Look closer, and you'll notice the big errors were always there under the hood. It's just that we never really focused on them.| Armarium Interreta
At the 2019 Australian federal election, four separate pollsters under-estimated the Coalition vote and over-estimated the Labor vote/Labor two-party-preferred, leading to one of the worst polling errors seen at an Australian federal election since the 1980s. In response to this error, one pollster had their contract terminated (Ipsos), two have made significant, documented changes toContinue Reading... Do State Election Polling Errors Predict Federal Election Polling Errors?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Over the past few months, some pollsters have begun to publish very different voting-intention figures from the rest of the industry. Historically, have such outliers ended up closer to the mark than the consensus? Resolve, the Nine News pollster/Shows a high Indy vote (this has absolutely nothing to do with me realising that “Resolve” isContinue Reading... Do Outlier Polls Tend To Get It Right?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Recently, I had to hunt down what might politely be termed “discussion” around the polls for Rebekah’s excellent piece showing why polls taken too far out from an election don’t predict results very well. Let’s leave the delightful individuals who call intending-voters for the other side “stupid”, “idiot” etc to one side for now (preferablyContinue Reading... Why Theories of Polling Bias Don’t Make SenseContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
What’s the Shy Tory effect? The term “shy Tory” originates, as many wacky nicknames for political factions do (see: “Whig”), from the UK. It emerged in the aftermath of the 1992 UK general election, where a race which polls suggested was a tie with Labour narrowly ahead turned out to instead be a sizeable winContinue Reading... Is There A Shy Tory Effect In Australian Polling?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
This is an addendum to another piece I wrote, in which I attempt to model both pollster herding and sample bias as possible explanations for the significant polling error seen at the 2019 Australian federal election. If you haven’t read that, it’s available here; it’s probably helpful to go through some of the background onContinue Reading... Addendum: Pollster Herding and Sample BiasContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Using a model of pollster herding and sampling bias, we examine hypotheses for the polling error seen in the 2019 Australian federal election.| Armarium Interreta
In our development of our Western Australian forecast, one thing I noticed was that state voting-intention polls (state polls from here on out) of WA tend to be quite favourable for the party in power. On a two-party-preferred (2pp) basis, the incumbent government in WA has tended to perform 1.8% worse in their election-day resultContinue Reading... State polling has historically skewed to incumbents. Will that continue?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta