William Bowe
Editor of The Poll Bludger @PollBludger
William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, is one of the most heavily trafficked forums for online discussion of Australian politics, and joined the Crikey stable in 2008.
Another double header in our ongoing scramble to cover potential Coalition-held seats of interest … Dunkley (Liberal 1.1%) Dunkley covers an area of bayside Melbourne about 40 kilometres from the city centre and has been effectively unchanged by redistribution. It consists of two distinct electoral parts, with Labor-leaning Frankston and its northern coastal neighbour Seaford […]
Four new poll results have been added for the BludgerTrack aggregate this week, with Newspoll handing Labor a relatively weak result and ReachTEL, Essential Research and Morgan recording little change. The force of Newspoll has pulled the two-party preferred total 0.4% in the direction of the Coalition, which nets it a handy three seats on […]
Seat of the week #1: Forde Straddling the southern edge of Brisbane, Forde was one of a number of Queensland seats that fell Labor’s way under Kevin Rudd’s leadership at the 2007 election, only to be lost again in the wake of his demise three years later. The electorate contains the eastern part of the […]
Longman is centred on Caboolture and Burpengary in Brisbane’s outer north, from which it extends eastwards to Bribie Island and the mainland coast immediately opposite and westwards to the semi-rural townships of Woodford and D’Aguilar. The seat was created at the 1996 election from territory that had mostly been in Fisher, which thereafter assumed a […]
Three weeks after I hit reset on BludgerTrack’s “poll of polls”, the results remain sensitive to weekly variation as the overall pool of data is still very shallow (11 polls in all). This week we have had Nielsen’s monthly result, the poll which appeared last week from newcomers AMR Research and the usual weekly Essential […]
Held by troubled Labor-turned-independent MP Craig Thomson, Dobell covers the urban areas around Tuggerah Lake just beyond the northern coastal reaches of Sydney, including the coastal retirement haven of The Entrance, lower-income Wyong on the interior side, the tourist area from Bateau Bay south through Wamberal to Terrigal, the demographically unremarkable northern Gosford suburbs of […]
Kevin Rudd’s electorate of Griffith covers inner-city Brisbane immediately south of the Brisbane River, from South Brisbane east to Bulimba and Queensport, south to Annerley and south-west to Carina Heights. Highly marginal historically, Griffith changed hands between Liberal and Labor in 1949, 1954, 1958, 1961, 1966, 1977, 1996 and 1998. Don Cameron won the seat […]
Expect highly volatile polling results in the next few weeks, but when things calm down, Rudd's numbers will probably not be as good as they currently are.
The electorate of Canberra covers the southern half of the national capital together with the bulk of the Australian Capital Territory’s thinly populated remainder, with northern Canberra accommodated by the seat of Fraser. The two ACT electorates presently have enrolment of around 130,000 voters each, compared with a national average of around 96,000. The electorate […]
Isaacs covers south-eastern bayside Melbourne from Mordialloc south to Carrum, from which it extends inland as far as Western Port Highway to encompass Keysborough in the north and Carrum Downs in the south. The bayside suburbs are naturally marginal and shifted decisively to the Liberals at the state election in November 2010, whereas the centres […]
