Consistent polling errors created ‘parallel universe’ in Australian politics - Polidicks

Consistent polling errors over the past few years could have created a "parallel universe" in Australian politics, long-time Labor Party pollster John Utting has said in the wake of the federal election. Speaking with 7.30, Mr Utting said there seemed to have been a two or three percentage-point error embedded in the opinion polling of the past "few years" that had distorted the narrative around leaders, parties and policies. "A lot of stuff has happened based on that," he said. The Coalition's victory in the 2019 election sent shockwaves through the opinion polling industry. Multiple public polls had shown Labor consistently in the lead for years on a two-party preferred basis, and exit polls on election day were still pointing to a narrow Labor win. Mr Utting — who ran Labor's internal tracking polls for many years, but not in this campaign — said the industry now needed to confront the possibility its numbers had been wrong all along. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-23/federal-election-2019-aus-votes-polling-malcolm-turnbull/11144464?section=politics Opinion polling leading up to the Australian federal election indicated a likely swing of ~2% towards the Labor party, but on election day, the Coalition instead received a ~3% swing towards them, including a landslide result in Queensland.

Here's 538's words on the matter: Bonus bulletpoint: Something is rotten down under, and it isn’t the polls So what was that about Australia? Stop me if this one sounds familiar. Polls showed the conservative-led coalition trailing the Australian Labor Party approximately 51-49 in the two-party preferred vote. Instead, the conservatives won 51-49. That’s a relatively small miss: The conservatives trailed by 2 points in the polls, and instead they won by 2, making for a 4-point error. The miss was right in line with the average error from past Australian elections, which has averaged about 5 points. Given that track record, the conservatives had somewhere around a 1 in 3 chance of winning. So the Australian media took this in stride, right? Of course not. Instead, the election was characterized as a “massive polling failure” and a “shock result”. When journalists say stuff like that in an election after polls were so close, they’re telling on themselves. They’re revealing, like their American counterparts after 2016, that they aren’t particularly numerate and didn’t really understand what the polls said in the first place. They may also be signaling, as in the case of Brexit in 2016, their cosmopolitan bias; the Australian election, which emphasized climate change, had a strong urban-rural split. Dig in deeper, and you can find things to criticize in the polls. In particular, they showed signs of herding: all the polls showed almost exactly the same result in a way that’s statistically implausible. If Labor was ahead by only 2 points, a few polls should have shown conservatives winning just by chance alone because of sampling error. Still, some of the headlines in the Australian media are idiotic and embarrassing. When polls show a race within a couple of percentage points, nobody — least of all journalists, who are paid to be informed about this stuff — should be shocked when the trailing side wins.

This is what happens when you build up votes for twelve hours.

Yeah but you need to do that if you want to win by half a vote

Blaming it on the media not understanding error margins is a bit shortsighted. Every poll over two years was consistently indicating a swing towards Labor, and the result also took both major parties off-guard, revealing that even their internal polling (where the parties have an incentive for their internal polling to be as accurate as possible) had discrepancies from the final outcome. And look at how the parties responded to the polls up to the election: Labor thought that they had a licence to adopt a bold policy platform and get away with it. And most of the Liberal frontbench abandoned Scott Morrison, to let him fend for himself. Not even the Liberals were expecting a Liberal win. And this leads into the ‘parallel universe’ point, where eg Malcolm Turnbull was dumped based on failure to poll well, but when the polls themselves might have been wrong. Even the pollsters themselves have conceded that they have got it wrong. Literally no one is saying ‘it’s just a margin of error, smarten up dumbfucks’ (that 538 article reeks of a condescending attitude).

To me, polls are hypothetical bullshit. The only poll that matters and correctly figures out the outcome is the election itself, whereby everyone is polled, and not a sample

People place too much value on opinion polls, but they do have a time and place. Eg during the Abbott Ministry, opinion polling showed that the Liberals would likely fail to win re-election if Abbott was still Prime Minister. So they replaced him with Turnbull, and although the 2016 election result was underwhelming, Turnbull did nonetheless secure the Liberals another 3 years.