Pollytics

Politics, elections and piffle plinking

Morgan and a Pollytrend Update

November 13, 2009 – 2:47 pm, by Possum Comitatus

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 a sample of 874, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3.3% mark.

That makes all 4 regular pollsters having shown a drop in support on both the primaries and TPP for Labor over the last month, with 2 – Newspoll and Morgan – showing a considerable drop (although the former was still most likely an outlier while the latter has a pretty small sample size).

However, it’s enough to register a drop in both the phone poll and all pollster trend metrics of Pollytrend, which can be seen over the fold: Read More »

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Unemployment Stats

November 12, 2009 – 2:49 pm, by Possum Comitatus

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:

unempstate

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

If we look at how the unemployment rate has changed in each state since January 2007, Tasmania has had a mighty fine economic downturn, having had their unemployment rate actually reduce over the period.

unempchangestateThe resource states of Qld and WA were hit hardest, but should be expected to undergo a bit of volatility but overall strong decline over the next few years as the resource boom swings back into action.

The other stats worth looking at are the underemployment rates. The ABS defines underemployment as: Read More »

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What if you were a pollster and produced an outlier?

November 10, 2009 – 11:19 am, by Possum Comitatus

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 and be damned” approach it sets the hares, like me, running around screaming “Outlier!”. Others might start to see manipulation where none exist, questioning the polling organisation itself rather than simply the poll it produced.

Alternatively, if they withhold the poll from publication, questions are inevitably asked about “Why?”. This too sets the hares running with accusations inevitably flowing about how X media organisation is boosting Y political party by not releasing polling data that is probably bad for them. What ever decision a pollster takes, there is an automatic downside to producing an outlier that extends beyond the actual numbers themselves.

It’s a really tricky question that every pollster has to deal with at some point in time – and most come down on the side of publish and be damned.

So what should a pollster do? What would you do if you ran a polling organisation that produced a result that was almost certainly an outlier?

Is there any way you could not lose in the short term simply by producing an outlier poll that probability alone suggests is inevitable at some time?

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Essential Report – political approval and the economy

November 10, 2009 – 6:12 am, by Possum Comitatus

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 week sample of 2029, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.2% mark.

Additional questions this week looked at political approval ratings, public perceptions of economic conditions over the next 12 months, interest rates, better party to manage the asylum seeker issue and the recent oil leak of the Kimberly coast. These additional questions came from a sample of 1105, for an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

Do you strongly approve, approve, disapprove or strongly disapprove of the job Kevin Rudd is doing as Prime Minister?
Do you strongly approve, approve, disapprove or strongly disapprove of the job Malcolm Turnbull is doing as Opposition Leader?

ruddapprovnov turbullapprovenov

ruddstrengthnov turnbullstrengthnov

On the cross-tabs we have:

Approval followed party lines – Labor voters were more likely to approve of the job Kevin Rudd is doing as Prime Minister (93%) while Coalition voters were more likely to disapprove (69%). 25% of Coalition voters approve of the job Kevin Rudd is doing as Prime Minister.

[On Turnbull] Coalition voters were more likely to approve (56%), while Labor voters were more likely to disapprove (70%). 28%
of Coalition voters disapprove of the job Turnbull is doing as Opposition Leader.

. Read More »

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Asylum Seeker Polling – Three Pollsters

November 9, 2009 – 9:00 am, by Possum Comitatus

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 up, we’ll look at two Newspoll questions, which pretty much answer the debate on whether it is people looking for tougher laws that are believing the government is doing a bad job on this issue, or whether it is people that think Rudd is replicating Howard.

newspollAS1

.

newspollAS2

One quarter of those that believe the Rudd government is doing a bad job over the asylum seeker issue do so on the basis of seeing Rudd being too hard on boat people.

On the other hand, nearly two thirds of those that believe Rudd is doing a bad job on asylum seekers do so from a position of believing that Rudd is too soft on asylum seekers. That fairly convincingly ends that particular sub-debate on who is believing what and the magnitudes involved.

Next up, we have Nielsen and Essential Report on the question of the  government’s handling of the asylum seeker issue. Read More »

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Honeymoon Restored

November 9, 2009 – 5:52 am, by Possum Comitatus

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 last Nielsen poll in October. The Greens are on 9 (down 1) while the broad “Others” are sitting on 7 (steady). This comes from a sample of 1400, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.6% mark.

Normality resumes.

Rudd has taken a slight clip in the approval ratings and preferred PM which you can see in the charts below, but it’s just more ebbs and flows of they type he’s experienced over the last 6 months. There was some additional questions measuring public perceptions on asylum seeker policy, but we’ll get to them later today where we’ll compare the Nielsen results and last week’s Essential Report results with a set of questions asked over the weekend and published in today’s Oz – although strangely they havent published the voting intention estimates…. perhaps tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the usual charts come in like this:

Read More »

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New Pollytrend Metric – Phone Pollster Trend

November 8, 2009 – 11:25 am, by Possum Comitatus

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 voter sentiment, some of us question it’s accuracy when it comes to it’s actual level at any given point in time. As the two pollsters with the largest sample sizes (Essential and Morgan Face to Face) have a slight relative lean to the ALP in the vote estimates compared to the phone pollsters, it forces the entire Pollytrend line to have a relative lean as well.

Today we’ll solve that concern by introducing a new addition to our Pollytrend – the Phone Trend. The phone trend line is calculated a little differently to our all pollster Pollytrend line.

First and most obvious, it uses only phone pollster data.

Secondly, only the most recent two polls of each phone pollster get entered into the initial calculations. We use the most recent two polls because any given pollster’s “poll before last” still contains valuable information about the state of public opinion today, but the information is just not as valuable as their most recent poll.  In order to differentiate between “best” information (the most recent poll) and “second best information” (the poll before last) from any pollster – we simply take a rolling all phone pollster average of the two most recent polls from each phone pollster, but weight all results by time – so the further back in the past a poll was taken, the less weight that particular poll carries when we calculate the weighted average. For example, a poll taken 60 days ago will only have one tenth of the weight of a poll taken today.

Thirdly, every time a phone poll is released we calculate our new weighted average to build ourselves a time series.

Finally, as we do with the all pollster Pollytrend, we then run a Read More »

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Morgan Adds Outlier Weight to Newspoll

November 6, 2009 – 5:18 pm, by Possum Comitatus

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 Labor. The Greens are on 9.5 (up 2) while the broad “Others” are sitting on 7 (up 1). This comes from a sample of 1050 giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark. This poll was taken over the period of October 31 to November 1 – the same period as the now infamous Newspoll that has caused so much hyperventilation by the usual suspects over the last week.

If we plug this Morgan result in with the other ultra-regular polls of Newspoll and Essential Report, we now come up to date as of November 1st.

ALPprimary lnpprimary

ALPtwoparty

Outliers are simply part of life for a pollster – they happen and there’s absolutely nothing they can really do about the odd one popping up. So the first thing to point out is that if the last Newspoll was an outlier – the probability of which has just increased – there is no Newspoll conspiracy here. We actually expect pollsters to give us a WTF moment every now and again.

What catches my eye about these three pollsters is the way the ALP primary vote most Read More »

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Pollytrend and Odds and Ends

November 5, 2009 – 7:59 am, by Possum Comitatus

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.

pollytrendnov

Also worth having a squiz at are three charts that I used in a Crikey article on Tuesday that shows how the three pollsters that have been in the field of late – Essential, Morgan and Newspoll -  have comparatively behaved, with a focus on the last 3 weeks.

alptwoparty

Read More »

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

November 3, 2009 – 6:43 am, by Possum Comitatus

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 on 8. This comes from a sample of 1149, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

Is this an outlier?

Probably, and it comes from something Newspoll head honcho Martin O’Shannessy said to the Australian.

The majority of the change in the Labor primary vote is attributable to a fall in Labor’s primary among those aged over 50 under 50

The only issue over the last fortnight in media has been asylum seekers, and all the polling we’ve ever had on that issue suggests that it is the over 50’s that are the strongest supporters of tough border protection – and as yesterday’s Essential Report suggested, the over 50’s are also more likely to believe that the Coalition would do a better job at managing this issue..

If this wasn’t an outlier – we would expect the over 50’s to move strongest, so the composition of the poll is inconsistent with what we would expect to occur if the poll was, in fact, an accurate representation of the true state of public opinion.

There is also other evidence for it being an outlier. Firstly, we expect that, on average, 1 in 20 polls are out by an amount larger than the margin of error – which in Newspoll’s case is 3%. Further, we expect that, on average, 1 in 100 of all Newspoll’s will be about by a margin larger than 4%.

This is simply the probability statistics of random sampling in action.

Secondly, this issue has been Read More »

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