' spectacular seat haul, taking two seats apiece from the major parties to go from two to six seats out of 25.  They thereby won 24% of the seats off 13.5% of the vote, a feat that requires some explanation.  This is, by a very small margin in percentage terms, their highest seat share in ACT history.  By comparison in 2010 the party won just five seats with 21.6% of the primary vote in Tasmania's 25-seat Hare-Clark system, which also has five divisions with five seats in each.

2020 ACT Election Live And Post-Count

ACT Election 2020

Labor-Green government has been returned

Final result Labor 10 Liberal 9 Greens 6

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DISCLAIMER - all assessments are provisional except where stated as definitive calls.  Hare-Clark elections are very complex.

Friday

9:30 Final distributions are up - barring any kind of challenge (which is unlikely) it's all over.

In Brindabella Davis (Green) defeats Werner-Gibbings (ALP) by 82 votes, with Wall 110 ahead of the cutoff point.

In Ginninderra Ramsay is out by 166 votes.

In Kurrajong the Greens get two by 407 votes.  

The Queensland Poll Drought Is Finally Over

Note added 16 Oct: The Newspoll just out is virtually identical to the YouGov poll below so I have nothing to add to this article on its behalf, save that it is not just one poll saying this now, but two by the same company, and with much less time remaining.  It should be noted though that the Greens primary is down 1% on the YouGov poll, which makes the 52-48 2PP off those primaries rather than 51-49 seem more tenuous, especially with the information that the UAP is polling something in the Others tray.  

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YouGov 2PP 52-48 to Labor

Projected seat result if this poll is accurate: ALP win, but majority status touch and go (approx ALP 48-9 LNP 37 KAP 3 Green 2-3 ON 1 Ind 1 - almost no net change from 2017)

Over three months since the last, and less than four weeks til polls close, we finally have another public voting intention poll for the 2020 Queensland election.  Finally, for a week at least, I will be able to scan social media in search of polling data in some peace without the Violent Femmes singing "WHY CAN'T I GET JUST ONE POLL?" or the Angels responding "AM I EVER GONNA SEE A POLL AGAIN?" in my head.  The release of a rather large statewide YouGov sample that has Labor leading 52-48 finally gives me something to apply a statewide poll model to so I can talk about modelling and this election.  Though in comparison to 2017, there's really nowhere near as much to say.  

Could Just 2000 Shifting Votes Swing The ACT Election?

 Advance Summary

No.

(This article is rated 5/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.  It is extremely mathsy and technical.)

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Yesterday the ABC published an article that claimed that the Liberals could win the 2020 ACT election if just 2,000 ACT voters switched their vote compared to how they voted in 2016.  The article is still up and the author continued to defend it after both Tim Colebatch and I independently pointed out on Twitter why it was incorrect, so here is an article to explain in detail why this claim is not correct.  In the process I hope to highlight that interpreting Hare-Clark spreadsheets really is rocket science and that a simple question like "how close was the election?" can have a very complex answer.  

Newspoll: The Sound Of Narratives Dying

 This week's Newspoll results have included fresh approval ratings for Labor Premiers Daniel Andrews (Vic) and Annastacia Palaszczuk (Qld), along with a number of issues questions regarding handling of COVID-19.  These are well worthy of comment - Victoria especially - along with some brief comments on less striking results (but strikingly if typically bad reporting) in federal Newspoll land.

Victoria

A widespread narrative in Victoria has been that Premier Daniel Andrews is severely on the nose and his Premiership is in crisis, either because of the second wave of COVID-19 in the state that resulted from avoidable quarantine failures on his watch, or from the severity of lockdowns deployed in response to (so far successfully) bring new case numbers down.  

Victoria has recently seen public voting intention polling, finally, via a 51.5-48.5 lead in Roy Morgan Research's SMS polling.  I am not a fan of SMS polls as a method (I think they are too prone to motivated response), and Morgan's recent state polls have a history of volatility and being rather inaccurate, but at least this is something.  Also, ALP-linked campaigning firm Red Bridge has issued a 53.5-46.5 result for Labor.  These results followed Liberal Party MediaReach polling that had the Liberals picking up massive swings in a group of Labor-held seats (which if applied statewide would see Labor losing), but this is the same firm that, for instance, had the Territory Alliance on course to be the largest party in the NT parliament (it won a single seat very narrowly).  The internal poll also showed a rather heavy fall in the Greens vote, which seemed unlikely in the absence of anything that would cause it and given the general resilience of the Greens vote in recent elections (OK, except for Eden-Monaro.)  

Guardian debut

Just a very quick post to put up a prominent link to my debut article for The Guardian, a general preview of the Queensland election:

Queensland 2020 elections will be a test of state's COVID response

(This is a single commissioned piece, similar to commissioned pieces I have done in the past for other outlets, most frequently The Mercury.  I thank the Guardian very much for their interest in my work.)