In the wake of its most unambiguous failure at a federal election since at least 1980, Australia’s polling industry is licking its wounds.
The Nine/Fairfax papers announced last week that the Ipsos poll series will be put on ice. Those pollsters who do return to the field shortly will face catcalls — whether they persist in recording a Labor lead we now know doesn’t exist, or only now start detecting a Coalition lead that eluded them through the entirety of the past parliamentary term.
Despite it all, though, the pollsters’ performance hasn’t been without its defenders.
David Briggs, who as principal of YouGov Galaxy is responsible for Newspoll, argued in The Australian last week that expectations of a Labor win had arisen less from the polls’ inaccuracy than with the failure of commentators to interpret them properly.
Lest we be too quick to file this under “he would say that, wouldn’t he”, a not dissimilar view was advanced last week by no less an authority than Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight publisher and long-standing poster boy of American psephology.
Arguing that a judicious interpretation of the polls would have allowed a one-in-three chance of a Coalition win, Silver wrote that “journalists” who spoke of a “massive polling failure” had shown themselves to be “not particularly numerate” — referring, would you believe it, to Antony Green.
With Nate Silver having called it from on high, should we not conclude that our pollsters merely hit a burst of the noise that inevitably distorts their signal from time to time? Should we leave it to them to do better next time with the same methods and, hopefully, a bit more luck?
Well, not so fast.
Silver’s one-in-three calculation derives not from the conventional considerations of sampling error, but from what he imagines to be an established record of mediocre performance by Australian pollsters. This is based entirely on a tweet-length assessment of the polling record going all the way back to 1943, well before any polling organisation here or abroad had any real idea what it was doing.
Local observers knew better about the three-decade reign of Newspoll, which has consistently produced large sample polling of the highest standard on the eve of each election, in a successful strategy by the Murdoch organisation to bolster the prestige of the newspaper that bears it, The Australian.
Until last Saturday, Newspoll had hit close to the bullseye before every federal election since 1993, excepting a partial failure in 2004 when inaccurate preference allocations threw out the two-party total.
Such a record would be the envy of any international pollster, and could probably only be accomplished under Australia’s enforced regime of stable high turnout.
The fly in the ointment may be that Newspoll as we know it actually came to an end when the company of that name was wound up in 2015, after which Newspoll became a brand name for polling conducted by YouGov Galaxy. Where the old Newspoll was a live interview phone poll — which had persisted, increasingly contentiously, in targeting landline phones only — the new Newspoll combined automated “robo-polling” with surveys of an online panel.
In its first major test at the 2016 federal election, this approach produced an eye-wateringly accurate set of numbers that seemed to dispel any doubts as to the new Newspoll’s right to claim the mantle of the old.
This time though, a big sample pre-election poll with a theoretical error margin of 1.8% appeared to confirm the established trend, only to prove nearly 4% amiss on the primary votes of both major parties. And with that, the long apparent danger that the entire polling industry might one day be herded off a cliff was realised.
Whatever some pollsters might offer for public consumption, all will be acutely aware that they now face a serious challenge in restoring their credibility, and that they have no reason to think they can accomplish it by persisting with their existing methods.
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Pollsters need to take a leaf from the worlds specialist smoke and mirror dealers. Moody’s, Standard & Poors, et al.
Actually, ‘Australia’s enforced regime of stable high turnout’ didn’t turnout this time. More than 4 million eligible voters didn’t vote, and 3.7 million of them were enrolled. This represents a swing to indifference much greater than the swing toward or away from any of the major parties. What are the reasons for this? And why is nobody talking about it? You can easily find an unlawful non-voter: there’s a dozen between you and the nearest street corner.
Add to that reports of increased proportions of informals. I’ll be interested to see the final estimates for deliberate informals in particular (i.e. defaced or commented on rather than incorrectly numbered).
Where did you find this figure?
16 million were enrolled to vote. Are you claiming nearly a quarter of them actually didn’t vote?
Not claiming: it’s the AEC’s figure.
I find that hard to believe. The AEC hasn’t even finished the count yet and there is no way a quarter of enrolled voters were no shows.
Just looked at the aec website – about 12 and a bit million votes counted?
@NB et al
By my look at AEC Reps vote
10% stayed home
another 5% did not cast a formal vote.
Looking at
https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseStateFirstPrefsByParty-24310-NAT.htm
13,928,827 formal 94.9%
812,538 informal 5.51%
TOTAL: 14,741,365 89.75%
89.75% refers to the turnout.
That’s 89.75% of 16,424,919 possible.
So – 10.25%, or 1,683,554 stayed home
Add 812,538 informals and 2,496,092 or 15.2% of registered voters did not cast a valid vote.
In the Reps.
I’ll have a look at Senate.
Senate is not complete from what I can tell. Various booths are “not complete”.
They have a “turn-out” (which includes informals) of 81.81% as opposed to 89.75% for Reps. Can’t see how this is the final figure.
Turn out for Senate: https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/SenateTurnoutByState-24310.htm
Turn out for Reps: https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseTurnoutByState-24310.htm
The Sydney Morning Herald has just run a report on the record no-show and informal voting, particularly by young voters, whom Labor was counting on. In other countries, pollsters may well ask if voting intention will become a valid vote. Up till now they have not had to ask this here due to historical patterns of compliance. As the article suggests, is possible that if the missing voters had turned up and cast a valid vote things might have been a bit different.
The article asks the question as to whether we might be evolving toward a turnout contest between the parties as in other countries.
But why were the polls so consistent for so many consecutive months and wrong on Election Day?
And the exit polls. All consistently wrong. There has to be an element of shy-tory syndrome, which conservatives like to paint as the product of intimidatory political correctness.
You know – the brutal litotes and sarcasm of PC nazi robo-pollsters, who are notorious for saying things like, “Voting LNP?! Could we just confirm we’ve got you’re correct address?”
Another possibility comes to mind: they might just think, quite independently, that a response of “Intend to vote LNP” exposes them as shallow self-interested prats.
Pollsters get primary votes in the low 30s for Labor and yet predict that the 2PP will split 52/48 in their favour. I’d like to see the paper-work on that. Flows of preferences are not going according to their formulae.
Only Ipsos got 33 primary for Labor, and that was due to their long running issue of having Labor’s primary about 3 points down and the Greens primary about 3 points up on everyone else (which comes out to about the same 2PP as everyone else).
Everyone else was around 36-37 from memory. That was the error… the Labor/Green combined primary was 3 or 4 points lower than all the pollsters had.
It is correct that the flow of preferences is also stronger to the Coalition than expected. It turned out that Newspoll’s decision to increase the pro-Coalition flow of preferences from One Nation and Palmer from what it had been in previous years was an underestimate. Those voters preferenced the Coalition much more strongly than in the past.
This may be only one smaller side of the problem. Consistently poor polling finally dragged a crooked LNP to the banking RC, caps on super balances and contributions and some small actions on animal live exports to name a few.
There’ll now be even less response to public opinion and that’s already apparent with resurgent talk of company tax cuts, religious bigotry (aka freedom) laws and attacks on industry super. The cave in over mortgage broker commissions was at least before the election.
There’ll be no action on carbon emissions, local gas prices and non payment of export royalties, multinational tax avoidance or the Murray Darling scheme rorts. Goodness what new ways to gouge the public purse will be dreamt up.
Yes and no.
The reporting suggests that the Coalition think their polling only actually turned around when they announced their predicted budget surplus coupled with the “Labor can’t manage money” motif and Labor not countering it at all during the campaign.
Also, it wasn’t poor polling that moved the Coalition on some of those things. The banking RC, for example, occurred because the Nationals were ripe to burst on it, and the Nationals were ripe to burst on it not because of polling but because their own supporters were hammering them on it internally. The Nats know that they are always vulnerable to independent challengers if they don’t listen to their supporters, regardless of the state of the polls.
Actually, the Coalition seemed remarkably resistant to change policies in order to obtain a polling bounce. It would have been easy to let Turnbull deliver a figleaf of a climate change policy to win votes; they didn’t. It would have been easy to roll over on the banks; they resisted until the National threat to cross the floor became impossible to ignore. They fought for the big business tax cuts until every avenue for persuading the cross-bench was exhausted. And so on.