Pollycide 2 – Draft Numbers

This article has been rewritten as well to hook more coherently into Part 1.

OK folks, we have the first draft of the numbers on the trends we highlighted earlier in Pollycide Part 1. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do.

The way these were calculated was kind of complicated but used a type of linear programming, which is basically where glorious software figures out the value X (the size of the swing in each seat cohort) under the constraints of A, B, C etc, or in our case the various swings and proportions which make the numbers balance out to reflect the Newspoll data.

The table contains the seat, then the state, then the nominal TPP from the 2006 redistribution followed by the estimated ALP and Coalition TPP figures.These are all currently Coalition held seats.

This is one alternative of what could explain the swings from quite a large number of mathematical possibilities, but it is the one probably closest to the ‘median possibility’ (which is not a particularly technical term BTW, but literal) , in that the others contained quite large swings in some seat cohorts and produced some pretty funny results.

That’s 47 seats falling in July according to the quarterly Newspoll data analysed to within an inch of its life, and we still have around a 2% swing to the ALP to allocate in NSW that can’t be extracted properly from the data without producing some silly things, as well as an extra 3% or so swing to the ALP in the government safe seats. Those two probably are a bit of a twin act in NSW somewhere, but the latter could well be spread around.

This is something approaching the most likely result of an election were it held in July based singularly on uniform swings by state, city type and safe/marginal grouping that is consistent with the Newspoll data. However, with a 2% swing to the ALP not really accounted for, there would have been some reallocation of the size of the vote in some of those seats, possibly including the loss of an extra 10-15 seats as a worse case scenario for the government, depending on where that extra swing went.

This is a little better for the Coalition than I had expected from the initial play around with the data in Pollycide Part 1, but only just. You might notice that the ALP TPP has calmed down a fair bit from the earlier post that used the Experimental TPP– that’s the result of removing as much feedback from the combined swing issues as was possible, but you also might notice that the seats, or rather the types of seats identified in Pollycide Part 1 as being in danger was actually pretty close to the mark.

That gigantic 14.6% swing happening in the safe government seats is the real, profound danger for the Coalition. I can’t remember anything like this happening before (maybe the living electoral encyclopaedia Adam could tell us) and only local factors would have saved the Coalition any marginals were an election held in July.

The other big killer is the fact that the safe ALP seats have only swung 4.1%.It’s not unusual for largish swings to happen, but in the wrong seats such as the ALP experienced in the 1998 election.

This, however, is a completely different ballgame. The swings are in all the right places for the ALP and all the wrong ones for the Coalition. It’s leading me to believe that if the polling behaviour holds, the ALP will win more seats, a lot more seats than their national swing would ordinarily suggest.

So the question becomes, if there are big swings happening in unusual places, which there must be for the Newspoll data to be right (which it surely would be – who doesnt worship the truthly godliness of the Newspoll? 😉 ) where are they?

Anyone on the ground in safe government seats, particularly in NSW and Qld that are picking up an anti-government vibe worth around, oh….. say, 14.6% ?

Continue on to Part 3 – The Verification