As we all get reacquainted with the madness that is the first week of the new political season, the time is ripe to do a bit of a comprehensive rundown about the actual state of play of our political polling. We’ll start off looking at the trends and finish with an election simulation for the […]
Articles by Possum Comitatus 
Possum: Australian exceptionalism on an eight-lane highway
“Australian exceptionalism” … let that phrase roll off your tongue. Now stop laughing for a moment if you can. There’s something about that phrase that just doesn’t sit right with us. We’re not only unaccustomed to thinking about ourselves that way, but for many it’s a concept that is one part distasteful to three parts utterly […]
Possum: how Australian pollsters lean
We can never really tell if any pollster delivers results that are actually higher or lower for a party than other pollsters, because we just don’t have elections every week to determine the true state of public opinion.
Tax forum gave us naked policy debate and no horseshit
If you want to improve the debate in Australia, if you want real public debate in this country rather than the dismal sloganeering of the unhinged — this tax forum is a marvelous template.
Possum: Pollytrend metrics have Labor in palliative care
With a bag of polling data bursting at the seams, it’s that time of year again where we not only update our Pollytrend metrics.
Possum: polling trends — spring session edition
With the Parliament set to start its spring sitting session today, it might be worth taking a look at the current state of play on the polling trends using our Pollytrend system.
Possum: Labor’s worst month in government
This quarter has seen everything move towards the Coalition.
Possum: a budget so tough, Chuck Norris checks under the bed for it
Regardless of your politics, when politicians put some serious thought into public policy, they should be commended.
Possum: CSIRO gets insulation program to debunking media hysteria
The CSIRO last week released what was effectively a statistical analysis of the reality surrounding large parts of the infamous Home Insulation Program.l
Possum: carbon price opinion — the starting gates
Over the next 12 months, we’ll have more polls on pricing carbon than we can poke a stick at.
Possum: what’s a $1.8 billion levy look like?
The floods arent costing nearly as much as some may have earlier feared.
Possum: floods, prices and mortality
Just about every large destructive event — be it flood, fire or cyclone — has consequences on the prices of goods and services at the local level.
Possum: public opinion on same-s-x marriage
With three separate polls released over the past couple of months gauging public opinion on same-s-x marriage, it’s worth taking a squiz at how opinion has changed over the past few years.
Possum: how the once-mighty ALP fell
One of the more astonishing things about the federal election result is how the ALP managed to destroy such an enormous amount of public goodwill over such a relatively small time frame.
Possum: Bligh looking to remove optional preferential voting
There is no doubt at all that optional preferential voting existing at the state level increases the size of the informal vote at the federal election in those states.
More Morgan Reactor testing of US mid-term ads
We have a new batch of US mid-term ads that have been run through the Roy Morgan Reactor audience response testing (using US citizens and with the technology deployed online) — giving some pretty interesting results, especially by party breakdown. Looking at the latest batch of ads, they’re all “Vote for me! Vote for me!” type stuff […]
Possum: insulation fire risk — the data is in
What we found was that under every possible scenario, the government insulation program — far from increasing the rates of fire occurring from installing insulation — actually reduced the rate of fires and likely reduced the rate in a quite substantial manner.
Possum: Morgan Reactor and US mid-term political ads
Roy Morgan has deployed Reactor technology to track US audience response to several political ads currently showing in the US
Possum: how to double your average income in just four years
Want to double average income in four years? For that’s exactly what happened in the WA town of Ravensthorpe.
Possum: swings, margins and indie heterogeneity
If we break them down by state, just what occurred at the election becomes really easy to visualise (at least as an alternative to the visual of a train derailing at high speed).
Possum Comitatus: analysing the informal vote
Over the last 30 years or so, probably longer, the size and distribution of the informal vote that we see at every election can be largely explained by a handful of variables – with the election on Saturday being no exception.
Possum: penultimate polls and the Greensurge
The spooky similarity between the ALP 2010 versus Coalition 2004 polling patterns continue.
Possum: Lateral Economics — stimulus partially pays for itself
Were the total benefits of debt-funded stimulus greater than or less than the total costs of that debt-funded stimulus?
Possum: some new election simulation
With today’s combined two week Newspoll breakdown released over at the Oz, we can aggregate the results with the past two Nielsens and the JWS Godzilla poll to run some simulations.
