We twa hae run about the polls and pu’d the maisters fine...

Welcome all to 2014, where we will enjoy the drama of three state elections (South Australia on March 15, Tasmania before June 7 and Victoria on November 29), the US Mid-term elections (November 4), a possible federal senate re-election in WA (before April 26), an outside shot at a federal double disillusion in July/August and a very long shot at a QLD state election to boot.

Last election turned out pretty poorly for me as far as electoral predictions, and obviously we hope to do better this year. Last year's federal predictions where partly thrown by some really odd outcomes (I'm looking at you, conservative Tasmania), and partly by poor methodology. The latter can be fixed; the former will require some recalibration.

Some elections are less predictable than others. To account for this we are going to start measuring successful predictions differently. Taking the simple pendulum calculations as a baseline, the test will be to see whether the Infographinomicon's predictions fare better or worse than just assuming an uniform swing based on polling.

Here we see the actual results, predictions based on the pendulum/polling and my predictions side by side.

Pendulum tossups occur in seats held by Independents or non Labor-Coalition parties, since these lie outside the scope of the swing calculations. My tossups are seats that I determined to be too close to call. Informally I have never allowed tossups to constitute more than 5% of my predictions. From now on that will be a solid rule here; at least 95% of all seats must have a prediction. Further, excessive tossups will count against me in this measure of success. I have opted to include tossups in the following calculations as a reward for contests where I have fewer tossups than the pendulum, and a handicap where I have more.

The rating at the bottom is calculated by dividing the number of correct predictions made here by the number of correct predictions resulting from the basic pendulum method. The target is to perform in excess of 100% -- that is, to provide more accurate predictions than the pendulum. Unfortunately, in the federal election this blog was only 97% as accurate as the pendulum, which is slightly embarrassing. With 131 correct predictions the pendulum had an 87% success rate, which is not great but better than the 85% success rate of the Infographinomicon with 127 correct assessments.

Ignoring tossups, the pendulum would offer a 90.3% success rate, which if passable, while the Infographinomicon only had 88.8% right. This does boost the blog to 98% accuracy compared with the pendulum, but takes unfair advantage of the two additional tossups. Without the 5% rule, it would be easy to ignore all but the safest predictions and get 100% accuracy for a rating of 111% as accurate as the pendulum.

Before we get into full-swing electoral mode for the state election (or the WA senate re-vote if that comes first) I'd like to spend some time reassessing the usefulness of our predictive tools from last year and see how we can improve our methodology.

Archives and Admin

I have begun to collect all of the pre-blog election/political analysis and add it here. [Editor: archiving completed 3/11/2013]

All of these posts are marked "backdated" and will be added over the next few days. Any predictions will not be added to my accuracy ratings (although for the record, this would almost certainly be a boost for my current scores).

These posts date from the 2010 Australian Federal Election, the 2010 US midterms, the 2011 Papua New Guinean constitutional crisis, the 2012 ALP Leadership crisis and the 2012 US Presidential Election.

If a WA Senate vote is called, expect a few blog posts on that. Also, there will be a review of how my predictions are scored in the near future.

Oh, and by the way...

Turns out I am not very good at this hiatus thing.

I was just going to update the data in earlier posts as the AEC confirmed the election results, but several requests have led me to address a few other matters, so I may as well post them afresh here.

Here are the House of Representative results:

This ammounts to 127 predictions correct out of 141 known results, or just over 90%. 90% is the bare minimum I would consider a decent result, since pure guesswork will get almost 50% and just a cursory consideration of polls and margins should make over 80%.

If we assume Palmer wins Faifax (which, with a lead of around 1% of 1% of the votes, is not at all certain despite what many media outlets are reporting) and Labor has won Wills (which I feel is by far the most likely outcome) this gives a success rate of 89.5%, which is not great. [EDIT: I can confirm Labor has won Wills. You just have to trawl through all of the seat-by-seat CSV downloads on the AEC website.] In the future it may perhaps be more meaningful to compare my success rate against a baseline of what would be predicted by applying a uniform swing from the polling data to the pendulum, thus accounting for abberant and bizzare electoral phenomena.

Abberant and bizzare electoral phenomenon Clive Palmer

One request I have recieved is that I provide a pie-chart of how many seats I have correctly predicted (you know who you are). This is also an excellent excuse to use this website, which offers pretty infographics but lacks the variety and neuances I normally require here.

In the Senate, WA is still being (re)counted and I cannot find the Victorian results. The Democrats have lost their expected seat, and the Palmer United candidate from Tasmania is in. A few other changes are also apparent:

Sadly, until I have the Victorian and Western Australian data, it is too early to provide a meaningful chart. So instead, here is a meaningless one.

Elections within elections:

Finally, I have been asked a couple of times to comment on the leadership election of the Australian Labor Party. I have not looked very hard, but to the best of my knowledge there is no public polling on the topic. And if there were, only ALP members can vote, so such pollig is either complex, or flawed, or complex and flawed. Instead, I am just going on gut feeling.

The general perception is that Shorten is a statesman, bringing much needed (relative) dignity and calm to parliamentary debate after the percieved chaos of the last 3 (or 6 (or 38 (or 112))) years. Albanese, on the other hand, is seen as the attack dog of the Labor Party, taking the fight to Tony Abbott.

Shorten is a member of the larger right faction and Albanese belongs to the weaker left. Shorten is implicated in the "revolving door leadership" problems of the ALP. Alanese was anointed deputy by "Rudd 2.0". Both have the skills and experience to lead the party forward. Both have some baggage from the past as well.

My gut feeling is that Shorten will have the support in the party room, and Albanese will have the support of the "rank-and-file". The difference is that the Caucus will be firmly set in their ideologies, and the general members will be more easily swayed. Since the right dominate the caucus and the national executive, Shorten has to have the advantage here. However, my gut feeling is that Albanese will win based on the generally left-leaning views of ALP supporters (though this may not translate directly into members) and the desire to hound what promises to be a very brutal revision of ALP policies by the current government.

There has also been speculation that whoever wins may offer the other the position of deputy. This obviously demonstrates unity in contrast to the Rudd-Gillard period, and follows the tradition of ballance. As Wikipedia points out "The usual arrangement is that the federal leader of the party is from the Right, while the deputy leader is from the Left, although former federal Labor leader and Prime Minister Julia Gillard was from the Left with support of the Right. Most of the Labor state Premiers are associated with the Right; there are some exceptions, such as former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill."

I, however, doubt that this will occur. I think both have longer memories than the media and public who cling to this idea, and recall that Rudd's deputy was Gillard, that Hawke's deputy was Keating, etc. etc. etc. I would expect the loser to be given a decent shadow ministry to demonstrate stability, but at arms length from the leadership since a challenge -- or even challenge speculation -- is the last thing Labor neads.

I therefore unofficially predict Albanese for opposition leader, a non-threatening and uncontroversial member of the right for deputy leader, and Shorten for Shadow Treasurer, Shadow Minister for Finance or some combined portfolio including workplace relations.

Should Shorten get the leadership, Albanese would be well placed for simmilar positions, replacing workplace relations with something relating to civil liberties and equality.

End of the line

The Infographinomicon will be on hiatus for a while, as far as new posts are concerned. Election results will be updated soon, and the results added to the running total on the right. My pre-Infographinomicon predictions will be uploaded and backdated, but not added to the running total. The missing NSW rundown will hopefully be replaced [Editor: Nope]. Other edits to fix typographic or grammatical errors might eventually occur.

Until the next election (probably the SA state election), adieu. You have been a great audience.

- the PsephologyKid.

Post-Election - Senate

Senate Results:

I am once more out in the field, so this data may be a little out of date. However, by inserting the state-specific AEC data here (15/09/2013) into Antony Green's Senate calculator here, quotas and preference flows are calculated to give the following results:

This gives us a vibrantly coloured Senate requiring quite a bit of deal-brokering on the part of the Liberal-National Coalition:

The Coalition is five votes short of half, and thus six votes short of a majority. With some minor concessions they could normally rely on support from the FFP, PUP, DLP and perhaps LDP. The last two votes, then, will require deal brokering with the AMEP, ASP and Xenophon. Given the lack of policies among the AMEP and ASP outside of their particular issue of interest (Motoring and Sports respectively), it seems likely that these two will be the most common legislative enablers for the Coalition.

Prediction Results:

In terms of predictions I was expecting this:

With these seats already determined from 2010:

State (and Territory) by State (and Territory):

ACT
Predicted: ALP (1), Coalition (1)
Result: ALP (1), LIB (1)
Score: 2/2 (2/2)

NSW
Predicted: ALP (3), Coalition (3)
Result: LIB (1), ALP (2), NAT (1), LDP (1), DEM (1)
Score: 4/6 (6/8)

NT
Predicted: ALP (1), Coalition (1)
Result: CLP (1), ALP (1)
Score: 2/2 (8/10)

QLD
Predicted: ALP (2), Coalition (3), Tossup (1)
Result: LNQ (3), ALP (2), PUP (1)
Score: 6/6 (14/16)

SA
Predicted: ALP (2), XEN (1) Coalition (3)
Result: LIB (2), XEN (1), ALP (1), GRN (1), FFP (1)
Score: 4/6 (18/22)

TAS
Predicted: ALP (2), Coalition (3), Tossup (1)
Result: LIB (3), ALP (2), GRN (1)
Score: 6/6 (24/28)

VIC
Predicted: ALP (2), GRN (1), Coalition (3)
Result: LIB (2), ALP (2), GRN (1), AMEP (1)
Score: 5/6 (29/34)

WA
Predicted: ALP (2), GRN (1), Coalition (3)
Result: LIB (3), ALP (1), ASP (1), GRN (1)
Score: 5/6 (34/40)

34/40 gives me 85%, which is pretty poor even though you expect the Senate to throw up a few surprises. I think this pretty well demonstrates that House of Representatives primary vote polling cannot be used as a reliable analogue for voting intention in the Senate as a result of the greater number of parties on the white ballot. Also, simple quota calculations and estimations of transferable vote are probably not complex enough to deal with the counting process, and in future Antony Green's ever-useful calculators should play a lager role in my predictions.

And finally...

Last week we looked at the potential for the ALP to block the repeal of the Carbon Tax in the current Senate and, depending on the next Senate, trigger a double disillusion. Given this many groups to make deals with, it is unlikely that the Coalition will be prevented from passing the repeal after mid 2014. To block, the ALP would nead at least 38 votes. That is 25 ALP, 10 Greens and three others who will not be swayed by Coalition deals.

The New South Wales Democrat is one, since the Democrats' Climate Policy includes:

18. The use of taxes, levies and 'polluter pays' instruments designed to reduce and limit greenhouse gas emissions, as well as encourage business innovation in environmental efficiency.

The Dems may be open to changes on the Carbon Tax, but not a full repeal.

On the other hand, the LIB, LNQ, NAT, FFP and PUP candidates already support a repeal. The DLP does not state its position, instead proposing nuclear fusion as the way of the future. Nuclear fusion is something of a Holy Grail of energy production - cheap, efficient, safe, clean, capable of high base-load power output, and out of our reach at the present time. The LDP opposes "either subsidising or unfairly taxing any particular source of energy", though this is largely linked into ambitions for nuclear fission plant development, and they do not specify whether the Carbon Tax is considered 'unfair'. Xenophon opposes the Carbon Tax, prefering his own system of incentives rather than penalties.

Let us assume, then, that the DLP side with the conservatives on principle, Xenophon sides with the conservatives on pragmatism and the LDP do oppose the Carbon Tax. That leaves the Senate vote thusly:

In this case the ALP needs both the AMEP and ASP candidates to side with them. Being single-issue candidates, this means doing deals on motoring and sports respectively. And, being in power, the Coalition is far better placed to negotiate. [Editor: Also, minor parties that effectively lucked their way into a seat are not going to want an election any sooner than they can avoid.]

In short, do not expect a double disillusion any time soon.

Post-Election - House of Representatives

What has passed...

It is ironic that in an election with such a foregone conclusion, I should recieve the lowest score the I can remember. Here is the results table:



These results provided by the AEC 14/9/2013. Counting is ongoing and results may change.

These results give the following House of Representative results:

Coalition - 91 (60 Liberal (including 1 CLP), 22 LNQ and 9 Nationals)
Labor - 54
Other - 5 (1 Greens, 1 Palmer, 1 Katter, 2 Independents)

A clear Coalition victory, which should have been no surprise to anyone. However there were enough surprises to smash my predictions down to not-so-respectible 127/143 (~88.8%). So, lets get down to the usual broody, intraspective navel-gazing that inevitably follows my eqally inevitable mistakes.

That leaves 16 errors: Barton, Blair, Brand, Capricornia, Chisholm, Fairfax, Greenway, Hindmarsh, Indi, Lilley, Lyons, McEwen, Melbourne, Moreton, Parramatta and Perth.

Fairfax, Indi and Melbourne are local curiosities not playing part in the wider game of red vs blue. In Fairfax I had anticipated that, should Palmer outpoll the ALP, their preferences might push him over the top. While I had expected the ALP primary vote to perform as low as it did, Palmer's high vote surprised me. I think this illustrates the high protest vote in the community in general, and in my opinion stands as another example of the folly of compulsory atendance.

Melbourne demonstrates the power of incumbency. Until last election, the Greens were largely seen as a protest vote. Things have changed since then, and the Greens are being viewed more and more as a viable party in both houses perhaps partly the result of taking the seat of Melbourne, but this was not the first lower house seat the party has won. This change is visible in the (ultimately meaningless) polls released by the media, which often include the Greens as well as the Liberals and ALP. A large swing against the Greens was expected this year, which I think is at least partly the result of protest voters switching allegiance to Palmer and "the Kat in the Hat", Bob Katter. This swing was noted in Melbourne, but with only a 1% swing this was not as big as I had predicted.

Lastly Indi saw the demise of Liberal would-be-minister Sophie Mirrabella to Independent Cathy McGowan. I frankly have no idea why McGowan is doing so well, but that is the nature of the game. I cannot scope out every Independent in every seat, so I just have to swallow this mistake.

Those are the easy ones, the "minor parties" that can occasionally throw a spanner in the works.

That leaves Barton, Blair, Brand, Capricornia, Chisholm, Greenway, Hindmarsh, Lilley, Lyons, McEwen, Moreton, Parramatta and Perth unaccounted for. I have historically failed to develop a means of determining which seats are likely to recieve the largest swings. There are no historical patterns, there is no obvious correlation with margin, and now it appears that arbitrarily allocating an increased swing to historically unpredictable seats works marginally better.

This is what I did, however, for Bass, Blair, Braddon, Chisholm, Dobell, Lingiari, McEwen, Page, Parramatta, Perth and Richmond, which was successful for Bass, Braddon, Dobell, Lingiari, Page, and Richmond and unsuccessful in Blair, Chisholm, McEwen, Parramatta and Perth, which is as near as dash it 50% success. Irritatingly it would be roughly as ineffective, based on this year's results, to discard this approach as to persist with it. I will have to look further into this, and play around over a few more elections to resolve this.

Now we have to work out what went wrong with Barton, Brand, Capricornia, Greenway, Hindmarsh, Lilley, Lyons and Moreton. Brand, Greenway, Lilley and Moreton were predicted to fall to the Right on the grounds of the predicted swing, and until I can formulate a better means of predicting this I have to accept these losses. Brand has always been Labor and I should have been more cautious on that front. Greenway and Moreton somehow picked up votes for Labor. Lilley lost some votes, but was at least in part saved by Wayne Swan's familiarity among the general public. In general I think I need do develop some way of factoring in incumbency, since (with the exception of Palmer winning Fairfax and Mirrabella losing Indi to an Independent) only four of the errors I made occured where an unexpected change occured. The majority of mistakes resulted from a failure to succumb to the expected change.

Capricornia was misjudged as safe early on. In hindisght this looks foolish, and precluded it from analysis prior to the election. That just leaves Barton, Hindmarsh and Lyons. I cannot explain these seats changing hands at this time, with large swings unobsevered elsewhere. Lyons experienced a swing in excess of 13%.

In summary, I need to be more wary of minor parties rising on the back of protest votes, I need to refine my means of predicting where the largest swings will occur, and I need to factor in incumbancy.

... and what is yet to come.

And now that we know even more certainly that the next Prime Minister is indeed Tony Abbott, I will engage in that very thing I so recently derided -- speculation on the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. However, I maintain that this time is different because the position of leader is already in flux.

It has become clear that the challenge will be between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese. Mr Shorten is a popular politician, with many people at large hoping that he would step in during the depths of the Rudd-Gillard leadership troubles. However he also carries the baggage of being deeply involved in the removal of Rudd and then Gillard. Obviously Shorten has at least some power in the caucus, and may well command the votes among the party members as required under Rudd's leadership reforms.

The alternative, however, is widely favoured as the best move politically. Albanese was apointed deputy under Rudd, and given that the ALP wishes to demonstrate a break from the old conflict of Rudd vs Gillard vs faceless men, someone with some claim to precieved legitimacy might smooth the way.

Whoever takes on the job will have to bring stability, as Albanese is suggested to be better at, and be able to take the fight to the Coalition, which is Shorten's forte. Normally I would expect Labor to go through several leaders as the Libs did after 2007 to erase any links and perceved links to the old regime. (In the case of the Liberal Party, it is ironic that such fresh faces as Dr Nelson and Mr Turnbull cleared away the memories of the Howard years merely to install one of his closest ministers, Mr Abbott, to face the 2010 and 2013 elections.) However, if there is one aspect of the past that the ALP needs to shed, it is the image of the "revolving door leadership" and back-room powerbrokers. Therefore I am tipping the next ALP leader to be the contender for PM at the next election, barring any catastrophies.

Importantly, the next leader of the ALP may have some say in determining the date of the next election, and thus whether there is time for another change of leadership.

The Coalition has vowed to repeal the Carbon Tax on day one of Parliament. However, the Senate will not change until mid next year, and with the Greens opposed to a repeal, the ALP has two choices. They can support the repeal on the grounds that it is clearly the will of the people and that the Coalition has a mandate to repeal the law, and then prosecute the case that the Coalition is not serious about climate change. Alternatively, they can oppose the repeal on the grounds that it is a good law and that a transition to a carbon trading scheme is imminent.

In that case, the Coalition can back down or try again with the new Senate. The risk here is Section 57 of the Constitution, which states:

If the House of Representatives passes any proposed law, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, and if after an interval of three months the House of Representatives, in the same or the next session, again passes the proposed law with or without any amendments which have been made, suggested, or agreed to by the Senate, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, the Governor‑General may dissolve the Senate and the House of Representatives simultaneously...

The old double-dissilusion clause. If Labor plays for this and succeeds, we could have another election as soon as mid next year. It is a difficuly play to make, though, and will rely heavily on the Senate results.

The Senate resuts which will be the subject of next weeks post...

Down to the wire

The House of Reps has been seen as a foregone conclusion -- not that I disagree -- and many commentators I am listening to in my election-night bunker are saying that the only question is the magnitude. However there is another, far more significant question: Who holds the balance of the senate. So, just before we get down to the actual, official figures, here is my prediction for the senate seats:

A federal NewsPoll indicates the following primary votes by state:

NSW (including ACT):

LABOR: 35%
COALITION: 46%
GREENS: 8%
OTHER: 11%

Queensland:

LABOR: 30%
COALITION: 48%
GREENS: 5%
OTHER: 17%

South Australia:

LABOR: 31%
COALITION: 44%
GREENS: 10%
OTHER: 15%

Victoria:

LABOR: 33%
COALITION: 44%
GREENS: 12%
OTHER: 11%

Western Australia:

LABOR: 30%
COALITION: 51%
GREENS: 11%
OTHER: 8%

Crikey also reports on a ReachTEL poll that apparently (once rounded off) gives the following primary votes for Tasmania:

Tasmania:

LABOR: 28%
COALITION: 48%
GREENS: 11%
OTHER: 13%

I could not find polling for the Territories (ignoring the ACT section of the NSW report above). In the Territories, both senators are up for relection, and normally these are one Coalition and one Labor. I'm using the National Primary Vote of roughly 33% ALP, 46% Coalition, 21% other. With two places to fill (i.e. n=2), each candidate needs more than 100%/(n+1) = 33% votes to win a seat. Labor and Liberal candidates are likely to get this streight out, but if not the sizable other vote will boster both sides, so I'm assuming one of each in the ACT and NT.

As for the states, n=6 so each candidate needs 100%/(n+1) = ~14.3% of the vote.

Assuming the primary vote (normally calculated for the House of Reps) is indicative of votes in the senate, this straight out gives Labor 2 senate seats in each state and the Coalition 3. With the carry over senators from 2010, the senate so far looks something like:

Red = ALP || Green = Greens || Black = DLP || Blue = Coalition

However, given the greater choice in the senate, the primary votes will be unlikely to be quite that high, potentially costing the ALP a Tasmanian seat, and possibly in Queensland and WA as well, and the Coalition one in SA and Victoria. However, when the "others" drop out, this will probably come back.

SA and Queensland also have a large enough "other" vote to collectively get one person into the senate in each state. The "other" vote is naturally difficult to predict, since it could represent one strong alternative or many no-hopers. In Queensland this is largely split between Katter's and Palmer's respective parties. If Palmer drops out first, preferences flow to the Greens. If Katter falls first, this will favor Palmer. I think Katter will poll lower than Palmer, but will be boosted by ALP overflows before Palmer gets any LNQ bonus, giving the final Queensland seats to Katter or the Greens. My prediction, is "tossup", with a possibility of Katter, Greens or Palmer.

Nick Xenophon is the only other "other", in my mind, who will harvest enough support for a seat. He does well off ALP, Liberal and National overflows (with the Nats preferencing him above the Libs!), who will be shorter of reaching the last seat than he, and thus push him over the line.

New South Wales will have less Coalition overflow from their third seat than Labor will have from its second, and the LibNat bloc wil give support to the ALP before the Greens. The Greens, therefore, will need a lot of support from "others". As low as the ALP scores in the preferences, the Greens score lower. I think Labor gets this one.

In Tasmania, Labor will be spent after taking two seats, meaning the Coalition needs to gain 60% quota, or the Greens need 20%, from the "others". I suspect this is a Greens win, but I'm calling this a tossup.

In Victoria the Greens will outpoll all "others", based on the primary vote data, and unless there is a heavy flow to either major party to bolster their overflows, this should be a Greens win.

WA Labor favours the Greens, and may give the Greens a close-to-quota vote from overflows. The Greens are likely to carry this one too:

Red = ALP || Green = Greens || Grey = Independent (Xenophon) || Black = DLP || Blue = Coalition || X = Tossup

This will give the Liberal party 36 senators, Labor 28 and the Greens 8 (giving a left-wing bloc of 36). Throw in one for Xenophon, one for the DLP and two unknowns (neither of which I expect to go to the Coalition). To hold the balance of power, the Coalition will need to make a deal with the DLP (not a big ask) and win Tasmania (a somewhat bigger ask).

I am therefore expecting a ballanced Senate, giving Abbott's now apprently inevitable government a lot of power, but still requiring a little backroom dealing.

Another Prediction of Coalition Victory

Somewhere in the Pilbara

18:39 Local Time

Your erstwhile host locks himself in his mining-camp bunker with a laptop, a wifi connection, a cup of tea in a paper cup, and cable TV flicking between Sky Election 1, Sky Election 2 and the Election 2013 channel (on Sky).

Against this tense backdrop, he attempts to crack his fingers and, failing to elicit the desired sound, cracks his neck.

As the television babble dies down to an incoherent background babble of conservative, elderly white men, the PsephologyKid gets down to work...

And so, here is the House of Representatives as it currently stands:

Data from the Psephmeister

Which hangs something like this:



A hung parliament.

Two polls released today by Galaxy and ReachTEL put the primary vote at 47:53 two party prefered in the Coalition's favour. This is pretty consistent with the other polls released lately (e.g. these), and when normalised by Kevin Bonham's Experimental Aggregator (updated with unnerving punctuality) this is sitting at 46.6:53.4. (I also have it on Sky News' authority that Newspoll will release a 46:54 poll tomorrow in the Australian)

The 2010 election was (just) won by Labor with 50.12% of the 2PP vote (Wikipedia), which suggests a 3.5 percentage point swing to the Coalition. (Or a 7 pp total adjustment, which some people call a swing). Newspoll was giving the ALP a 50.2% 2PP vote before voting day 2010, which is a 3.2 pp swing to today's figures.

Taking a uniform 3.5% swing to the Coalition would give us the following results (assuming a simmilar swing against Greens, but not Katter or continuing Independents, and assuming retiring Independents (who were in conservative seats anyhow) go to the Coalition as well):

Giving the Coalition a majority of 86 out of 150 seats:

Now for a little more of the nitty-gritty. Here I outlined 44 seats to watch, including O'Connor which we will return to later, but ignore here.

Let's assume there is no pro-ALP swing tomorrow sufficient to deliver fresh seats to Labor. We can then strip away any of those 44 held by the Coalition. This leaves us with 23: Bass, Blair, Braddon, Canning, Chisholm, Corangamite, Deakin, Denison, Dobell, Eden-Monaro, Greenway, La Trobe, Lilley, Lindsay, Lingiari, McEwen, Moreton, Page, Parramatta, Perth, Petrie, Richmond and Robertson.

Now take out those we have already passed over to the Coalition, and we have 12: Bass, Blair, Braddon, Chisholm, Denison, Dobell, Lingiari, McEwen, Page, Parramatta, Perth and Richmond. These require further analysis, along with Banks, Brand, Lyne, and Reid (which we have passed to the Coalition despite not being on the short list), and all the seats held by Independents, Katter and the Greens.

Bass, Blair, Braddon, Chisholm, Dobell, Lingiari, McEwen, Page, Parramatta, Perth and Richmond are probably going to see larger swings than elsewhere. Some people are predicting a 6% swing, Blair, Chisholm, Dobell, Lingiari, Page, Parramatta and Perth would all fall under this swing, so I think there is a fair chance that most of these will cross the line. This is a big ask for Bass, Braddon, McEwen and Richmond which may still suffer those ever pressent, abberant super-swings. I am leaving McEwen with the ALP based on its margin, and putting Bass, Braddon and Richmond as tossups.

Banks has been Labor since it was founded in 1949. There is no evidence in recent results to suggest a slow transition to the Coalition, and its current position may well be about as right-wing as the seat can go. Call this a tossup, I'm informally tipping the ALP to hold this seat so often touted as a certain Liberal win. Brand is 100% ALP at the state level, dispite the massive anti-Labor swing earlier this year, and has always been Labor. Counter to common opinion, I'm calling this an ALP hold. Reid has been Labor since it was founded in '22, and its current 2PP rating is the lowest for Labor in a long time. I feel this seat is as close to changing as it will go. Safe ALP.

Melbourne is one of the Greens' best shots, and has been good for them for a while. Yes, the Greens hold this seat, but only just. If the seat's how to vote cards go as I expect, and factoring in the smashing the Greens are expecting, Melbourne will probably slide back to Labor. Then again, independently thinking Liberal voters may hate Labor enough that the Greens could get a little boost by out-polling the Libs. Then again again, even when winning the seat in 2010 the Greens could not outpoll the Liberal Party. In short, I'm giving Melbs back to the ALP, and leaving the Greens with no seats in the house of reps.

New England and Lyne have retiring Independents in strong Nationals seats. Two wins for the Coalition.

Fisher is currently Independent, but he was elected as LNQ. Peter Slipper is a long-term incumbent, but the swing to the Coalition will probably work against him. Calling this a tossup, but guessing this is a Coalition win.

Dobell, on the other hand, has an ex-ALP Independent who may pick up the Labor-disliking, left-leaning vote. Tossup.

Denison has an Independent whose margin is against the ALP. People looking to not vote for either major party will probably favour the status quo, along with anyone who prefers the major party that drops out first. This one stays Independent.

Katter has held Kennedy forever. In an election where both the LNQ and ALP are struggling to appeal, in a seat where politician-hating is a common hobby, the Kat in the Hat will be back.

Finally, I want to look at Fairfax which is Clive Palmer's best bet (and his own seat). If the ALP drops out before Mr Palmer, he will get the bulk of their support and may win the seat. However the seat has been LIB/LNQ since 1990, Coalition since foundation in 1984, and a LNQ primary vote twice that of the ALP I don't see the Labor vote being large enough to bolster Palmer over the LNQ. (Nor do I see Palmer outpolling the ALP, but who knows?) Safe LNQ.

That give us this prediction:

Another prediction of a clear Coalitin victory in the lower house. I get no points for that. I do get a possible 143 points for the seat-by seat predictions, though, so lets see what happens tomorrow.

If I get the time before polls close in the eastern states, I'll try and get some Senate predictions online. Otherwise, see you after the vote!

'Twas the night before voting...

Ladies and gentlemen, I apologise for my silence over this most tense of electoral weeks.

Detailed electoral predictions to follow, with a matter of hours until polling booths open in some areas. However, I have not found any method of refining generic swings into seat-specifics. As a result, my predictions will largely follow a traditional application of the general reported swing to the pre-election pendulum, but I will also consider the factors highlighted here and elsewhere on this blog, an explain in detail why my predictions are what they are.

In the mean time, feel free to download and print out these Australian electoral images. Normally I would be sitting at home with a pot of tea and images like these to colour in as seats fall. This year I will miss most of those luxuries, but I'll still be filling in the boxes to watch one party or another creep over the line.

First up, here is the electoral map:


The map is always good fun, but with some seats being many, many times the size of others it is worth also using a more ballanced table, below. I normally colour the progressives (ALP, Greens etc) from the left and conservatives (Liberal, National etc) from the right and see who crosses the cntre line first. However, others may prefer to label each box, which allows you to handle independents more effectively. Either way, here is the simplified table:

Pretty basic, but it does the job.

And for the senate, here is a state-by-state breakdown, with the carry-over senators already filled in. (I have put the DLP in the middle, although they will back the Coalition).

And again, a first-over the middle chart:

And finally, the legend for carry-over senators:

Getting into the swing of things

After my attempt at a general formula to approximate seat-swing from marginality and national swing crashed and burnt, I started looking at the possibility of formulating a swing index. This would basically be a value for each seat. For example, a seat that generally experiences a smaller-than-average swing might have an index of 0.5, meaning in a national swing of, say, 7 percentage points that seat could be expected to have a swing of around 0.5 x 7 = 3.5 percentage points.

For this purpose, I looked at the last three federal elections (2010, 2007 and 2004) and calculated their swings from the post election pendulums (e.g. the 2004 swing is the difference between the Two-Party-prefered result in 2001 and 2004.) Note that the post-election pendulum (aka election results pendulum) is different to the pre-election pendulum for the following year, since corrections are made following by-elections, redistribution of seat boundaries etc.

The pendulums I used are as follows: 2010, 2007, 2004 and 2001. Some seats had to be excluded due to the nature of the calculations. Any seat that had elected an independent or minor party during those four years would confuse the data from the simple 2PP ALP v Coalition analysis I was conducting. That was goodbye to Calare (Independent 2001-2004), Calwell (Independent 2001), Cunningham (Greens 2004), Denison (Independent 2010), Kennedy (Independent 2001-2010), Lyne (Independent 2010), Melbourne (Greens 2010) and New England (Independent 2004-2010). Three more seats were excluded because the second party was a minor party (which would also mess with the 2PP data): Batman (ALP v Greens 2010), Grayndler (ALP v Greens 2010) and O'Connor 2010 (renegade Nationals v Liberal). Had Melbourne still been in play, it too would have been excluded after 2007's ALP v Greens. Finally, any seats that had only contested the 2010 election could not be assigned swings, so Durack, McMahon and Wright were also excluded. Other seats with short enough histories to not date back to 2001 (Bonner, founded in 2004, Flynn founded in 2007 and Gorton founded in 2004) have been included but lack some of the early data.

So, to jump right into things, here is a graph of each (usable) seat's swings from '04 to '10. (Negative swings are swings away from the incumbent.)

Now to appreciate how closely each seat reflects the national trend, we need to normalise the direction of the swings so that they are all swings to or from the same party. Or, if this were a science-fiction pollitical arena, it would be time to (selectively) reverse the pollarity. (See what I did there? POLLarity? Oh, never mind...)

Here are the same seats with there swings towards the party (or parties in tha case of 2004) that would go on to form government (Coalition 2004, ALP 2007 and 2010).

Notice that the green and blue swings are generally positive, while those from 2010 are generally negarive. This is a good sign, since the public vote swung towards the future government in '04 (Howard) and '07 (Rudd), but away from Gillard's Labor in 2010.

There is still work to do though. Some seats demonstrate large swings one year and small ones another. This is starting to look like random, but lets double check to be sure, by eliminating the variable of national swing magnitude. All swings might be expected to be exagerated in volatile years with large national swings, but quite small in the more stable campaigns.

Here is one last graph, reprisenting the swings as a proportion of the national swing, according to the formula (Seat Swing)/(National Swing) x 100%:

This was also the point at which I realised that a single tall bar graph makes more sense than chopping up a column graph.

Now almost all of the graph lies in the positive - which is unsurprising, given that if most of the seat level swings went against the national swing there would be some pretty odd outliers. That said, Wakefield's -1000% swing in 2004 is pretty nuts.

Other than that, there does not seem to be any indication of such things as big-swing and small-swing seats. Perhaps a longer view of the history will prove otherwise, ignoring some recent outlier elections. Then again, perhaps such paterns belong to a bygone age in that case.

Either way, we still do not have a reliable means of estimating the size of a swing in a given seat. I'll give it all a bit more thought, but I cannot promise any progress on this front.

Polls, polls, polls...

They’re not very useful things, but if we didn’t have polls what would we use to fill our newspapers with?

The problems with polls are legion, and have been discussed by many of the bloggers listed to the right (and many more of the 146 million Google hits for ‘the problem with polls’). Then there are the dreaded polls of polls gaining popularity in the United States, which are generally just an average of other polls. While it may seem superficially reasonable to assume that an average will iron out errors between the polls (e.g. neutralise the biases of two opposing polling houses), unfortunately not all errors can be so easily dealt with, and some are further entrenched or even exacerbated. For example, in phone polls it is generally easier to fill the over-60s quota than the under 30s. The only options are to keep phoning until you get enough under-30s to answer (in which case they may not be representative of the generally inaccessible younger generation) or else to mathematically exaggerate the under-30s results and minimise the over-60s to represent their proportion of the voting population. This is called scaling and can exaggerate statistical anomalies.

Then there is the constant reporting of 1 and 2 percentage point gains and losses, even though the margin of error on most polls is roughly 3 pp. And then we have all the informal polling, and push polling, and selective use of data. To illustrate, here is an often weekly “poll” published for most of this year. It is the Q&A audience demographic, excluding those weeks (e.g. the “religion Q&A”) where the audience demographic was measured on another scale (e.g. religious belief):

Interestingly, despite the roller-coaster ride of Gillard’s failing popularity, Rudd’s resurgence and the subsequent Coalition momentum –- all of which are known to have affected voter intentions –- the polls seem to have flat-lined. The Coalition flutters overhead between the 40 and 50% marks, with the ALP roughly 10 percentage points below. Coincidentally, 10% is roughly where the Greens have been sitting all year. It is almost as though the ABC picks its studio audience to give a roughly consistent 50-50 split between conservative (Lib/Nat) and progressive (ALP/Greens) views.

Oh, wait… that is exactly what it does.

But my main gripe is simply the way polling has to be framed in order to be realistically achievable in terms of time and resources. The two main polls are preferred PM/approval-disapproval ratings type questions –- which are irrelevant because voters do not directly elect the PM -– and the one commonly phrased “if a vote were held today, who would you vote for?”

Now let’s ignore the point that the election is not being held today, and accept that these polls are a snapshot of the popular vote. The real issue is that our government is not elected by the popular vote. The country is divided into 150 seats, and you need to win just over 50% of the seats to form government. To win each seat you need just over 50% of the two-party preferred vote in that seat. In other words, it is possible to form a majority government with just over 25% of the vote. The TPP vote at that, which means you can win with an ever smaller support base if enough people vote for the “others”.

This means, conversely, that you can lose an election with almost three-quarters of the TPP vote. And, in an extreme hypothetical situation you could go from winning with 25.1% to losing with 74.9% in one term, giving you a loss of the back of an almost 50% swing in your favour.

Of course, in reality the swing lies mostly with the marginal voters who can win or lose a seat for a party, so it can be an accurate indicator. But if a 1% swing were predicted in favour of party A, the media would turn to their electoral pendulum and work out who would win the election assuming a uniform 1% swing. In other words all seat with a margin of 1% or less cross the floor, and the media counts up who has a majority.

Swings are rarely uniform, however. In the state WA election this year, I got a pretty close estimate of seats changing hands by assuming a swing of around ⅔ that reported in the polls. And then there was Albany, the most marginal seat on our pendulum for the ALP, which not only resisted the general dash to the Coalition, but actually improved its margin for the (now) opposition Labor party.

Now that ⅔ of the predicted swing was plucked out of mid-air, but my reasoning was simple – most of the campaigning (and in particular the “sand-bagging”) would be focused on the marginal seats, which would tighten up the figures there, while in the safe seats that no one cares about the polls would run away a little more and become exaggerated. This time around, we’ll be a little (emphasis on little) more scientific in our use of polling.

According to ABCNews24, Newspoll today released a new poll through News Limited, so you know this news is new. This poll is apparently (I’m going on second- and third-hand sources) predicting a 6% swing to the Coalition next weekend, as well as indicating a 5% decrease in the ALP primary vote in three marginal Victorian seats and 7% in five NSW coastal seats.

Note that the “coastal” demographic (which I have never really payed much attention to) is more volatile than the “marginal” chaps and chapettes. Again, the seats where the swings really matter are not quite as vulnerable as the nation as a whole.

But don’t take my word for this phenomena. (No, seriously, don’t. You’ll see why later.) Here is a graph based on the previous election’s data. It compares how marginal a seat is (vertical axis) with their swing towards the ALP (horizontal axis) from their 2007 position*.

I don’t think I have produced a more ambiguous graph yet. The scatter demonstrates an overall shift to the Coalition (I don’t know whether to call that a shift to the left or a shift to the Right…), but beyond that, not much. There are big swings in seats with high and low margins. Perhaps things become clearer if I ignore pro- and anti- incumbent swings and just look at an absolute swing across the board?

Nope. Not really.

To be fair. A line of best fit would probably run roughly bottom left to top right, but the correlation is very low with many distant outliers.

I had hoped to deduce a nice little line of best fit and use that to estimate the size of swings in various seats based on their margins to give a rough prediction of how many seats might fall during the election based on the latest poll. Unfortunately my hunch that marginal seats would be less influenced by swings is not borne out strongly in the data, so there goes that idea.

Instead, over the next few days, I will be looking at how strongly influenced by swings each seat has been over the last few elections to see if there is any logic in assigning seats a “swing index” instead. This index would represent whether the seat generally felt the trends more or less powerfully than the national average, or even if they tend to vote against the trend.

My gut feeling is that each seat will have a reasonably consistent number of swinging voters, and thus have a reasonably stable susceptibility to the factors driving the national swing. But then again, we’ve all just seen how reliable my gut feeling can be on these things.

*N.B. several seats have been omitted. Durack (WA), McMahon (NSW) and Wright (Qld) did not have a real swing, since they were created in 2010 (replacing Prospect (NSW),Lowe (NSW) and Kalgoorlie (WA)) and had no incumbent to swing to or from. However, I have still included the seats the new divisions were carved from, and the seats the old divisions amalgamated into, despite the obvious changes to their constituency makeup. Call me lazy – I know my mother does.

Denison (Tas) and Lyne (NSW) elected independents in 2010 while Kennedy (Qld) and New England (NSW) re-elected theirs. Since we are just looking at the 2PP swing, these can cause all kinds of confusion and misunderstanding. That does not mean these seats’ data is irrelevant, just that other factors may be in play and I need a different kind of graph. Likewise Melbourne (Vic) was omitted because it elected a Greens candidate in 2010.

Finally, any seat with a non-ALP-vs-Coalition margin in 2007 or 2010 was also omitted: Batman (Vic) and Grayndler (NSW) (second place Greens, 2010), Melbourne (Vic) (again) (second place Greens, 2007) and O’Connor (WA) (Nationals win over Liberals, 2010, after the WA Nats formed a breakaway from Warren Truss’s leadership). These were omitted because I calculated the 2010 2PP swings from the 2010 and 2007 2PP margins and didn’t want to extract the necessary major parties’ support by calculating back-flows from eventual 2PP stats. If you guys want it done, do it yourself.

Data Dump

Q&A Polling History 2013

	Labor	Coalition	Greens
4/02/2013	36%	44%	10%
11/02/2013	36%	41%	14%
18/02/2013	38%	44%	12%
25/02/2013	30%	44%	10%
4/03/2013	35%	45%	10%
11/03/2013	33%	44%	11%
18/03/2013	33%	48%	11%
25/03/2013	35%	46%	11%
15/04/2013	33%	45%	11%
22/04/2013	28%	47%	11%
29/04/2013	33%	44%	10%
13/05/2013	31%	46%	12%
27/05/2013	29%	44%	11%
3/06/2013	30%	40%	10%
10/06/2013	36%	46%	10%
17/06/2013	33%	45%	9%
24/06/2013	35%	48%	10%
1/07/2013	37%	46%	9%
8/07/2013	37%	45%	9%
15/07/2013	38%	45%	9%
22/07/2013	33%	45%	11%
29/07/2013	35%	43%	9%
5/08/2013	34%	43%	10%
12/08/2013	33%	45%	10%
19/08/2013	35%	45%	10%
26/08/2013	36%	46%	10%

2010 Electoral Statistics

 

Seat	Swing to Labor	Margin
Adelaide (SA)	-0.84	8.53
Aston (Vic)	3.29	5.05
Ballarat (Vic)	3.55	8.15
Banks (NSW)	-9.63	11.08
Barker (SA)	-3.43	9.45
Barton (NSW)	-5.24	12.1
Bass (Tas)	5.74	1
Bendigo (Vic)	3.4	6.13
Bennelong (NSW)	-4.52	1.4
Berowra (NSW)	-7.26	8.94
Blair (Qld)	-0.24	4.48
Blaxland (NSW)	-6.14	18.37
Bonner (Qld)	-7.35	4.53
Boothby (SA)	2.18	2.93
Bowman (Qld)	-10.35	0.04
Braddon (Tas)	6.04	1.44
Bradfield (NSW)	-4.73	13.45
Brand (WA)	-2.29	5.62
Brisbane (Qld)	-7.89	6.76
Bruce (Vic)	-0.2	8.32
Calare (NSW)	1.31	12.05
Calwell (Vic)	0.39	19.33
Canberra (ACT)	-2.67	11.82
Canning (WA)	3.39	5.58
Capricornia (Qld)	-9.03	12.71
Casey (Vic)	1.75	5.93
Charlton (NSW)	-0.2	12.87
Chifley (NSW)	-8.32	20.66
Chisholm (Vic)	-1.27	7.38
Cook (NSW)	-6.09	6.57
Corangamite (Vic)	-0.44	0.85
Corio (Vic)	5.29	8.93
Cowan (WA)	-4.58	1.71
Cowper (NSW)	-8.04	1.23
Cunningham (NSW)	-4.96	18.13
Curtin (WA)	-2.62	13.57
Dawson (Qld)	-5.64	3.21
Deakin (Vic)	1	1.41
Dickson (Qld)	-5	0.13
Dobell (NSW)	1.17	3.9
Dunkley (Vic)	3.02	4.04
Eden-Monaro (NSW)	0.84	3.4
Fadden (Qld)	-3.99	10.2
Fairfax (Qld)	-3.94	3.01
Farrer (NSW)	-3.34	11.17
Fisher (Qld)	-1.03	3.1
Flinders (Vic)	-0.86	8.25
Flynn (Qld)	-3.74	0.16
Forde (Qld)	-4.54	2.91
Forrest (WA)	-2.91	5.83
Fowler (NSW)	-9.49	18.25
Franklin (Tas)	6.34	4.48
Fraser (ACT)	-0.87	15.07
Fremantle (WA)	-3.44	9.14
Gellibrand (Vic)	2.44	21.46
Gilmore (NSW)	-1.25	4.07
Gippsland (Vic)	-5.54	5.91
Goldstein (Vic)	-0.42	6.05
Gorton (Vic)	0.94	21.22
Greenway (NSW)	5.38	4.5
Grey (SA)	-6.73	4.43
Griffith (Qld)	-3.86	12.32
Groom (Qld)	-10.31	8.22
Hasluck (WA)	-1.83	1.26
Herbert (Qld)	-1.96	0.21
Higgins (Vic)	0.29	7.04
Hindmarsh (SA)	0.65	5.05
Hinkler (Qld)	-8.7	1.69
Holt (Vic)	1.6	11.63
Hotham (Vic)	0.5	13
Hughes (NSW)	-3.01	2.16
Hume (NSW)	-4.56	4.16
Hunter (NSW)	-3.44	15.92
Indi (Vic)	-0.75	9.19
Isaacs (Vic)	3.33	7.69
Jagajaga (Vic)	2.54	8.98
Kingsford Smith (NSW)	-8.13	13.29
Kingston (SA)	9.49	4.42
Kooyong (Vic)	1.98	9.53
La Trobe (Vic)	1.42	0.51
Lalor (Vic)	6.62	15.53
Leichhardt (Qld)	-8.58	4.03
Lilley (Qld)	-5.41	8.59
Lindsay (NSW)	-5.66	6.78
Lingiari (NT)	-7.46	11.16
Longman (Qld)	-5.49	3.57
Lyons (Tas)	3.51	8.78
Macarthur (NSW)	-2.3	0.72
Mackellar (NSW)	-3.3	12.42
Macquarie (NSW)	-8.3	7.04
Makin (SA)	4.5	7.7
Mallee (Vic)	-3.14	21.27
Maranoa (Qld)	-8.45	14.44
Maribyrnong (Vic)	1.54	15.32
Mayo (SA)	-0.29	7.06
McEwen (Vic)	5.33	0.01
McMillan (Vic)	0.38	4.79
McPherson (Qld)	-1.45	8.83
Melbourne Ports (Vic)	0.41	7.15
Menzies (Vic)	-2.7	6.02
Mitchell (NSW)	-5.57	11.59
Moncrieff (Qld)	-3.48	14.01
Moore (WA)	-2.02	9.17
Moreton (Qld)	-3.62	4.75
Murray (Vic)	-2.09	18.26
Newcastle (NSW)	-3.42	15.91
North Sydney (NSW)	-8.68	5.38
Oxley (Qld)	-8.36	14.13
Page (NSW)	1.83	2.36
Parkes (NSW)	-5.82	13.04
Parramatta (NSW)	-2.51	6.88
Paterson (NSW)	-3.82	1.51
Pearce (WA)	0.21	9.07
Perth (WA)	-2.97	8.85
Petrie (Qld)	0.46	2.05
Port Adelaide (SA)	0.28	19.75
Rankin (Qld)	-6.33	11.74
Reid (NSW)	-14.12	16.8
Richmond (NSW)	-1.88	8.87
Riverina (NSW)	-1.94	16.23
Robertson (NSW)	0.89	0.11
Ryan (Qld)	-3.34	3.82
Scullin (Vic)	1.4	20.85
Shortland (NSW)	-1.89	14.74
Solomon (NT)	-1.94	0.19
Stirling (WA)	-4.26	1.29
Sturt (SA)	-2.49	0.94
Swan (WA)	-2.42	0.11
Sydney (NSW)	-2.43	19.5
Tangney (WA)	-3.64	8.68
Throsby (NSW)	-11.35	23.46
Wakefield (SA)	5.36	6.59
Wannon (Vic)	0.18	7.47
Warringah (NSW)	-3.59	9.5
Watson (NSW)	-11.19	20.33
Wentworth (NSW)	-11.01	3.85
Werriwa (NSW)	-8.49	15.24
Wide Bay (Qld)	-7.14	8.47
Wills (Vic)	0.23	22.41