Politics, elections and piffle plinking

Author Archives: Possum Comitatus

Morgan and a Pollytrend Update

November 13, 2009 – 2:47 pm

Morgan has released a face to face poll from last weekend with the primaries running 46.5 (down 4.5)/38.5 (up 6) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 56/44, a 5 point gain for the Coalition. The Greens are on 8 (down 1.5) while the broad others are on 7 steady.This comes from [...]

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Unemployment Stats

November 12, 2009 – 2:49 pm

With the release of today’s ABS Labour Force Survey and the unemployment figures, it might be worth having a squiz at a few things. Firstly, the way the unemployment rate in each state has been behaving:

Qld is the only State where unemployment hasn’t started to taper off, with NSW looking like it’s leading the pack [...]

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What if you were a pollster and produced an outlier?

November 10, 2009 – 11:19 am

Would you publish?
We know outliers are inevitable, they’re something that cannot be avoided – but from a pollster’s perspective, running a poll where your results look a little iffy becomes a bit of a two edged sword. Regardless of whether they publish or not, ultimately they lose in the short term.
If they take the “publish [...]

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Essential Report – political approval and the economy

November 10, 2009 – 6:12 am

This week’s Essential Report has the primaries coming in 48 (down 1) /35 (steady) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 59/41 the same way – no change since last week. The Greens are on 9 (up 1) while the broad “Others” are sitting on 8 (steady). This comes from a two [...]

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Asylum Seeker Polling – Three Pollsters

November 9, 2009 – 9:00 am

Today we have some results on the public perception of asylum seeker policy issues from both Newspoll and Nielsen. When combined with last week’s Essential Report questions on the same issue, all three pollsters turn out to be pretty consistent with each other, only differing by amounts we’d expect from slightly different question wording. First [...]

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Honeymoon Restored

November 9, 2009 – 5:52 am

Not that it actually stopped to begin with, we have this months Nielsen today in Fairfax (demographic tables here) coming 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 – a one point increase to the Coalition since the [...]

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New Pollytrend Metric – Phone Pollster Trend

November 8, 2009 – 11:25 am

We all know about our Pollytrend chart – where we build a rolling average of the most recent poll from each pollster weighted by sample size, then run an aggressive locally weighted polynomial regression through the results to give us an adaptive trend line. While Pollytrend is good for picking up medium term shifts in [...]

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Morgan Adds Outlier Weight to Newspoll

November 6, 2009 – 5:18 pm

Morgan has cheekily come in a week early, giving us the first week of what is usually a two week Face to Face poll with the primaries running 51 (down 1) /32.5 (down 2) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 61/39 the same way – a half a point increase to [...]

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Pollytrend and Odds and Ends

November 5, 2009 – 7:59 am

Throwing the last polling cycle’s worth of data into the Pollytrend algorithm, we can see that Newspoll produced no discernible change in the trend line – which is to be expected, since our trend here measures how all polls move together and it can adapt to outliers.

Also worth having a squiz at are three charts [...]

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Outliers Outliers – get’em while they’re hot!

November 3, 2009 – 6:43 am

Today’s Newspoll via The Oz comes in with the primaries tied at 41 a piece with the ALP down 7 and the Coalition up 7. This washes out into a two party preferred of 52/48 – a 7 point change from last Newspoll. The Greens are steady on 10 while the broad “Others” are unchanged [...]

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