Research industry body to review political polling following Federal election embarrassment
The Association of Market and Social Research Organisations has announced a review of Australian political polling methods to understand why polls incorrectly called the outcome at Saturday’s Federal election and how methods can be improved in the future.
The review comes after widespread criticism of polling companies after almost the entire industry called the wrong winner in Saturday’s federal election.
Maybe people told them they were voting Labor just to amuse themselves. Or maybe only ABC and Guardian folk were polled. Either way it made for a bloody good night and a very sweet victory.
Nice to see the polls that have led to half a dozen PM’s being knifed by their parties finally being held to account. There’s a new poll every 2 weeks – think one would have got it a bit closer.
Surely the media, that regard these polls as such an important metric to judge how our politicians are doing, should also be reassessing their reliance on them.
Maybe it’s polling and media companies having an overwhelming metropolitan / upper-middle-class bias – where regional Australia is portrayed as unimportant, ignorant, or lacking any decisionmaking power.
The writing was on the wall when you have ABC journalists making 200k+ a year with a network of ‘contributors’ from similarly affluent sources telling everyone they are underprivileged and working class. This created a bubble of similarly affluent inner-city left-leaning workers who thought themselves the same. People who have never been inland for more than a week at a time. People who were actually surprised that there are different views outside of cities.
Like many instances of misuse of data, the polls weren’t wrong, most of the MSM just chose to interpret them in a way that matched their narrative that Labor would win. Simplistic national numbers never tell the story on the ground in the handful of seats that determine an election result.
Interesting to know by what criteria you think this was a good night…
I would suspect there might also be a version of the “Bradley effect” at play. People answer polls according to what they perceive to be socially more desirable or accepted as opposed to what they really think. We’ve seen many instances of this already, like Brexit, Trump and multiple right wing parties in Europe outperforming their poll numbers when it came down to the voting booths.
This is extremely hard to adjust for as a pollster and I’m not sure what could be done about it. Perhaps try to measure the sentiment in mainstream media as a proxy for what is socially desirable and then weight results a bit in the other direction but would that really be more than a dressed up finger in the air?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect
100% correct Rob.
I’ve always been concerned that the polls are based on population distribution rather than electortate enrolments.
The AEC does a pretty good job (unlike the US) with electorates ranging from around 70k to 125k, but heavily clustered around 100k. The variations are pretty much due to absolute population count. For example, the NT has around 140k enrolled voters. You either have one seat of 140k or two seats of 70k – so there is no deliberate gerry-mandering (unlike the US).
When the result is generally 51-49 to the winner in most elections, weighting the raw data to enrolments rather than population may increase precision. This however doesn’t remove the bias of geographic selection, nor the respones variance within widely dispersed geographic areas.
Well done for so perfectly representing the party of hatemongers you voted for – no ideas, no thoughtfulness, no graciousness, no inclusiveness, no intelligence – just sneering self-entitlement and a win at all costs mentality. If there’s one good thing to come out of the election result, it’s that the LNP won’t be able to blame the tanking economy on Labor (though I’m sure they’ll give it a good shot) as the recession we’re now in starts to bite, and with them carrying double the debt of every government since Federation. Unfortunately, everyone else and definitely the environment will suffer as well, but you obviously don’t give a toss, so yay you!
Surely this must remove the Newspoll results from ever being the reason for a change of PM? Stamp “not trusted” all over it!
It might be better to wait for the outcome of the review, but it’s likely there are three issues:
1) Design. It’s clear that the current structure of polling isn’t picking up those differences. In particular, design isn’t dealing with the shift to minor parties. It’s worth noting that there was possible also a shift away from the coalition towards minor parties, but that preferences flowed more to the coalition than to Labor.
2) Desirability reporting. I’m sure some people didn’t want to admit that they weren’t going to vote Labor. Most polls now look beyond demographics to test attitudes but clearly more work needs to be done on this. Demographics is not destiny…
3) Interpretation. One thing that almost all the commentary so far has ignored is the vital words ‘margin of error’. As someone who works in research (but NOT polling) I’ve watched with frustration as things get reported as facts when actually the reality is the numbers are not robust enough to make the assumptions stated. We’ve moved forward in that most articles now mention that results are within the margin of error, but most people read the interp and have NO idea what the phrase means. So can we stop reporting results within the margin of error as facts?
More accurate polling is probably going to mean more money spent on doing it … but also a more reflective approach to reporting statistics. It’s not glamorous but it is important. Polls can influence how people vote (I wonder how many people thought they could register a vote for a minor party to show disaffection with both major parties, given a clear result was expected?)
Looking forward to the investigation either way!