Just checking in to remind everyone that back in Nov 2008 I stated that Obama would win two terms. mainly due to the voters wanting someone to stick around long enough to clean up the colossal Bush mess, a task I described as “janitorial” rather than “messianic”.

I followed up in Apr 2010 when I predicted that the Tea Party would  ”burn out” and Obama would win the 2012 election “comfortably”. I also argued that Obama needed to focus on winning a bigger share of the “white working class” vote.

Its still possible for an upset Romney victory to spoil my winning streak. Especially if base turnout favours the REPs. But It looks like the auto bailout has swung the white working class vote in Ohio into the DEM column.

Everyone goes on about Ray Fair, Doug Hibbs and Nate Silver in the US and Possum Polytics, Poll Bludger and Mumbles in AUS. They are all great quants but I am now sitting on a 6 on 6 winning streak picking US/AUS federal elections through the naughties. With a good chance of making it 7 on 7 with Obama.

If the poll goes as I predicted then I would be interested to see if any other psephs can top that. Either I am very lucky or as Jack Nicklaus once remarked, “the more I practice the luckier I get”.

The way things are going, he’ll be waiting a long time…

Missing your rundown of polling data. Could you give us a new post soon please.

Cheers.

The weightings of the polls used for Pollytrend are based on the history of the accuracy of the individual company polls. If you look at the “Pollytrend ALP Primary” above there appear to be lots more polls (red dots) above the trend line than below.You would expect them to drag the whole line up a bit if they were deemed to have more significance than they get here.
Mr. Catsaras probably has a different way of evaluating the different polling companies’ products. Could be as simple as that.

There seems to be a significant difference in the trend analysis between your Pollytrend Two Party Preferred graph and Andrew Catsaras’ Poll of the Polls Two Party Preferred % graph on ABC Insiders on Sunday.

See the Catsaras graph at 1:06 on the video at this link:

http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2012/s3439649.htm

While you have the two party preferred trends flatlining over the summer months, Catsaras has continuing trends of increasing support for Labor and decreasing support for the Coalition.

My understanding is that you are both involved in a process of averaging and weighting all the available opinions polls. I would have expected this similar analysis of the available polls to generate similar trends.

Do you have any thoughts on why there is this significant difference in the apparent trends on the graphs?

Thanks,

Ray Polglaze

Thanks for doing the analysis; informative as always. You don’t have to convince me of the value of doing monte Carlo analysis in this context.

Interesting to see Labor having steadied since last year, though still in a losing position. It would be ironic if Gillard was dropped after her polls turned the corner, just as Rudd was knifed when his polls were starting to improve again. The difference of course, is that Rudd’s window of opportunity is not closing, and we haven’t yet seen a poll post the Four Corners interview. To me, these polls are a recipe for continuing instability in the Labor party, with lots of backbenchers (72-53=19) having good reason to stay nervous.