Pollytics

Politics, elections and piffle plinking

Tony Abbott – Running With Scissors

February 8, 2010 – 5:03 pm, by Possum Comitatus

Fresh from the virginity quips – which, as one of you lot pointed out in comments,  makes us wonder when we’re going to get a “Better Party to Manage” poll on that issue – comes a new episode of Tony running with scissors on the female vote. The audio (all 20 seconds of it) can be heard over here thanks to Malcolm Farnsworth on twitter

It’s groany, it’s cringy and it’s probably not helping him at all – but it’s pretty funny none the less.. “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing..”. Oh dear.

In other silly news, did you folks see the latest leftist conspiracy from the ABC? Deliberately manipulating the studio lighting to make Abbott look a little Hitler-esq on Insiders on Sunday – shame! :-D

abbott1 abbott2

abbott3

Interesting mo Tone! Expect it to be popping up in the unified theory of leftist ABC conspiracies from your favourite wingnut blogger at any moment.

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Essential Report – MySchool and Climate Change

February 8, 2010 – 3:29 pm, by Possum Comitatus

This weeks Essential Report has the primaries running 44 (down 1) / 38 (steady) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 55/45 the same way – a one point gain to the Coalition since last weeks Essential. The Greens are on 10 (up 1), while the broad “Others” are on 8 (steady). This comes from a rolling two week sample of 1868, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.3% mark.

Additional questions this week focused on climate change policy and the My School website. These additional questions came from a sample of 1033, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark.

Do you approve or disapprove the Liberal Party’s new policy on addressing climate change announced by Tony Abbott this week?

libclimatechangepolicyOn the cross-tabs, Essential says:

Coalition voters were more likely to approve the Liberal Party’s policy to address climate change (68%), while Labor and Green voters were more likely to disapprove (51% Labor, 47% Green).

Males were more likely to approve of the Coalitions’ policy (44%), while females were more likely to indicate they don’t know (49%).

The results here are consistent with what we saw earlier today in the Nielsen – Abbott’s policy of direct action using a climate change fund is generally popular with the caveat that there’s an awful lot of people that don’t know a thing about it.

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Which party do you think has the best policy for addressing climate change?

climatechangeparty

The brackets are the December question response wording.

On the cross-tabs, Essential tells us:

Results followed party lines – Coalition voters were more likely to think the Liberal Party has the best policy (58%), Labor voters were more likely to think Labor (44%), and Green voters were more likely to think the Greens have the best policy for addressing climate change (78%).

Males were more likely to think that the Liberal Party has the best policy (32%), while females were more likely to indicate that they don’t know which party has the best policy for addressing climate change (48%).

People aged 55 years and over were more likely to favour the Liberal Party’s policy when it comes to addressing climate change policy (37%), while people aged 25 – 34 were more likely to favour Labor (22%).

In December 2009, Essential Research put a similar question to the Australian public asking people to indicate whose position on the ETS and addressing climate change they most agree with. The results obtained this week are reasonably similar to those obtained previously for both the Liberal Party and the Greens. However the most notable difference is the result for Labor, with a 5% decrease since December.

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Have you visited the Government’s “My School” website which provides detailed information about all the schools in Australia.

myschool1On the cross-tabs, we have: Read More »

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Nielsen Part 2 – Climate Change Polling

February 8, 2010 – 2:53 pm, by Possum Comitatus

Continuing on from Part 1 of the Nielsen where we looked at the vote estimates, we’ll now take a bit of a squiz at the additional questions in the poll. There we three questions on the ETS/climate change and one on means testing the private health insurance rebate – so we’ll deal with the latter, isolated question, first. There’s plenty of data here to chew through so you might want to go and make yourself a cuppa first.

Nielsen asked:

And finally, families and individuals that pay private health insurance premiums are currently eligible for the Federal Government 30% Rebate on private health insurance. This means they get a 30% reduction on the cost of their private health insurance. The Government has introduced legislation to means-test the rebate for singles on incomes over $75,000 and couples over $150,000. Do you support or oppose a means test on the private health insurance rebate or is this something you don’t really have an opinion about?

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phidemographics

phiage

The usual partisan polarity turns up here that we seem to be increasingly seeing of late on any given issue, and the large numbers of “no opinion” washes out a lot of the political certainty. Yet the big standouts here are the male/female and Capital/Non capital city splits.

On the capital city/non capital city difference, it’s probably explained by basic income issues, which we also see coming out in the age cross-tabs. The wealthier cohorts of 25-39, 40-45 and Capital City all have higher levels of opposition to any means testing of the private health insurance rebate, probably reflecting basic self-interest where larger proportions of people in those cohorts would be affected negatively by any means test. In the poorer cohorts of 18-24, 55+ and non-capital city – we see higher levels of support for the means test.

The odd one out though is the gender divide. Be interested in your thoughts to try and explain that.

Moving on to the ETS, Nielsen asked three questions: Read More »

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Nielsen Part 1 – The Votes

February 8, 2010 – 9:57 am, by Possum Comitatus

Today’s Nielsen via Fairfax stable comes primaries running 42 (steady)/ 41 (up 4) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 54/46 the same way – a 2 point gain to the Coalition since the last Nielsen poll in November. The Greens are on 10 (down 3) while the broad ‘Others’ are on 8 (down 1). This comes from a sample of 1400, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.6% mark. The complete demographic tables for the poll can be seen here.

Nielsen is the last of the regular pollsters returning to the field this year, with all of them now having shown an increase in Coalition support under Abbott’s ascension to the leadership.

There was talk in the press today about the movement in some of the geographic subsamples of the Nielsen polls – specifically NSW. We need to be pretty careful about taking those State based sub-samples at face value because of the small sample sizes involved. In NSW, for instance, the sample is only around 430 – giving us margins of error between 4.5 and 4.7% for the major party primary votes and two party preferred. As a result, we expect to see a large chunk of random volatility in these sub-samples on a poll by poll basis.

To give an example of this in action, if we chart the major party primaries and two party preferred of the NSW sub-samples of the Nielsen polls and also add in the margins of error, this is what we get: (click to expand)

alpnswprims lnpprimsnsw

tppnsw

Just note that there were actually two Nielsens in November – I just knocked one out so the charts didn’t get cluttered up.

As you can see, the pure sampling error bands on these sub samples are pretty substantial, so just be wary of drawing too many conclusions from the state level data that you can find in the tables.

Nielsen also ran additional questions in this poll on the climate change policies and means testing the private health insurance rebate. I’ve got the full cross-tabs for those which I’m running through now and they’re particularly interesting – so there’ll be a specific post about the additional questions a little later on today.

UPDATE:

Nielsen Part 2 is now up.

Meanwhile, the usual Nielsen charts come in like this – just note Abbott’s relatively low net approval ratings for a new leader, it’s rather unusual. Read More »

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Betting Market Friday

February 5, 2010 – 6:38 am, by Possum Comitatus

Something we don’t pay much attention to around this place are the various political betting markets – so from now through until the election, we’ll have Betting Market Friday as a regular post. Essentially, what we’ll do is look at the federal election prices from five betting agencies – Centrebet, IASbet, Sportingbet, Betfair and Sportsbet – and do all sorts of nerdy things with them over time.

As we approach the election, we’ll be able to answer questions on whether poll results lead the betting markets around by the nose, which pollster has the biggest impact on the betting markets, and as individual seat markets open up, we’ll also be able to do some monte carlo simulations on them and see how the predicted election results differ from the latest polling snapshot election simulation.

We’ll also add the betting market implied probabilities for each party into the sidebar as a little graphic – because, well, that sidebar isn’t quite filled with enough information yet :-P

To start the ball rolling, we have to calculate ourselves some implied probabilities from the prices that the betting agencies are offering. This is a two stage process – firstly we have to get ourselves some nominal probabilities. Secondly, we have to adjust those nominal probabilities for the overround – the effective commission that the betting agency makes from the book.

To calculate the overround and the nominal, unadjusted probabilities – we just simply take the inverse of the prices to get the latter, and sum them together to calculate the former. Using an example, the latest Centrebet prices have the ALP on $1.20 to win the next election, while the Coalition is sitting on $4.25. The calculations then look like this:

bettingeq1

These prices give nominal probabilities of 83.3% likelihood of victory for the ALP compared to the Coalition’s 23.5%. However, you may notice that the probabilities add up to 106.86%? That excess probability is how the betting agencies make their money.It represents the cream they take from the market.

If we assume that the betting agencies are making money equally from both sides of the betting equation (in that the ALP probabilities are inflated in the same approximate proportion as the Coalition probabilities), we can adjust for this overround to get at the true implied probabilities associated with the prices by simply dividing the nominal probability of each price by the overround.

bettingeq2

Currently, the Centrebet prices imply that there is a 77.98% probability of the ALP winning this coming election compared to the Coalition’s 22.02%.

If we do that for all five betting agencies and calculate an average based on the raw data from those agencies, this is what Read More »

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Abbott vs. Latham Polling Deathmatch

February 3, 2010 – 9:36 am, by Possum Comitatus

A few of you have asked about polling comparisons between the early stages of the Latham and Abbott leaderships. While there’s certainly some similarities in the way that each leader had an impact on the polling metrics in their first few poll outings, there’s some considerable differences between the two when it comes to the size of each leaders satisfaction, dissatisfaction, preferred PM and two party preferred vote.

To start with, we’ll run through the two party preferred and preferred PM. Fortuitously, we can use the same bottom axis here as both Latham and Abbott gained the leadership in December – 2003 for Latham and 2009 for Abbott. To keep everything consistent, we’ll just use Newspoll data for the whole post (click to expand).

lathamabbotttpp lathamabbottbetterpm

Both leaders increased the size of the two party preferred vote for the opposition, but Latham was coming off a much higher base level. Similarly, on the preferred PM metric both leaders increased their ratings, but Latham was always on a higher base and a higher level of uncommitteds than Tone.

If we move on to the satisfaction ratings, things start to get quite different. Read More »

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Newspoll – a close one

February 2, 2010 – 6:28 am, by Possum Comitatus

Newspoll via The Oz comes in with the primaries running 40 (steady)/ 41 (up 3) to the Coalition, washing out into a two party preferred of 52/48 to Labor. The Greens are on 12 (steady) while the broad “Others” are 7 (down 3). This comes from a sample of 1146, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

This is the equal lowest Newspoll primary and two party preferred vote for Labor since they’ve been in government, as we can see by taking a squiz at the Newspoll primary and TPP charts since January 2008.

newspollprimarylong newspolltpplong

It’s pretty clear that Abbott is on a honeymoon, at least according to Newspoll – but adding strength to the argument that it’s a real vote shift at the moment rather than a whimsical dipping of the toe into Coalition waters, it’s worth looking at our two party preferred vs. net satisfaction rating chart for Rudd: Read More »

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Essential Report – Voter Firmness Edition

February 1, 2010 – 4:15 pm, by Possum Comitatus

This week’s Essential Report comes in with the primaries running 45 (down 1) / 38 (up 1) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 56/44 the same way – steady since last week. The Greens are on 9 (up 1), while the broad “Others” are on 8 (down 1). This comes from a rolling two week sample of 1937, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.2% mark.

Additional questions this week focus on the strength of the political vote, campaigning in shopping centres, productivity, politicians & moral advice and the republic/flag/national anthem triplets.

These additional questions run from a sample of 1078, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark.

Would you say your choice is very firm, pretty firm but you might change your mind, or might you consider another party and leader as the campaign develops?

firmness

On the cross-tabs, Essential tells us:

People aged 55 years and over were more likely to consider their voting choice ‘very firm’ (60%), people aged 25 – 34 were more likely to indicate it as ‘pretty firm but I might change my mind’ (43%), while 18 – 24 year olds were more likely to indicate they ‘might consider another party and leader closer to an election’ (29%).

We often here about the soft Labor or Coalition vote, but the softest of them all appears to be the Greens. Read More »

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The Election Year Starts Now

February 1, 2010 – 8:40 am, by Possum Comitatus

Today, the Australian Electoral Commission has released political party funding data for the 2008/09 financial year. It can be seen in all its searchable glory over here. Let us know if you find anything interesting.

To wet the whistle, if we look at just those companies that donated to both the Federal ALP and the Federal Coalition, not all had been donating equally (click to expand).

donations

I’ve also listed the total value of all receipts for each party, and the number of donations above $10,900 – the threshold for which donations cease to be effectively anonymous.

Not stopping there, today we also have the release of Swan’s version of the intergeneration report, titled : Australia to 2050: Future Challenges . It should pop up here about 12:30 AEDT over here somewhere.

If you’re into important economic stats, today also sees the release of the ABS measure of house prices in the eight capital cities.

Tomorrow of course we have Parliament starting – join us on twitter for the fun and games in real time. (Speaking of which, if anyone wants to understand what this twitter business is about for political tragics, give me a yell in comments – if there’s enough people interested in getting into the whole thing but have no idea where to start or what the point of it all is, we’ll run a post on it, walk you through it and set you up.)

Also tomorrow we have the release of the Coalition’s new Read More »

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When Big Polling Leads Match Election Results

January 28, 2010 – 1:59 pm, by Possum Comitatus

Antony had a good post over on his blog today about how the current big polling leads Labor enjoys may not end up flowing through to a large election victory. My own view on the subject is that I’m completely and utterly open minded about the prospect – it’s worth explaining why.

If we look back over the last 10 years or so of federal and State politics, there’s been a number of examples where political parties have enjoyed large and consistent polling leads. In fact, there’s been five really strong examples where a party has completely dominated the polling for most or all of their term, and two moderately strong examples where a party dominated the polling late in their term. Of the 7 times a party has dominated the polling, on 6 of those occasions the party has gone on to get election results consistent with those large polling leads.

The only exception was Kevin Rudd and Labor in the 2007 federal election.

The other interesting thing to note is that when you just look at incumbent governments and their polling, of the six incumbent governments that experienced big polling leads, all six of them went on to win large election victories consistent with those big polling leads.

First up, we’ll take a look at the five strong examples of polling domination in Qld in 2001 and 2004, Victoria in 2002, South Australia in 2006 and the Federal election in 2007. We’ll track the polling on both primary vote terms and estimated two party preferred terms through to the actual election result using Newspoll data. I had to construct a two party preferred estimate for some of this polling (Qld, NSW and Vic) as Newspoll either didn’t measure or didn’t publish that estimate (click the charts to expand).

qld2001 qld2004 Read More »

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