The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Galaxy has conducted a poll for SBS’s Insight program showing Labor leading 52-48 across a sample of marginal electorates: Dobell, Eden-Monaro, Blair, Moreton, Deakin, Stirling and Wakefield. The average margin in these seats is 3.5 per cent, so this suggests a combined swing of 5.5 per cent.
Reflections on the Miracle of Democracy at Work in the Greatest Nation on Earth
Galaxy: 52-48 in “marginals”
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911 Comments
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# 413 Kina Says:
November 20th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
We all know that any statement that IR reform is finished by howard is a ‘non-core’ promise.
Perhaps Howard should say “Further reform is finished. Dead. It’s never ever going to be put forward by our party again”. So he can make sure everyone knows he means it.
Downer’s a smirky little cock.
What an absolute fool he’s made of himself over the last 10 weeks.
How embarrassing that this petulant clown has been representing us for 11 years.
Looking forward to the expected result on Saturday (with fingers crossed!).
Wannon finally has had some mailouts (only 5 brochures so far). The hon. Mr Speakless has excelled himself by describing in a glossy A3 page a new bowling green as evidence of his environmental credentials. Pardon me while I throw up!
Finally getting interested in whats going on, I think that the social pendulum has now swung far enough to the right and is on its way back, as it always does.
LTEP,
Yes, saying the Coalition has no chance of winning at 46% TPP is incorrect. Will’s Monte Carlo simulation said that with a 46% TPP, the Coalition have a 1 in 100,000 chance of winning – close enough to zero.
As stated above, with a 52/48 split in favour of Labor, the Coalition only have a 2% chance of winning. So 53/47 should be comfortable for Labor…
P.S. I’m still sticking with my analysis that both Herbert and E-M will fall comfortably to Labor this time. I’ve seen no objective (i.e, external polls) that shows me anything to change this prediction…
Socrates! meany meany meany!
*giggle*
I am prepared to admit the LNP can win with a minotrity of the 2PP, so long as someone here suggests One Nation will get 8%. (as they did in 98)
Now I get it. The Liberals are competing with each other to say the most stupid thing. Not to be out done their State mob in NSW are getting in on the act.
A NSW State school put up the following sign on an external notice board.
“We are a society not just an economy”
John Watkins said :”Actually, both sides of federal politics believe that,”
Dingbat Stoner said: “It’s clearly a reference to the Howard government, it’s clearly been placed there at the peak time of political opportunism, just days out from an election.”
Here’s the story
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/School-sign-stirs-political-debate/2007/11/20/1195321750325.html
484 Slackboy
I also had the same concern about the Young Libs, hence my last helpful post. But they need career advice too:
- Seek.com
- defence enlistment (they will love it in Iraq but better hurry before Kev brings them home)
- emigration
Julie, Peter Hartcher on La Trioli this morning said that there was a high level meeting at the SMH today to decide who they’ll endorse.
I think the SMH hasn’t been too bad, and Hartcher is one of the better political correspondents.
I think we’d all be surprised if they endorsed Labor, however.
Glen “Gary Bruce why can’t we just ban the Citizens Electoral Council they are as bad if not worse than the EB!”
Democracy is why.
Swing Lowe, I’ve fiddled around with Antony Green’s election calculator and can come up with any number of scenarios where Labor doesn’t make it on 48% of the 2PP. Will’s simulation seems to demonstrate a uniform swing.
Anyhow I’m not going to argue on the 2PP stakes anymore. Its been done to death. As I’ve said, it’s not likely to happen in any case, but I’m just acknowledging the very slim possibility which gets less slim the closer you get to 50-50.
Mad Cow, I’ve received that DVD. Haven’t watched it yet.
Which one of the Tories was asking for evidence of Dolly being an embarrasment?
LTEP
So what if its not a 0 chance. Its statistically possible for a party to win on 25% of the vote but there’s no probability of it happening. The same with 46%. So why even mention it? Surely reason dictates that you go with what is highly probably rather than what is fractionally possible..
What electorate are you in LTEP?
LaLa Land
No point in complaining about Fran Kelly: I listen to her every morning and am often gobsmacked by breathtaking her lack of understanding on a number of subjects, including polling (she certainly doesn’t understand margins of error) and science. (She once interviewed a Nobel winning scientist and thought bacteria were the same as viruses. I rest my case.)
Swing Lowe: Thanks. Perhaps some people need to understand a Monte Carlo simulation is like rolling the dice. At 100000 simulations there was no win at 46%, I’ll try 10m simulations tonight just to please some people to prove it is possible but it would mean nothing anyway since it would be like 0.0001% chance.
It is possible.
A handful of marginals indeed. The pendulums are suggesting 90 seats to labor. That’s 8 seats being saved against the swing (90-2*8 = 74). That’s more than a handful.
The point is that any extra few percentage points these popular people have are ALREADY reflected in the vote.
You can make the “mariginals” not swinging argument for 1 seat, or even 2, but 8?
mad cow
I know its not very philosophical of me, but my sympathy for the lot now in power was emptied well before the passengers on the Seive X hit the water.
I hope someone has a good powerful camera trained on wherever Howard is and we can see the look on his face. Getting Janette in shot would be good too.
I forgot one more career option for the Young Libs:
- Clown School
Will try your simulation at 3% std and then keep lowering the 2PP until you get 1 in 100,000, 1 in 10,000… 1%.. 10% probabilities..
That would be an interesting sequence
Comment moderation cleanout conducted. Apologies for delays.
Al from Hindmarsh, I hope you’ll be coming down to the Henley South booth to take a how-to-vote card from me.
Well we seem to have got LTEP thinking positively again (sort of). Who else needs our help?
Of course there’s a probability of a party winning with 25%. I’m far too lazy to work it out but it’s very very slim. The closer this result gets to 50% the more probable it is of resulting in victory. Once it gets very close to 50%, the probability becomes even greater, particularly with the incumbency factor. Now, whether 46% is too far from 50% I’m not going to argue. As I said, I think it’ll be a smidgen closer to that on the day.
Should we raise possibilities that seem improbable? I think so. Who would’ve thought it likely the Coalition would win 4 Senate seats in Queensland in ‘04? History can throw up odd examples, and after the fact its easy to explain them away. I think its completely valid to discuss things with fractional probability.
People on here do it all the time by suggesting Labor will win 100+ seats, which surely must be so wild as to have only a slight chance of occurring. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t raise it.
You know, I have this thing about not kicking people when they are down.
It’s about being a gracious winner and giving a hand up to the losing opponent, saying – ‘well done, good comptetion!’
Then I remember they are Tories……….. and think ‘nuts to that’!!!
Death to the Tories,
Death to the Tories,
Oh what a wonderful day it will be,
With the workers flag flying
high above the GPO,
where the ol Tory rag used to be…………..
Socrates
If the rodent loses his seat you’re gonna need to have the VCR set up. It’ll be like the final scenes of king lear..
PI @ 488
I am not sure if you are accusing me of being “a blind conservative” but I don’t see Labor as a centralist party.
Yes, the party has moved to the right but I think your predjuces are shining through if you think Labor is a party of pluralism.
Wait on, I’m confused, no one told me this election was decided by Rudd and Howard rolling dice.
(Howard to Rudd… c’mon how about best 3 out of 5?… 5 out of 7?…)
mad cow, I am in Eden-Monaro.
Rates Analyst, yes you could make the argument for 8 seats. All the Coalition need to do is when each of these seats by handfuls of votes and the damage to the overall swing would be negligible. Of course they’d be extremely lucky if it broke like that and that must be what they’re hoping for. Odd non-uniform swings and a large amount of luck.
Go on Grog, there’s a joke about craps in there somewhere…
Socrates, you know my favorite daydream was kinda like this..
Take Howard, put him on the front seat of a bus..
Take Costello, sit him next to Howard..
Abbot..
Minchin..
Downer..
Once you get to about the 3rd row, ad mix folks like Alan Jones..
Pauline Hanson..
George Pell..
You’d have to think carefully because you’d have to stick to the most bigoted, dangerous and despicable people.
Then..
Drive the lot off a cliff!
I still have this “feeling”… not that the polls are wrong… they can’t be wrong. BUT – they might just well be a poor representation of what will happen on Saturday. It is known that quite often it takes up to 100 people before someone is willing to answer questions from Newspoll. Of course, this wouldn’t happen every time – but generally people will only participate in polls if they have a gripe, and would, in this situation, pitch a vote against Howard. On top of this, 15% of people decide who to vote for as they’re filling it out.
Whilst I totally agree that everything points to a Labor win, I will NOT be the least bit surprised if the Coalition is returned by a nose.
Darn Says:
November 20th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Well we seem to have got LTEP thinking positively again (sort of). Who else needs our help?
I think the MSM article that described this blog as therapy for nervous ALP voters was pretty much right
But I think the zillion polls in a row showing the ALP with a comfortable lead have worked better.
LTEP: The swing method I used was a normal distribution with a standard deviation based on last election’s swing distribution. That was about 3.05%.
A 54% TPP to the ALP is a swing of 6.7, so to cover 99.8% of all swings, I used random swings between -2.45 to 15.85 distributed as a Gaussian distribution (i.e. bell curve). 95% of swings would be in 2 standard deviations which would be 0.6 to 12.8, and 68.2% of swings would have been between 3.65 to 9.75. Because I used a Gaussian distribution random number generator, there would still be cases on either side including swings like -3.
While I didn’t list them there, yes there were some ALP seats lost but none more than .1% of the time. But in the 100,000 simulations (which would include ones were all the swings were low) there was no result less than 76 to the ALP.
I don’t claim that the distribution is correct, but to a first approximation it is.
Toby, it goes the other way too. There’s plausible reasons for thinking the polls have failed to take on board hidden groups of people who might actually vote more strongly Labor.
Toby (532) I think you just answered my question in 523.
I’ll leave it to you Pancho.
btw I’m on this blog at the moment because I’m taking care of my daughter while she is home sick, why aren’t you all working????
No wonder the ALP is concerned about Australia’s productivity!!
An article based on nothing
Apparently Labor need to win 18 seats now?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22790628-11949,00.html
There hasn’t been a single poll saying there is a swing to Coaltion in WA, just hype from Liberals
Umm wtf? “The latest Newspoll gap, according to pollster Martin O’Shannessy, suggests a 20 seat swing to Labor – hence the Prime Minister’s public optimism “
Paterson is certainly one to watch. I heard yesterday that Jim Arneman has door knocked about 7000 homes. He also did a lot of shopping centre visits and community events before the election was called. A lot of ground work has been done. Apparently this week they are concentrating on the southern portion of the electorate where they expect to get the big swing eg Raymond Terrace and east Maitland area. Hopefully that means a visit by Rudd.
519 Socrates- I hate to have to point this out but you have made a serious error when you use the phrase “I know its not very philosophical of me…”. This is a common mistake made by non-philosphers. It can be very philosphical to want revenge etc, it all depends on what philosophy you follow. You are referring to the Stoic philosophy in your post. With a name like yours, I just had to say something!
but Grog we ARE working……..
Toby, but surely that would have been the case in previous elections as well, and yet polls have been pretty good indicators. Plus the fact that there have been so many polls this year, conducted with different methodology and in different times and places, yet steadily given the same result time after time means a lot.
Toby, in that case why do polls ever say the Government is in front. Surely NSW Labor should’ve been behind routinely in polling up the this years’ state election if the ‘only answer if you’ve got a gripe’ theory is true.
Sean @ 526
I’m not sure if King Lear is an appropriate metaphor. Maybe Macbeth would be better? I do like Socrates suggestion of Downfall though. Watching a delusional despot convince himself against overwhelming evidence to the contrary that he was about to have his greatest victory over the unwashed socialist barbarians will be very reminiscent of some of the behaviour of the right wing media pundits (and tory lunatics on this board).
LTEP, Labor winning 100+ seats is FAR more likely than Labor losing with 54% 2PP. There are 150 seats total, and Bracks and Beattie both won around 2/3 of the seats with a bit less than 55% 2PP. In addition, the biggest swings to Labor have been occurring in Lib safe seats, medium in marginals and smallest in Labor safes. If Labor gets 55% it’ll be a crushing landslide, with plenty of Lib safes falling to Labor.
427 Diogenes
Rofl, I also tried an AWB comment that didn’t make it through.
Just did an Australia specific Google search for the term “Howard denies”.
The result: 14,300 hits!
About $100,000 queued up on Betfair to back on the ALP but not much on the other side.
A headline you don’t want to think about too much:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/were-not-faking-it-howard/2007/11/20/1195321747836.html
Try “Howard rejects”, MGM.
You get 16,700.
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