2004 Federal Election Diary The Polling Trap of the Third Party Vote
5th October, 2004
It was Rod Cameron, the distinguished grey haired fellow who keeps bobbing up with words of wisdom on ABC television programs analysing the election, who alerted me to the problem that opinion pollsters have with minor parties. Right back to the days when Roy Morgan was running what was then called the Morgan Gallup Poll in the 1950s and 60s the actual result for the minor parties was higher than the polls predicted.
The DLP was the problem party in those days and the first of Australia’s professional pollsters eventually learned to make an adjustment before he his published figures. Rod learned the lesson when he was interpreting his ANOP results for the Labor Party when he was their pollster but the major pollsters these days do not appear to do so. In the last couple of elections the vote for minor parties has been four or five percentage points higher than Newspoll, for example, has predicted.
The point of this comment is that there is plenty of scope for the pollsters, who are predicting a Coalition victory, to be wrong come Saturday. If an extra five percentage points came equally off the predicted Liberal and Labor votes then Labor would pick up between one percentage point and 1.5 percentage points on a two party preferred basis depending on whether it gained 60% or 70% of the minor party preferences. It is this kind of arithmetic that was behind Mark Latham’s decision to pitch for Green second preferences by committing a future Labor Government to ending logging in old growth forests.
Comments