Elections and polls
Labor holds its lead, and signs of rising support for “others”
The latest Newspoll, covered in William Bowe’s Poll Bludger, finds Labor and the Coalition level-pegging on primary votes of 37 per cent, which translates to a 53:47 two-party lead for Labor.
But do we pay too much attention to the two-party outcome? Newspoll asks people about their support for Labor, the Coalition, the Greens, One Nation and “other”. The “other” vote has been rising over the last three Newspolls and is now above its level in the 2019 election.
A few words about interpreting these figures. Polls are good at picking support when they’re around 50-50: they become less reliable at picking up small levels of support. (The explanation takes a couple of pages of statistical mathematics.) Also there is a bias in nation-wide political polls because it is easy for people to conceptualise “Labor”, “Green” and so on, but it is much harder to conceptualise “Independent”. Nation-wide polls don’t ask the voters of Warringah if they would vote for Zali Steggall or the voters of Clark if they would vote for Andrew Wilkie. For this reason, opinion polls tend to under-state support for small parties and independents.
We don’t know who these “others” are. They may be people or parties on the lunatic fringe – stooges for the coal mining industry who corral anti-vaxxers as a means of ensuring preferences go towards the Coalition. They may be far-right libertarians. Or they may be candidates like Helen Haines or Rex Patrick standing on issues avoided by big parties in their race to outdo each other on populism.
The Sydney Morning Herald has also produced some figures from a Resolve Strategic poll of federal voting intentions. It shows a small fall in support nationally for the Coalition since the 2019 election and no change in the Labor vote.
From the time Resolve Strategic came on the polling scene it has been hard to reconcile their figures with those of other polls. One point that may be significant however, is that while Newspoll has been consistently showing the combined Labor plus Coalition vote between 75 and 79 per cent (it was 75 per cent in the 2019 election), this latest Resolve Strategic poll shows the big parties’ combined vote to be 72 per cent nationally, in New South Wales and Victoria, and only 70 per cent in Queensland. This result is worth considering because it would be unusual for a sampling error to be consistent in three sub-samples. It shows the Greens vote to be largely unchanged from the election. As in other polls One Nation scores poorly, except in Queensland where its support is shown at 11 per cent. “Independents” also score highly in this poll.
Writing in The Conversation Adrian Beaumont takes us into some details of recent political polls, along with comments on a Newspoll finding that voters support the AUKUS agreement by a 59-31 per cent majority. One might wonder what people’s support for AUKUS would be had the Morrison government explained it, or had Labor not meeklly gone along with it. That’s a cost of Morrison’s wedge politics: when the opposition fails to take the bait the media lose interest and public attention is drawn away from important issues.