How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the Polls (For Now)
While final polling is quite accurate, polls taken too far out from election day have little predictive value.| Armarium Interreta
At the 2022 federal election, Victorians swung away from the major parties, with a 9.2% decline in the major party vote in the House of Representatives and a 3.3% decline in the Senate. This decline hit the Liberal/National Coalition harder than Labor, with two-party swings of 1.4% to Labor in the House and 5% toContinue Reading... How Did Victorian State Electorates Vote at the 2022 Federal Election?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
(if you haven’t seen our 3-candidate-preferred explorer for the 2018 Victorian state election, click here) Preferential voting and the three-candidate-preferred Historically, the outcome of Australian elections is often summed up using some version of the two-party pendulum, where seats are ordered based on the margin between the final two candidates (the two-candidate-preferred, or 2cp) asContinue Reading... How our Model of Preference Distribution Works (and How Accurate Is it?)Continue R...| Armarium Interreta
Recently, someone I met told me that the 2022 Australian federal election was unusually close by historical standards. This made me wonder – was it? And are there any trends in which elections tend to be closest? Here, we order each postwar election based on how close it was on five metrics, and assess howContinue Reading... How Close Was the 2022 Australian Federal Election?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
A collection of details from the final forecast and random findings, each too small for a separate piece. Normally, we’d have an Upside/Downside piece, but Rebekah’s run into some technical difficulties – turns out multiverse travel isn’t as easy as the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes it look. I think the broad picture will be familiarContinue Reading... Federal Election 2022 MiscellanyContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Voting Intention In The Final Week Currently, Labor maintains a lead of about 54% on a 2-party-preferred (2pp) basis against the Coalition. This has gone up and down a little in recent weeks but the overall picture remains the same – Labor’s 2-party lead remains about double what it was in 2019, and a muchContinue Reading... A Repeat of the 2019 Polling Error Would Still See Labor AheadContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
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
An examination of how the electoral map shifts if Labor continues to trade voters in historically-Labor electorates for voters in historically-Liberal electorates.| 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
A look at potential best- and worst-case scenarios for each party in today's South Australian state election.| Armarium Interreta
A follow-up to our piece on improving uniform swing, prompted by an interesting question about the problem of seat realignments.| Armarium Interreta
How data from older elections can help, and why our forecast differs from a uniform swing in its prognostications for Colton and Hartley.| Armarium Interreta
We’ve built a forecast for the 2022 South Australian state election. Some background on the election, and how our model works.| Armarium Interreta
What little history there is of split House/Senate elections suggests that the government would be making its life much harder if it opted for one, for little gain.| 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
Wherein America steals Mexican jobs, American manufacturing employment increases post-NAFTA, and no, this is not a joke.| Armarium Interreta
An uncritical exploration of its emotional networks; and a defense of Denis Villeneuve's distinctive emotional stillness.| Armarium Interreta
According to myth, Roman inflation ends Roman empires. According to me (and a barrage of evidence), I'd like to see someone try to prove it.| Armarium Interreta
High inflation shouldn't be your fear. The potential that we might not get this high again should be.| 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
(My analysis in this piece builds on the excellent work done by Dr Kevin Bonham on the same topic, linked here; it is very much worth a read) If you’ve read articles dissecting opinion polls in the media, you’ve almost certainly come across a statement of one of the following forms: Alongside strong results onContinue Reading... Approval Ratings Are Rubbish, But They Have ValueContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
In Australian politics, there’s often some discussion over whether a certain 2-party swing would be enough for one side or another to win a majority, with reference to the electoral pendulum prior to the election. Such a pendulum lines up all the Labor-held seats on one side, and all the Coalition-held seats on another, andContinue Reading... How Predictive is the Pre-Election Pendulum?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Veteran watchers of politics may be familiar with the old saying, “It’s the economy, stupid”. It’s a saying coined by the campaign of a challenger who unseated a seemingly-formidable incumbent amidst an unexpected recession, encapsulating the simple theory that voters tend to reward governments who have presided over a strong economy while tossing out thoseContinue Reading... How Much Impact Does The Economy Have on Australian Federal Elections?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
No polls! Polls bad! They failed in 2019 and with Trump and remember Brexit? Our model predicts all those correctly!| Armarium Interreta
Note: a fair bit more technical than usual, if you want to skip to what voting intention may have looked like with an honeymoon-adjusted left-anchored model in 2016-2019, click here. If you just want to read the summary for what this means for polling in the current (2019 – 2021/2022) term, click here. My interestContinue Reading... Anchoring, Honeymoons, and Voting Intention in the 2016 – 2019 TermContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Introduction Recently, the leader of the Australian Greens, Adam Bandt, has claimed that Australia is likely headed to a hung parliament (where no party or formal coalition has an outright majority of seats and therefore negotiations have to occur to form a government), declaring that: “The maths just says we are heading towards a power-sharingContinue Reading... Greens at the Gates?Continue 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
Why COVID is not going to cost you that much. Nor will it cost your children. In fact, why it's the cheapest debt we've ever taken on.| 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
Although most incumbent governments saw a big boost in their vote in the first month of the pandemic, we show that the pandemic bounce has completely faded for most incumbents.| Armarium Interreta
Background (if you’re familiar with the electoral systems used in Australia, click here to skip the background) After every Australian federal election, the Australian federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) publishes a regular post-election inquiry on the conduct of the election. In the aftermath of the 2019 Australian federal election, the JSCEMContinue Reading... How would optional preferential voting have affected federal elections?Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
An analysis of how the seat vote model in Meridiem performed, and some analysis of possible areas of improvement for election modelling.| Armarium Interreta
With the final distributions of preferences having come in, we have the 2-party-preferred estimates for every electoral district, and they show the sheer magnitude of the swing towards Labor. No district swung by less than 5% towards Labor, with 4 districts with swings towards Labor of greater than 20%. Here, we look at what variablesContinue Reading... Which areas drove the swing to Labor in WA 2021?Continue 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
What ended up happening Although there are still some votes to go, at this point, all districts in the 2021 Western Australian state election have pretty much been “decided” – i.e. the remaining vote to be counted is very unlikely to change the winner of the seat. Labor looks to have won 53 of theContinue Reading... How Meridiem performed – Part IContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
The upcoming Western Australia state election is widely expected to be a landslide for the Labor government, with polls showing Labor upwards of 60% in the two-party-preferred and possibly winning more than 50% of the primary vote. This has resulted in the leader of the opposition Liberals, Zak Kirkup, conceding that his party will notContinue Reading... Biggest State Election LandslidesContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
With any prediction or forecast, a lot of focus usually goes to the most likely outcome without appropriate consideration given to nearly-as-likely outcomes. Hence, in the first of what we hope will become a running series, we’ve taken outcomes from both ends of our model’s margin of error (95% CI) for the major parties (Labor,Continue Reading... Upside/Downside: WA 2021Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
If you haven’t had a look at our Western Australian 2021 forecast yet, it’s up and running here. Forecasts are useful little devils – they help to translate certain pieces of evidence (e.g. a poll saying Labor is ahead 68-32) into useful information (e.g. that means that given historical accuracy, Labor has a greater thanContinue Reading... How we intend to judge our WA 2021 forecastContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Beating Bush and Bill Clinton by a hair in the 1992 election, third-party candidate Perot nevertheless stamps deep marks into the future of US politics and policy. Alternate universe now reporting on: The Perot Presidency.| Armarium Interreta
Introduction (I promise this part is relevant) Let’s say you live somewhere in a rural town in the middle of the Australian outback. You come across a random person ranting about how there’s a giant arctic wolf running around and eating people. Do you believe them? Do you take shelter immediately and start checking forContinue Reading... Arctic Wolves in PollingContinue Reading...| 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
Introduction Welcome to our first Australian election forecast! If you haven’t seen it already, check out the forecast page over here. (if you want to skip the background and commentary, click here) Western Australians go to the polls on 13/March/2021 to elect a new state government, and the result is considered to be all butContinue Reading... How our Western Australia state model works (Meridiem 2021)Continue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Queensland Labor has been held up as an model of success in challenging environments, but is their electoral record as extraordinary as some claim?| Armarium Interreta
In our previous pieces in the Pandemic Politics series, we examined whether elections held during the COVID-19 pandemic saw significant swings in the vote for incumbent governments and minor parties from the last election held in that electorate (parts 1, 2, 4). However, that approach has a significant limitation, namely that it can only assessContinue Reading... Pandemic Politics: Minor Party Voting IntentionContinue Reading...| Armarium Interreta
Ross Perot's candidacy was not that much of a long shot as people might assume at first sight.| Armarium Interreta
Contrary to popular belief, incumbent governments have made no net gains in elections held during the pandemic.| Armarium Interreta
Winner-takes-all is by far the largest reason why Electoral College margins often look very different from the popular vote.| Armarium Interreta
An analysis of how minor parties have fared in elections during the COVID-19 pandemic.| Armarium Interreta
A look at historical repeat performances by previously-defeated presidential candidates in the USA.| Armarium Interreta
An introduction to our site, and a brief discussion of our writing philosophy and topics we intend to discuss here.| Armarium Interreta
While final polling is quite accurate, polls taken too far out from election day have little predictive value.| Armarium Interreta
