tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/polling-6608/articlesPolling – The Conversation2024-01-25T20:48:09Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2216122024-01-25T20:48:09Z2024-01-25T20:48:09ZSupport for Australia Day celebration on January 26 drops: new research<p>The decision by several major retailers to stop stocking Australia Day merchandise has become the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate over whether the nation should be celebrated on January 26.</p>
<p>In response to this decision, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for a boycott of Woolworths and criticised those who oppose Australia Day as “woke CEOs” and “whingers”. But what do the Australian public actually think about January 26?</p>
<p>In 2021, we conducted <a href="https://theconversation.com/60-of-australians-want-to-keep-australia-day-on-january-26-but-those-under-35-disagree-175503">a study</a> that showed while 60% of Australians continued to support the celebration of Australia Day on January 26, these figures were significantly lower among younger Australians. We predicted support for the day would continue to decline.</p>
<p>We tested this prediction as part of the latest wave of the Deakin Contemporary History survey, undertaken 20 months after our initial survey. In June 2023, we polled a representative, random sample of more than 3,500 Australians.</p>
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<p>Given that other, smaller polls, less representative of the Australian population, grab media attention on this question, it is important to note that, as with our earlier survey, data were carefully gathered to represent a cross-section of Australian society. Participants from all Australian states and territories were randomly selected and data were weighted to ensure they reflected the broader Australian adult population. In short, it is the biggest and best data set we have.</p>
<p>In November 2021, we posed the same proposition: we should not celebrate Australia Day on January 26. We also asked other questions about respondents’ attitudes to Australian and world history.</p>
<p>We thought Australians might change their opinions within a 20-month period, given this question was a dynamic one shaped partly by factors such as the looming Voice referendum and public reporting of the destruction of Indigenous heritage. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/60-of-australians-want-to-keep-australia-day-on-january-26-but-those-under-35-disagree-175503">60% of Australians want to keep Australia Day on January 26, but those under 35 disagree</a>
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<p>Our findings supported this thinking. In 2021, 60% of those surveyed stated they strongly disagreed or disagreed with the statement. In 2023, 56% of those surveyed strongly disagreed or disagreed with the statement.</p>
<p>The one other <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-reveals-our-complex-attitudes-to-australia-day-110035">survey undertaken in the same manner as ours was in 2019</a>, when 70% of Australians favoured retaining January 26 as Australia Day. The shift in support from 70% in 2019 to 56% in 2023 is very pronounced.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-reveals-our-complex-attitudes-to-australia-day-110035">New research reveals our complex attitudes to Australia Day</a>
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<p>We can conclude that while a small majority of Australians continue to support the celebration of Australia Day on January 26, support for this position is declining.</p>
<p>When we break down the responses by age, it is clear there are significant differences between cohorts on this question. In both surveys, the majority of respondents under 35 agreed we should not celebrate Australia Day on January 26. In 2021, 53% of those under 35 did not want to celebrate on 26 January. In 2023, this figure rose to 57%.</p>
<p>However, agreement that we should not celebrate Australia Day on January 26 increased in every age group. The most significant shift occurred in the 35-54 age group, where agreement with the statement increased from 35% to 42%. Given the short time between surveys, this is a statistically significant shift in public opinion.</p>
<p>Notably, while younger Australians might be leading the push for change, there is a shift towards change in all age groups.</p>
<p>Of course, agreement with this statement may reflect a variety of attitudes to Australia Day. Within the broader debates around January 26, there are those who believe the nation should be celebrated on a different day (represented by the slogan “Change the Date”) and those who believe it is not appropriate to celebrate the nation on any day (reflected in the slogan “Change the Date, We Still Won’t Celebrate”).</p>
<p>Our survey provides evidence that many of those who oppose celebrations on the 26 January are not opposed to national pride or celebration. When we asked respondents whether history should celebrate the nation’s past, 74% of respondents agreed. This suggests a strong desire among many Australians to promote a positive view of Australia. </p>
<p>As with the Australia Day question, however, there were significant differences between the age groups. While 65% of those aged 18-34 answered that history should celebrate the nation, this view increased by age, with 84% of those over 75 agreeing.</p>
<p>These surveys suggest that at this time, only a small – and declining – majority of Australians still support the celebration of Australia Day on January 26. Certainly, it is already inaccurate to argue that this is only the province of the “elite”, the “entitled” or the “woke”. </p>
<p>Further, given that the majority of those under 35 already support changing or abolishing the date, it is highly likely that within the next five to ten years a majority of Australians will hold this view.</p>
<p>There might not be clarity on what we celebrate and when we do it, but the momentum shift away from January 26 is clear. Younger Australians may be leading the push for change but – contrary to what some suggest – there is also a broader and growing discomfort around this much-debated date.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221612/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Lowe receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Singleton receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Cruickshank receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>New polling shows a significant drop in support for January 26 in just two years.David Lowe, Chair in Contemporary History, Deakin UniversityAndrew Singleton, Professor of Sociology and Social Research, Deakin UniversityJoanna Cruickshank, Senior Lecturer in History, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2194482023-12-22T15:47:30Z2023-12-22T15:47:30ZUS election: Jewish and Muslim votes probably don’t have the power to change the outcome – despite backlash on Gaza policy<p>Recent polling suggests that Joe Biden’s policy of backing Israel in the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/-muslim-americans-angry-at-biden-s-support-for-israel-196317765638">Israeli-Palestinian war</a> is hurting him in the eyes of American Muslims. </p>
<p>An #AbandonBiden campaign was launched by <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/muslim-americans-face-abandon-biden-dilemma-then-who-2023-12-02/">Muslim voters in Minnesota</a> in October 2023, after the US president didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire in the war. As part of the campaign, some Muslims have suggested they will organise to stop people voting for Biden in swing states for the upcoming presidential election in November. </p>
<p>The American National Election Study reveals that 83% of Muslim voters in the United States supported Joe Biden in the <a href="https://electionstudies.org/">presidential election</a> of 2020 as the chart below shows. But, while some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/03/muslim-leaders-swing-states-abandon-biden-campaign">analysts have speculated that</a> that this could affect Biden in the presidential election, if you look at the figures this is unlikely to be significant. </p>
<p>Muslim voters currently constitute only just over <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2010/compendia/statab/130ed/population.html">1% of the US population</a>, according to 2017 census data. So even if a significant proportion stayed away in the election or voted for Trump (Biden’s likely competitor) the Muslim vote is not expected to make a difference between a win or a loss.</p>
<p>But is the Jewish vote significant? The election study showed that 75% of them supported Biden in 2020 but since they make up just <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2010/compendia/statab/130ed/population.html">under 2.5% of the US population</a>, according to the same data, their direct impact on US elections is also small. </p>
<p>This means that the impact of the war on US electoral politics will depend on the attitudes to the conflict among all Americans, and currently they are preoccupied with <a href="https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/most-important-issues-facing-the-us">domestic political issues</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Voting by religion in the US presidential election 2020</strong></p>
<p>Traditionally, the US has been a staunch supporter of Israel and in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7 there was a great deal of sympathy for the Israeli side of the conflict. However, <a href="https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/47710-americans-are-growing-less-sympathetic-to-israel-as-war-fears-grow">a YouGov poll</a> conducted just two weeks after the initial attack showed that US attitudes had already started to change.</p>
<p>Within a week sympathy for the Israelis fell by 7%, and sympathy for the Palestinians increased by 3%. The respondents having equal sympathy for both sides rose by 5% over the period.</p>
<p>More recently, a survey conducted by the <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/%20politics/2023/%2012/08/americans-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/">Pew Research Center</a> on December 7 showed large differences in public attitudes to Biden’s policy on the war between Republicans and Democrats and between the different generations.</p>
<p>The poll showed that Americans were divided over whether Biden is striking the right balance between the Israelis and Palestinians. Some 21% thought that his administration favoured the Israelis too much, with 16% thinking this about Palestinians. Altogether 25% thought he had it about right. But 38% of respondents said they were not sure, so there are a lot of Americans who haven’t made up their minds about this yet.</p>
<p>An important question in the Pew survey asked about the Israeli military response in Gaza. Some 45% of Democrats thought that Israel is going too far in its military operations, compared with only 12% of Republicans. </p>
<p>In relation to perceptions of the responsibility for the conflict, age differences were also quite striking. Some 46% of the 18-to-29 age group thought Hamas had a lot of responsibility for the war and 42% thought this about the Israelis. In sharp contrast 81% of the over-65s thought this about Hamas and only 28% blamed the Israelis.</p>
<p>These findings raise an interesting question as to why young Americans and Democrats are much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than their older Republican counterparts. There are several reasons why this has happened.</p>
<p>First, US interests in what happens in the Middle East have declined over time. The late <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/06/trump-foreign-policy-accomplishments/">Henry Kissinger</a> is often quoted as saying: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” Kissinger, who <a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-kissinger-was-a-global-and-deeply-flawed-foreign-policy-heavyweight-218944">died in November</a> at the age of 100, was a firm advocate of the realist school of international relations whose views are captured by this quote.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-kissinger-was-a-global-and-deeply-flawed-foreign-policy-heavyweight-218944">Henry Kissinger was a global – and deeply flawed – foreign policy heavyweight</a>
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<h2>US-Israeli relationships</h2>
<p>For decades, the US and its western allies saw Israel as a key partner in a region where the west’s vital interests were at stake. This was where the west got much of its oil – and during the cold war it was seen as key to protecting the region from Soviet influence.</p>
<p>However, rising concerns about climate change, which are particularly important for young people, together with the fact that the US is now much less dependent on oil from the Middle East means that Israel has declined in importance as a US ally. Thanks to fracking, US exports of <a href="https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60622#:%7E:text=U.S.%20crude%20oil%20exports%20in,the%20United%20States%20was%20repealed.">oil reached records highs</a> in the first part of 2023. This is a trend that will only continue as the world reduces its reliance on fossil fuels.</p>
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<p>A second factor is the military defeats experienced by the US and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Libya. The Afghan and Iraq wars were launched by Republican president George Bush in 2001 and 2003. The late Senator Edward Kennedy described <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20031774">the Iraq invasion</a> as “George Bush’s Vietnam”. So, it is no surprise that young Democrats, are opposed to the United States being dragged into yet another Middle East war.</p>
<p>A third factor is the actions of the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu since the right-wing coalition was formed in December 2022. Millions of Israelis <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/12/middleeast/israel-protests-benjamin-netanyahu-intl/index.html">have been protesting</a> about the government’s attempts to concentrate power in the executive and weaken judicial accountability. Biden also <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/joe-biden-and-benjamin-netanyahu-in-icy-exchange-over-israels-controversial-judicial-reforms-12844704">criticised this development</a> as did other Democrats.</p>
<p>Another factor that could influence voters is that the current conflict is seen by some as <a href="https://environmentalhumanities.yale.edu/news/study-yale-faculty-and-students-shed-light-long-term-consequences-indigenous-land-displacement">a colonial war</a>. Israeli settlers have been involved in a wave of violence against Palestinians in the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/palestinians-israel-west-bank-war-gaza-hamas-settlers-army-raid-militants-c1386ab6a633971cc18b2497169210d3">West Bank</a> and some ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have actively encouraged <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67617920">this violence</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress have just defeated a bill proposed by Biden to give more aid to the Ukraine and Israel. They did this on the grounds that the US should be concentrating on illegal immigration on its <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-sets-test-vote-ukraine-aid-despite-republican-opposition-2023-12-06/#:%7E:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20Dec%206%20(Reuters),the%20U.S.%20border%20with%20Mexico.">southern border rather than overseas conflicts</a>.</p>
<p>What is still uncertain is whether US voters’ attitudes might shift away from domestic issues in 2024. At the moment that seems unlikely.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219448/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC. </span></em></p>Numbers of Muslim and Jewish voters in the US, are small, compared to the rest of the population, so their voting patterns are unlikely to change the 2024 election result.Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2186012023-11-27T11:01:18Z2023-11-27T11:01:18ZANU research suggests referendum confined to Indigenous recognition might have passed<p>An Australian National University survey has reinforced the view the October referendum might have passed if it had been confined to constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. </p>
<p>More than six in ten people (61.7%) said they would definitely or probably have voted for a referendum on recognition. </p>
<p>In the Voice referendum more than six in ten people voted no.</p>
<p>Despite the resounding defeat of the referendum, the survey found strong support (87%) for Indigenous people having a say over matters affecting them. </p>
<p>The survey, a partnership between the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods and the School of Politics and International Relations, tracked more than 4200 voters from January on the Voice. The post-referendum round of data was collected October 17-29. </p>
<p>The full results of the research, titled Explaining voting in the 2023 Australian referendum, will be released on Tuesday. </p>
<p>Co-author of the study, Nicholas Biddle, said: “Our findings show that there is widespread support for a broad definition of constitutional recognition”. He said the results suggested it was not so much the premise of recognition but the model put to voters, among other factors, that was the problem.</p>
<p>The report says: “Not surprisingly, there was a strong correlation between someone’s actual vote in the referendum and how they say they would have voted if it was on recognition only. </p>
<p>"Using a very conservative measure of support (that is, treating all those who were undecided as no voters) among those that voted yes in the Voice referendum, 86% said that they would have voted yes if the question was on constitutional recognition only. </p>
<p>"Of those yes voters that didn’t say yes on constitutional recognition, the vast majority (12.8%) were undecided.</p>
<p>"Even among no voters, however, there was quite substantial levels of support for constitutional recognition with 40.8% saying they probably or definitely would vote yes. Many no voters
were undecided about constitutional recognition (35.8%), but there was also a sizable minority (23.4%) that said they would vote no.”</p>
<p>The ANU findings come as the government has yet to put together a policy on Indigenous consultation in the wake of the referendum’s loss. This is not expected to come until early next year, with the government wanting its current attention concentrated on cost-of-living issues. </p>
<p>Last week the Joint Council of Closing the Gap, comprising federal, state and territory governments and the Indigenous Coalition of Peaks, met, noting progress on closing the gap “remains slow”. </p>
<p>Nearly eight in ten people (79.1%) in the survey said they felt proud of First Nations cultures, while 79.4% think the federal government should help improve reconciliation. </p>
<p>Some 80.5% believe Australia should “undertake formal truth-telling processes to acknowledge the shared reality of Australia’s shared history”. </p>
<p>But people were split when asked, “If Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people tried harder, they could be just as well off as non-Indigenous Australians.” In response, 51.3% agreed.</p>
<p>At the same time, more than 68% agreed many Indigenous people are disadvantaged today because of past race-based policies.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218601/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A survey released by the Australian National University has reinforced that October’s referendum might have passed if it had been confined to constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2159962023-10-19T09:25:35Z2023-10-19T09:25:35ZGrattan on Friday: Anthony Albanese had good motives but his referendum has done much harm<p>The National Anti-Corruption Commission the other day issued its weekly statement about its work program. The government legislated for the NACC late last year, it began operations on July 1, and it’s now going full steam. </p>
<p>What if Anthony Albanese had taken the same approach to the Voice? The Senate would have passed the legislation. The Voice could be operating right now. </p>
<p>Instead, the Voice is dead and reconciliation is, at least for the moment, a wasteland. In medicine they say “do no harm”. Albanese was well motivated, but a great deal of harm has been done.</p>
<p>The prime minister and others will say, the Indigenous people wanted a Voice in the constitution, not simply a legislated Voice. How could he ignore that, when he made his pre-election promise to pursue the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full?</p>
<p>It sounds a compelling argument. Except when you consider the result. Instead of getting something, the outcome has been to achieve nothing. </p>
<p>The destruction of the Voice has been a bipartisan saga over many years, since the Uluru Statement was put out in 2017. The Turnbull government tried to strangle it at birth by wrongly describing it as a “third chamber” of parliament (Malcolm Turnbull later changed his mind). The Morrison government rejected a constitutional Voice and never got around to a legislated one. Finally, the Albanese government has blown it out of the water. </p>
<p>The fact Albanese had the best of intentions is, unfortunately, irrelevant. This wouldn’t be the first disaster coming from a good heart. </p>
<p>Given that around six in ten people voted “no”, former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson is almost certainly right when he said this week, “there was never a time when there was a glimmer of hope this could get through”.</p>
<p>That’s regardless of the early positive polling, when the debate hadn’t started in earnest.</p>
<p>Australians almost never want to change the constitution, and many would not countenance a proposal that lacked enough detail and accorded one section of the community a particular constitutional place. </p>
<p>To blame lack of bipartisanship, mis/disinformation, and racism is kidding ourselves. The margin was too wide. </p>
<p>To think Peter Dutton’s support could have swung things is a very long stretch. The conservatives would have been divided, whatever Dutton did. </p>
<p>And yes, misleading information and conspiracy theories were flying around. But it’s insulting to suggest that so many voters were just duped. </p>
<p>Kos Samaras is a director of RedBridge, a political consultancy firm that undertakes research, including deep dives to tap people’s attitudes. Samaras is no right winger – he’s a former Labor operative, and a declared “yes” voter. His views on the intense focus on disinformation are worth thinking about. </p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/KosSamaras/status/1714760362808258756">He tweeted this week</a>: </p>
<p>“Why do some fixate on disinformation when digesting election results? </p>
<p>"1. It avoids self-reflection 2. It assumes everyone is interested in politics 3. It confirms a societal bias that people who do not agree with you are stupid, especially poorer folk 4. Some MPs, some media and the staffer class live separated lives from the lived experience of Australians. It helps to ignore this reality 5. It ignores the real reason disinformation works. It is believed if it aligns with a person’s voting intention and existing biases 6. It avoids having to alter campaign approaches that may force you to empower people who are culturally different 7. It helps with the sudden realisation that you belong to a minority. </p>
<p>"The fixation on disinformation also guarantees repeating the same mistakes next time.”</p>
<p>The Albanese government has legislation on the go to crack down on online “misinformation and disinformation”. But, as critics have pointed out, including constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey, a strong backer of the Voice, this carries significant dangers for freedom of speech. In fighting one problem, we should beware of creating another.</p>
<p>Racism reared its head during the campaign, and that was abhorrent. What proportion of votes racism drove, however, is another matter.</p>
<p>Racism should be always called out. Equally, it should not be exaggerated in the wake of this defeat. To explain the result as fundamentally the product of a racist Australia is likely to add to the despair some Indigenous people are feeling. </p>
<p>A central reason the Indigenous backers of the Voice campaign wanted it in the constitution was so a future (conservative) government could not abolish it. That insistence was understandable but had two flaws. </p>
<p>First, the plan had parliament possessing wide powers over the body’s structure, so a later government could have emasculated it to the point of near extinction.</p>
<p>The second flaw was this. If making the “perfect” (constitutional status) the enemy of the “good” (legislated only) was likely to end up where we are now, wouldn’t it have been better just to pursue the “good”? </p>
<p>Albanese apparently thought he could deliver the perfect, which is extraordinary for a politician with his experience. But plenty around him must have known this was unlikely and should have persuaded him to confront reality. And then he should have been straight with Indigenous leaders about what could be achieved. Instead he seemed almost intimidated by some of them.</p>
<p>Indigenous leaders are observing a week of media silence and contemplation. They too must feel the responsibility they carry. </p>
<p>Albanese says he is waiting to be advised by Indigenous people on where to from now. When the government said in the campaign it had no plan B, that seems to have been the case. It has not clarified its post-referendum position on treaty and truth-telling.</p>
<p>Given a fractious and difficult parliamentary sitting week, and internal Labor tensions over the Middle East crisis, the prime minister would be glad of the official Indigenous silence. </p>
<p>Politically, Albanese and the government want to move on quickly to other issues. Asked by a backbencher at Tuesday’s caucus meeting what they should say to constituents in the wake of the loss, the prime minister reeled off a list of the government’s achievements in education, health, employment and other areas.</p>
<p>On Thursday, the government issued a release announcing $30.8 million for health research “that listens to Indigenous communities”. It said the 26 research projects “have all involved First Nations people from the start, listening to the lived experience of people at every stage”.</p>
<p>There are a lot of Indigenous voices out there: when it regroups, the government will need to step up its efforts to work more effectively with them. In one encouraging result in a bleak week, an Essential poll reported more than six in ten people had agreed if the referendum failed the government should continue to work with First Nations communities to find solutions to the issues they face.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215996/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite the best of intentions, the prime minister’s determination to take Australians to a referendum on the Voice to Parliament has caused tremendous damage.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2131562023-10-14T09:00:07Z2023-10-14T09:00:07ZVoice to Parliament referendum has been heavily defeated nationally and in all states<p>The Voice to Parliament referendum has failed convincingly after the ABC <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/referendum/2023/results?filter=all&sort=az&state=all&party=all">projected</a> large victories for the “no” side in the national vote and all states. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.pollbludger.net/fed2023ref/Results/">Poll Bludger</a> is currently projecting a 60.0–40.0% win for “no” in the national vote with 74% of enrolled voters counted. </p>
<p>The Poll Bludger’s current projections in the states are a “no” win in New South Wales (58.9–41.1%), Victoria (54.1–45.9%), Queensland (68.1–31.9%), Western Australia (63.2–36.8), South Australia (64.0–36.0%) and Tasmania (59.0–41.0%).</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/voice-to-parliament-referendum-defeated-results-at-a-glance-215366">Voice to Parliament referendum defeated: results at-a-glance</a>
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<p>The referendum required a majority vote in a majority of the states (four of six), as well as a majority vote nationally, to succeed. Votes cast in the Northern Territory and ACT are only counted in the national vote.</p>
<p>The ACT is the only state or territory that will vote “yes”, by a 60.9–39.1% margin in the Poll Bludger projection. The NT is currently projecting for a 61.7–38.3% “no” vote.</p>
<p>Here is the latest aggregate poll graph that was updated with the final Newspoll and JWS polls and the provisional results.</p>
<p>The pollsters were broadly correct – they have been projecting a win for the “no” side for months. However, the Morgan and Essential polls that had “no” ahead by just six and seven points greatly overstated the “yes” support. </p>
<p>Newspoll’s final poll had a 20-point lead for “no” and YouGov’s final poll an 18-point lead. These two polls were the most accurate compared with the current projected result of a 20-point “no” win. The worst polls for “yes” were more accurate.</p>
<p>There were two late national polls not covered in Friday’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/final-voice-polls-have-no-leading-by-sizeable-to-landslide-margins-215264">Voice polls article</a> for The Conversation. A <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/indigenous/voice-referendum-newspoll-late-swing-for-yes-campaign-but-nation-poised-to-say-no/news-story/7096dcf9234291d496ba016ccaa5142c">Newspoll</a>, conducted October 4–12 from a sample of 2,638 people, gave “no” a 57–37% lead. And a JWS poll for the <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/yes-vote-in-need-of-a-miracle-poll-shows-20231012-p5ebn7">Financial Review</a>, conducted October 6–9 from a sample of 922 people, gave “no” a 52–39% lead.</p>
<h2>Electorate results</h2>
<p>The ABC has <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/referendum/2023/results?filter=all&sort=yes&state=all&party=all">called “yes” wins</a> in 28 of the 151 federal seats and “yes” leads in another five seats. The ABC has called “no” wins in 115 seats, with three seats leaning “no” and not yet decided.</p>
<p>The best electorates for “yes” were inner city seats where Labor and the Greens traditionally do well, such as Greens leader Adam Bandt’s Melbourne electorate, Grayndler and Sydney in NSW, and Canberra in the ACT. The three Queensland seats won by the Greens in the 2022 election also voted “yes”. </p>
<p>All the seats won by “teal” independents in 2022 appear to have voted “yes”, although Curtin and Mackellar are still in doubt. </p>
<p>The six electorates with the highest “no” votes were all in rural Queensland. Traditional Labor strongholds, such as Calwell and Scullin in Melbourne, also voted “no” by large margins.</p>
<p>Some postal votes were counted last night, so what remains to be counted is largely absent votes and late postal votes. These will report in the next two weeks. I believe these votes will help the “yes” side hold the electorates where it currently leads. The overall result will remain a heavy defeat.</p>
<h2>Labor referendums very rarely win</h2>
<p>In May, I wrote that just one of 25 Labor-initiated referendums had succeeded in winning the required majority of states, as well as a national majority. While not successful, Labor referendums held with general elections have performed far better than when held as a standalone referendum.</p>
<p>In view of this history, it was a blunder to hold this referendum as a standalone vote, rather than at the next general election.</p>
<p>Six of 18 referendums proposed by conservative governments have succeeded. The reason for the huge difference in success rate between Labor and conservative-initiated referendums is that Labor sometimes gives its support to conservative referendums, while the conservatives almost never do in reverse.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/while-the-voice-has-a-large-poll-lead-now-history-of-past-referendums-indicates-it-may-struggle-204365">While the Voice has a large poll lead now, history of past referendums indicates it may struggle</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Our election analyst lays out the current projections across the nation.Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2151452023-10-11T01:29:43Z2023-10-11T01:29:43ZThe ‘yes’ campaign is generating the most media and social media content. Yet, it continues to trail in the polls<p>With almost a third of votes cast already in <a href="https://antonygreen.com.au/the-voice-referendum-postal-and-pre-poll-voting-rates/">postal and pre-poll voting</a> for the Voice to Parliament referendum, the “yes” campaign is ramping up its advertising and media efforts. Both campaigns are in the home straight ahead of Saturday’s crucial ballot.</p>
<p>Recent polls indicate that in the closing weeks of the campaign, support for the “no” campaign has slowed somewhat, but “yes” still sits at around 42% nationally.</p>
<p>This week, Professor <a href="https://simonjackman.github.io/poll_averaging_voice_2023/poll_averaging.html">Simon Jackman’s average of public polling</a> placed “yes” at 42.7% nationally, with a 1.7-point margin of error. The best recent polls for “yes” continue to be those fielded by Roy Morgan and Essential, with support in the mid-40s. Newspoll (now administered by Pyxis) and Redbridge, meanwhile, have “yes” support in the high-30s. </p>
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<iframe scrolling="no" src="https://simonjackman.github.io/poll_averaging_voice_2023/level_plot_standalone.html" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;" width="100%" height="400"> </iframe>
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<h2>What’s happening in online advertising?</h2>
<p>Consistent with what we have seen during the course of the campaign, the Yes23 campaign has outpaced other paid referendum campaign groups in its online advertising spending on Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), the most-used platforms for online advertising during this campaign. </p>
<p>Four of the top five online advertisers are supporting the “yes” campaign, with A$364,000 in total advertising spending this past week. Yes23’s ad spend is distributed fairly evenly (relative to population) across the mainland states, reflecting its goal to attract national support. </p>
<p>The top “no” campaign advertisers on Meta spent just $46,000 this past week. This includes Fair Australia, supported by Advance Australia; Warren Mundine’s separate “Not My Voice” campaign, and Nationals MP Keith Pitt. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-no-campaign-is-dominating-the-messaging-on-the-voice-referendum-on-tiktok-heres-why-212465">The 'no' campaign is dominating the messaging on the Voice referendum on TikTok – here's why</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In comparison to Yes23’s blanket coverage, Fair Australia is chiefly targeting South Australia and to a lesser degree Tasmania. Assuming it will win sympathetic states like Western Australia and Queensland, the “no” campaign only needs to win one more state (either South Australia or Tasmania) to ensure the referendum fails. </p>
<p>Interestingly, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is no longer spending on social media advertising. Perhaps this is because she already has a sizeable presence on Meta (with a quarter million followers) and is generating millions of likes for her “no” campaign videos on the free platform, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-no-campaign-is-dominating-the-messaging-on-the-voice-referendum-on-tiktok-heres-why-212465">TikTok</a>.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552704/original/file-20231009-17-4holo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spending by Voice campaign groups on Meta platforms from October 2-9.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Meta Ad Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<h2>What’s happening in the news and social media?</h2>
<p>During the past week, which aligns with the commencement of pre-polling, our analysis of free media coverage – print, radio, TV and social media – shows that Voice coverage has unsurprisingly increased in volume since our <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yes-voice-campaign-is-far-outspending-no-in-online-advertising-but-is-the-message-getting-through-213749">last data report</a> two weeks ago. </p>
<p>The Voice referendum made up 7.3% of total coverage during the week, up from 6.7% reported in our previous analysis. </p>
<p>Recent stories getting the most attention on X (formerly Twitter) were: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>an <a href="https://anmj.org.au/health-organisations-sign-open-letter-in-support-of-voice-to-parliament/#:%7E:text=More%20than%20100%20of%20Australia%E2%80%99s%20leading%20health%20organisations,Strait%20Islander%20peoples%20and%2C%20ultimately%2C%20improve%20health%20outcomes.">open letter</a> from more than 100 health organisations advocating in favour of “yes”</p></li>
<li><p>widespread discussion of the <a href="https://twitter.com/DrVicFielding/status/1707529420536439180">uncivil nature</a> of the referendum debate </p></li>
<li><p>the start of early voting </p></li>
<li><p>and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/02/morning-mail-mundines-daughter-speaks-out-russian-oligarch-attacks-sanctions-penriths-magical-three-peat">Garigarra Riley-Mundine</a>, the daughter of leading “no” campaigner Warren Mundine, publicly supporting the Voice. </p></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<hr>
<h2>How we further analysed media content</h2>
<p>But what can we see about the distinctiveness of the campaign coverage since the referendum was announced on August 30? </p>
<p>One way to answer that is to look at the <em>supply</em> side of the debates. Supply represents what (and how much) information is in the public domain – as opposed to the <em>demand</em> side, which reflects how Australians engage with or react to the coverage. </p>
<p>To better understand this, we analysed about half a million Twitter posts and mainstream news stories from Meltwater, a global media monitoring company, combined with 50,000 Facebook and Instagram (public) posts that have appeared since the announcement of the referendum date. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yes-voice-campaign-is-far-outspending-no-in-online-advertising-but-is-the-message-getting-through-213749">The 'yes' Voice campaign is far outspending 'no' in online advertising, but is the message getting through?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>We then used an algorithm to categorise this content into one of five distinctly relevant narratives. Put simply, think of a machine that can organise a collection of many different LEGO blocks (or in our case, media items) into a predetermined number of bins (in our case, topics), based on the LEGO blocks’ similarities (in our case, the key words that make up these narratives).</p>
<p>The algorithm gives us a quick – and rough – estimate of what’s being said in the public sphere across our screens, airwaves and newspapers during the campaign.</p>
<p>As seen below, about a quarter of the data we analysed – the largest distinct category – comes from general media commentary, constituting a complex mix of positive and negative coverage reflecting Australia’s increasingly polarised media landscape. </p>
<p>We estimate language supporting the two main “yes” campaigns comprised over 40% of the public debate, providing mostly affirmative messages about the referendum. </p>
<p>The algorithm categorised the “no” camp’s distinctly negative language at well under 20% of the overall debate. This included coverage from Sky News, which has been much more negative about the Voice.</p>
<p>General voter information coming from a range of sources, including the Australian Electoral Commission and the Australian government, made up another about 18% of the total media and social media content during the campaign. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553172/original/file-20231011-23-p5whop.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Topic modelling of the Voice debates since the referendum’s date announcement.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Justin Philipps</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>All this data tells us a little about what’s been said during the campaign and the evolving nature of the debate as various narratives gain and lose popularity. </p>
<p>So, if the “yes” side has been contributing the lion’s share of Voice content over the past six weeks, why are the polls not closer? </p>
<p>That’s a complicated question because not all media and messaging are equal. Nor do we know how well campaigning actually changes voter behaviour. </p>
<p>We are also just looking at the supply side of free media only, not paid advertising or private messaging spaces. And we know the “no” side has had millions of people engaging with and sharing its content, which is not tracked here. </p>
<p>Rough estimates like these efforts, though, suggest there’s much more to be learned – both about our nation and, crucially, about ourselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215145/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Carson receives funding from La Trobe University Synergy grant pogram to undertake this research.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justin Phillips receives funding from New Zealand's Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, Meta (in the form of a Facebook Research Award), and the Royal Society Te Apārangi.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Max Grömping receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP220100050; DP230101777). He is an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and member of the Electoral Integrity Project‘s International Advisory Board.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Strating receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project. She is a recipient of external grant funding, including from the governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, the Philippines and Taiwan.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Jackman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Our research has found the ‘yes’ side has been generating the lion’s share of Voice content in the media and social media over the past six weeks, but is still trailing in the polls.Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe UniversityJustin Phillips, Senior Lecturer, University of WaikatoMax Grömping, Senior Lecturer, Griffith UniversityRebecca Strating, Director, La Trobe Asia and Associate Professor, La Trobe University, La Trobe UniversitySimon Jackman, Professor, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2138352023-10-06T12:31:06Z2023-10-06T12:31:06ZOften in error but still seductive: Why we can’t quit election polls<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552158/original/file-20231004-24-qh8x64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=80%2C0%2C5910%2C3071&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Polls showed Joe Biden, right, holding double-digit leads over Donald Trump, left, in the run-up to the 2020 election, but he won election by only 4.5 percentage points.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/Election2020TrumpBidenDebate/775bdcaa25584fc784badbc3b85f5b51/photo?Query=(persons.person_featured:%22Joe%20Biden%22)%20AND%20(persons.person_featured:%22Donald%20Trump%22)%20AND%20%20(Trump%20Biden)%20&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=2&currentItemNo=1">AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Their record is <a href="https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/election-polls-are-95-confident-but-only-60-accurate-berkeley-haas-study-finds/">uneven</a>. They misfired in one way or another in the past three presidential elections. And yet the prevalence of election polls is undiminished. Many months before the 2024 election, polls are many – and inescapable.</p>
<p>Why is that? What explains polling’s abiding appeal despite its performance record?</p>
<p>The reasons go beyond facile analogies that election polls are akin to weather forecasts in offering a fluid, if <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4220759-washington-post-says-poll-showing-trump-beating-biden-likely-an-outlier/">sometimes contradictory</a>, sense of what lies ahead.</p>
<p>Polls and poll-based forecasts are not always in error, as I noted in my 2020 book, “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300965/lost-in-a-gallup">Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections</a>.” Their enduring appeal rests in part in offering a sense of data-based certainty that can be irresistible, especially to journalists who tend to value precision in a field awash with ambiguity. </p>
<p>It is hardly surprising, then, that news organizations also are polling operations. Ties to election polling live deep in the media’s DNA. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Candidates Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey in a cartoon featuring predictions of Dewey's win." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362809/original/file-20201011-13-c5wala.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A cartoon published two weeks before the 1948 election, in which Dewey was expected to win the presidency by a wide margin – but didn’t.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/306150">Clifford Kennedy Berryman, Artist/National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, 1789 - 2015</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A deep affinity for polls</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Literary-Digest">Literary Digest</a>, an American news magazine published weekly from 1890 to 1938, conducted massive mail-in polls early in the 20th century and built what was widely called an “uncanny” record for predicting presidential elections accurately – until it <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/269085">failed utterly in 1936</a>. </p>
<p>The magazine’s poll that year was based on returns of more than 2.3 million postcard ballots and estimated an easy victory for Republican Alf Landon over incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat. </p>
<p>The Literary Digest <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41407095">miscalled</a> the election by nearly 20 percentage points. <a href="https://apnews.com/article/61180650de91bba046babcd198c0449f">Landon won just two states</a> in one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history. </p>
<p>Within two years, the Literary Digest was <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,882981,00.html">absorbed</a> by Time magazine.</p>
<p>Major news organizations these days figure prominently in election surveying. CNN, The Economist, Fox News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Yahoo News – among others – all conduct or commission preelection polls. Results of media-sponsored polls are shared with the built-in large audiences of the respective news outlets, exerting what <a href="https://carsey.unh.edu/person/david-moore">polling expert David Moore</a> has <a href="https://www.imediaethics.org/the-2020-election-polls-were-even-worse-than-it-appears/">called</a> “a major influence” on public perceptions of an election.</p>
<p>Indeed, media polls – notably <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/28/politics/cnn-poll-national-october/index.html">CNN’s</a> and the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/biden-leads-trump-10-points-final-pre-election-nbc-news-n1245667">final preelection survey</a> conducted jointly for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal – showed Joe Biden holding double-digit leads over Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election, encouraging <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/520692-the-memo-biden-landslide-creeps-into-view/">expectations of a landslide</a>. But the outcome was no rout. Biden won the election by 4.5 percentage points.</p>
<h2>Forgetting history</h2>
<p>Another reason why election polls endure is that memories among both the public and pollsters about past failures tend to be fleeting. </p>
<p>By nature, opinion research and journalism are <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/03/21/looking-ahead-to-2050-americans-are-pessimistic-about-many-aspects-of-life-in-u-s/">forward-looking</a> pursuits. Their practitioners tend not to dwell on, or often recall, how <a href="https://theconversation.com/election-polls-in-2020-produced-error-of-unusual-magnitude-expert-panel-finds-without-pinpointing-cause-164759">poorly election polls fared</a> in 2020, for example, by collectively overstating Biden’s prospects of victory.</p>
<p>Recollections have likewise dimmed about how polls in key states in 2016 mostly failed to detect decisive, late-campaign <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/where-the-polls-got-it-wrong/">shifts</a> in Trump’s favor. Or how in 2012 the venerable Gallup Poll <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/06/04/gallup-explains-what-went-wrong-in-2012/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.9d5f7b33f219">erred</a> in consistently giving Mitt Romney the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/158519/romney-obama-gallup-final-election-survey.aspx">advantage</a> in preelection matchups with President Barack Obama. </p>
<p>Memories, inevitably, are even dimmer about the <a href="https://theconversation.com/epic-miscalls-and-landslides-unforeseen-the-exceptional-catalog-of-polling-failure-146959">polling failures</a> of 1936, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/18/us/50-years-later-pollsters-analyze-their-big-defeat.html">1948</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1952/11/03/archives/election-outcome-highly-uncertain-survey-indicates-vote-in-many.html">1952</a> and <a href="https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal80-860-25879-1173496">1980</a>.</p>
<p>Failure notwithstanding, polls long ago became central features of the theater of American politics. Their results help sharpen and give dimension to the competitive drama of national elections. A tightening race or a building landslide can be at least mildly suspenseful and diverting.</p>
<p>Polls command attention because they “give the public and the candidates some inkling of the electorate’s thinking,” as media critic Jack Shafer has <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/09/journalism-polls-reporting-politics-520427">noted</a>.</p>
<p>Moreover, polls have become useful both to Democrats and Republicans in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/2020-democratic-debates.html">winnowing</a> bloated fields of presidential candidates, most of whom have no chance of being nominated. Both parties in recent years have <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4218852-rnc-raises-threshold-to-qualify-for-third-gop-debate/">imposed thresholds of polling support</a> for candidates to qualify for party-sponsored debates early in the cycle.</p>
<p>The 2024 presidential election campaign has offered a historically unusual reason to pay attention to the polls, even ones this early.</p>
<p>Not since 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party in a failed attempt to return to the White House <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1912">four years after he had left the office</a>, has a former president campaigned to reclaim the office. Trump’s candidacy for reelection no doubt has encouraged closer than customary attention to the polls, especially as they have indicated he <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/us/2024_republican_presidential_nomination-7548.html">maintains enormous leads</a> over rivals for the Republican nomination. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A presidential poll on a double postcard." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=195&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=195&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=195&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=245&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=245&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552162/original/file-20231004-19-tstfca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=245&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Literary Digest, an American general interest magazine, conducted massive mail-in polls early in the 20th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/275751060973">Screenshot, eBay</a></span>
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<h2>What else is there?</h2>
<p>Significantly, election polling benefits from a what-else-is-there attitude among journalists, opinion researchers, historians of public polling and politicians that <a href="https://sippey.medium.com/nate-cohn-on-polling-30a9c2c3d65b">no other reasonably accurate options</a> exist in sampling the public’s views and attitudes. </p>
<p>Extensive interviewing by political journalists, an earnest technique called “<a href="https://pressthink.org/2015/04/good-old-fashioned-shoe-leather-reporting/">shoe-leather</a>” reporting, occasionally has been tried by news organizations seeking an alternative to reliance on polls. But such experiments have produced little success. </p>
<p>A notable advocate of shoe-leather journalism was Haynes Johnson, a political reporter for The Washington Post who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/business/media/haynes-johnson-journalist-and-author-dies-at-81.html">died in 2013</a>. Johnson was a poll-basher, asserting that they represent “no substitute for hard reporting” and <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?16899-1/sleepwalking-history">bluntly acknowledging</a>, “I hate the polls.”</p>
<p>In the weeks before the 1980 election, when President Jimmy Carter sought a second term, Johnson wrote lengthy preelection articles based on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/09/21/a-small-southern-town-looking-for-a-president-to-believe-in/c7d36f8b-6c0a-4313-985a-a72b6e51ee92/">many hours of interviews</a> with Americans in places as diverse as Boston, San Diego and Youngstown, Ohio. As the campaign neared its end, Johnson was asked on the PBS <a href="https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=john&p=704&item=T:11452">program</a> “Washington Week in Review” who was positioned to win. “I think somehow that Carter is going to slip through” and be reelected, he replied.</p>
<p>A few days later, <a href="https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/1980">Carter lost</a> to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. </p>
<p>So, if you want clues to what the electorate is thinking in an election campaign – and almost everyone seems interested in such knowledge, from voters, journalists and pundits to donors, campaign workers and candidates – “shoe-leather” journalism won’t cut it. Counting candidates’ <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/polls-arent-perfect-but-nor-are-subjective-indicators.html">yard signs</a> won’t cut it, either. Estimating <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/28/donald-trump-continues-to-draw-yuge-crowds-that-matters-less-than-he-thinks/">crowd size </a> at campaign rallies is seldom <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a7121/the-curious-science-of-counting-a-crowd/">very revealing</a>. Odds produced by <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/betting-markets-now-see-a-trump-2024-win-as-likelier-than-a-biden-victory-and-give-newsom-better-chances-than-trumps-gop-rivals-96392f4b">betting markets</a> may be intriguing but aren’t consistently reliable. </p>
<p>For want of a better alternative, society is stuck with sample surveys, a popular, familiar, but often-fallible way of estimating outcomes in high-stakes elections.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213835/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>W. Joseph Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The unusual candidacy of former President Donald Trump has made election polling especially appealing, more than a year from the election. But consumers beware: Those polls may be wrong.W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of CommunicationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2147132023-10-04T19:05:42Z2023-10-04T19:05:42ZNew polling shows ‘no’ voters more likely to see Australia as already divided<p>As campaigning in the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament continues, <a href="https://www.aec.gov.au/referendums/files/pamphlet/your-official-yes-no-referendum-pamphlet.pdf">“no” campaigners</a> have repeatedly argued against what they call <a href="https://mumbrella.com.au/voice-of-division-advertising-blitz-seen-as-the-closer-for-no-campaign-801209">“the Voice of division”</a>. </p>
<p>The results of our exclusive opinion poll suggest something to the contrary: most prospective “no” voters see the country as already divided, while “yes” voters are more likely to see it as united.</p>
<p>As part of an <a href="https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/projects/determining-the-drivers-and-dynamics-of-partisanship-and-polarisation-in-online-public-debate/">Australian Laureate Fellowship project</a>, we commissioned a series of questions to explore whether Australian voters saw their country as divided, against the backdrop of the current referendum campaigns. These questions were added to the regular <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/04/more-voters-intend-to-vote-no-to-indigenous-voice-despite-yes-campaign-launch-essential-poll-finds">Essential opinion poll</a> in its September 5 poll.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/voice-support-up-in-essential-poll-but-it-is-still-behind-214257">Voice support up in Essential poll, but it is still behind</a>
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<h2>Division and the Voice</h2>
<p>Polling on Voice voting intention itself shows polarisation on the issue. In the week our questions were asked, Essential showed an overall split of 42% of respondents likely to vote “yes” and 48% likely to vote “no”, with 10% undecided. (The “yes” vote has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/03/guardian-essential-poll-yes-vote-gains-ground-but-no-still-ahead-on-indigenous-voice">regained some ground in more recent polling</a>.)</p>
<p>But when we asked respondents “How unified or divided you think Australian society is?”, their <em>perceptions</em> differed vastly between “yes” and “no” supporters. </p>
<p>Of those who see the country as unified, 58% intend to vote “yes”, while only 34% intend to vote “no”. Those who see division have almost exactly opposite intentions: 59% plan to vote “no” and 34% plan to vote “yes”.</p>
<table><thead>
<tr>
<th>Voting intention</th>
<th>Very unified + quite unified</th>
<th>Neither unified nor divided</th>
<th>Quite divided + very divided</th>
</tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr>
<td>Intend to vote yes</td>
<td>58%</td>
<td>38%</td>
<td>34%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Intend to vote no</td>
<td>34%</td>
<td>46%</td>
<td>59%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Unsure</td>
<td>8%</td>
<td>16%</td>
<td>8%</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p><em>Perceptions of unity and division in Australian society and referendum voting intentions</em></p>
<p>These results are remarkable, and contradict the “no” campaign rhetoric that it is the Voice to Parliament proposal itself that divides us. Instead, they show only a part of the Australian population believes the country is divided – and those voters overwhelmingly support the “no” campaign. </p>
<h2>Who sees Australia as divided – and why?</h2>
<p>Away from the Voice campaign, though, our poll results show societal division in Australia remains relatively mild overall. Of all the respondents we polled, 27% saw Australia as very or quite unified, and 42% as quite or very divided – which leaves 31% of voters who take a neutral point of view.</p>
<table><thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Very unified</th>
<th>Quite unified</th>
<th>Neither unified nor divided</th>
<th>Quite divided</th>
<th>Very divided</th>
<th>Very unified + quite unified</th>
<th>Quite divided + very divided</th>
</tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr>
<td>Percent of respondents</td>
<td>5% </td>
<td>22% </td>
<td>31% </td>
<td>33% </td>
<td>9% </td>
<td>27% </td>
<td>42%</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p><em>Overall perceptions of unity and division in Australian society</em></p>
<p>This compares favourably with countries such as the United States, where polarisation, especially between political camps, now pervades virtually <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/winter-2021/america-is-exceptional-in-its-political-divide">all aspects of society</a>. Australians may have their disagreements, but only 9% of us see the country as very divided.</p>
<p>It also means “no” voters believe Australia to be considerably more divided, and “yes” voters believe the country to be substantially more unified, than Australians do on average.</p>
<p>These perceptions vary among different demographics. Younger participants see more unity in Australia. In contrast, voters over 55 see more division. </p>
<p>Employment status also plays a role: those in paid employment see considerably more unity than those without employment. This is especially true of retirees – who are also likely to be older, of course. Similarly, residents of capital cities see more unity than those outside them.</p>
<table><thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Age</th>
<th></th>
<th></th>
<th>Residence</th>
<th></th>
<th>Employment</th>
<th></th>
<th></th>
</tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>18-34</td>
<td>35-54</td>
<td>55+</td>
<td>Capital</td>
<td>Non-capital</td>
<td>In paid employment</td>
<td>Not in paid employment</td>
<td>Retired</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Very unified + Quite unified</td>
<td>32%</td>
<td>31%</td>
<td>20%</td>
<td>30%</td>
<td>21%</td>
<td>33%</td>
<td>18%</td>
<td>19%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Neither unified nor divided</td>
<td>33%</td>
<td>30%</td>
<td>30%</td>
<td>31%</td>
<td>31%</td>
<td>28%</td>
<td>39%</td>
<td>30%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Quite divided + Very divided</td>
<td>35%</td>
<td>39%</td>
<td>51%</td>
<td>39%</td>
<td>48%</td>
<td>39%</td>
<td>42%</td>
<td>50%</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p><em>Demographic effects on perceptions of unity and division in Australian society</em></p>
<h2>A ‘no’ campaign that appeals to perceptions of division</h2>
<p>Our poll results show the main appeal of the “no” campaign’s rhetoric of “the Voice of division” is not to Australians who want to prevent deep political division in the country before it can take root. </p>
<p>Rather, it has attracted a substantial share of voters who think the country is <em>already</em> divided – and whose perceptions of polarisation are considerably greater than everyone else’s. In this sense, rather than offering a voice for unity, the “no” campaign is giving voice <em>to</em> division.</p>
<p>Conversely, the “yes” campaign has yet to convince a sufficiently large group of voters that the Voice offers a pathway towards greater unity – even if those who intend to vote “yes” on October 14 are already much more inclined to see the country as united.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yes-voice-campaign-is-far-outspending-no-in-online-advertising-but-is-the-message-getting-through-213749">The 'yes' Voice campaign is far outspending 'no' in online advertising, but is the message getting through?</a>
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<h2>Methodology</h2>
<p>This content was commissioned by Queensland University of Technology and completed by Essential Research. The survey was conducted online from August 30 to September 3 2023 and is based on 1,151 respondents sourced from online research panels. </p>
<p>The target population is all Australian residents aged 18 and over. Demographic quotas were applied to fieldwork and results are weighted. Full details of the methodology can be found <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/methodology">here</a>.</p>
<p>This research was conducted in accordance with the <a href="https://www.australianpollingcouncil.com/">Australian Polling Council</a> code of conduct. The council aims to advance the quality and understanding of public opinion polling in Australia.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214713/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Axel Bruns receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Laureate Fellowship FL210100051 Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate, Discovery project DP200101317 Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samantha Vilkins receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Laureate Fellowship FL210100051 Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tariq Choucair receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Laureate Fellowship FL210100051 Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate.
</span></em></p>Exclusive polling shows that those who see Australia as a divided nation are far more likely to vote “no” than those who see it as united.Axel Bruns, Professor, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of TechnologySamantha Vilkins, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of TechnologyTariq Choucair, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2144452023-10-02T10:49:47Z2023-10-02T10:49:47ZParty conference season is here – but decades of polling evidence suggests these events barely move the dial<p>From late September to early October, the UK’s political parties gather for their autumn conferences. The Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party will be among the parties bringing their members and MPs together at some expense in a season that lasts about three weeks. </p>
<p>Party conferences fulfil a lot of important political functions in the British party system. Florence Faucher-King, a political scientist based at Sciences Po in Paris, has written the definitive study of British party conferences in the form of an <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230509887">anthropological analysis</a>.</p>
<p>She argues that party conferences are central to the life of political parties. They contribute to setting policy agendas, developing policy options, legitimising policy choices, building party cohesion, motivating activists, publicising party activities and testing effective campaign messages among the wider public.</p>
<p>But it is fair to say that since TV coverage of conferences started in the 1950s, the focus on presenting an attractive face to the electorate and giving party leaders a publicity platform has taken precedence over their role as venues for debating and developing policies. The ritualistic standing ovations given to the leader’s speech is very much the centrepiece of contemporary party conferences. What started as a forum for internal debates and decision-making about policies among party members and leaders has become a scripted political theatre aimed at winning headlines and boosting social media campaigns.</p>
<p>This raises an interesting question – do these political theatres make any difference to the party’s popularity among the general public?</p>
<p>One way of answering this question is to look at voting intentions for the parties measured before and after the party conference season. If party conferences move the dial, then we should observe changes in voting intentions for the parties between August, before the season starts, and October, after it has ended. If a conference is reported to be a success, then voting intentions for the party in the polls should improve. If it’s a disaster plagued by calamity and infighting, then we should observe voting intentions for the party declining.</p>
<p>It is possible to find examples of this dynamic happening. After losing the general election in 1959, the Labour party conference in 1960 was a picture of disunity. A conflict between party activists and the leadership emerged over nuclear arms, with the party ultimately voting at the conference to adopt a policy of unilaterally abandoning Britain’s nuclear deterrent. This happened despite fierce opposition from the party leader, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Labour_Party_leadership_election">Hugh Gaitskell</a>. The party’s voting intentions score in the August poll that year was 42%, but by October this had fallen to 37%.</p>
<p>The past year potentially provides evidence in the other direction. In August 2022, Labour polled 41% in voting intentions, but by October it was 52%. To be fair, much of the shift on that occasion was caused by Liz Truss’s ill-fated attempt to introduce unfunded tax cuts. Financial markets reacted very badly to the idea, and this would have directly affected public opinion. However, it also gave Keir Starmer an open goal to attack the government’s handling of this crisis in his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywGjuqt_v_M">party conference speech</a>, which probably added to the significant change in voting intentions. </p>
<p>In this regard, Starmer was probably helped by Truss’s own conference speech, which was so hyper that it started with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orgtw9Vit1o">standing ovation even before she spoke</a>. In August of that year, Conservative vote intentions were 31%, so their popularity had eroded quite a bit already since the beginning of their tenure. After the party conference in October, it fell to 24%. </p>
<h2>Is anyone listening?</h2>
<p>But when we look at the relationship between party conferences and voting intentions over a long period of time, these examples appear to be the exception rather than the rule. When you compare the average voting intentions in August for the three major parties with the average voting intentions in October over the long term – between 1955, when the Conservative party conference was first televised, and 2022 – it’s clear there were no significant changes between the two months.</p>
<p>The average voting intentions for the Conservatives across the years was 38%, for Labour 42%, and for the Liberals and subsequently the Liberal Democrats 14% – both in August and October. On average, the dial did not move.</p>
<p><strong>Voting intentions in August and October for the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, 1955 to 2022</strong></p>
<p>So, these costly events that cause leaders immense anxiety aren’t really making a meaningful difference in the eyes of voters. Perhaps sensing the theatrical nature of the exercise, they are primed to ignore or discount much of what happens. </p>
<p>The time has come to change the emphasis so that party conferences are less about political theatre and more about debating issues and creating policies. It just might be that policymaking in government would be more effective and less subject to rapid U-turns and contradictions if more time were spent in party conferences preparing policies and less on cheerleading.</p>
<p>There is a large literature in political science on the effectiveness of <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0405">deliberative democracy</a> – an exercise in which ordinary citizens examine and debate policy choices with the aim of designing something effective and balanced. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, for example, <a href="https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/the-irish-abortion-referendum-how-a-citizens-assembly-helped-to-break-years-of-political-deadlock/">broke the deadlock</a> on the question of abortion and triggered a constitutional change. </p>
<p>Annual party conferences will always be rallying exercises for the party members, but if they dialled down the political theatre a bit and reinforced the debate about what should be done, they might have more impact on the public.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214445/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council. </span></em></p>The pressure to ‘have a good conference’ is immense for a party hoping to win an election. But the anxiety isn’t really evidence-based.Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2137492023-09-25T20:07:34Z2023-09-25T20:07:34ZThe ‘yes’ Voice campaign is far outspending ‘no’ in online advertising, but is the message getting through?<p>With early voting set to open next week for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, this is a critical time for campaigners to win over voters.</p>
<p>If the <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n11054/pdf/ch01.pdf">2022 federal election</a> is anything to go by, Australians have developed a taste for early voting, with fewer than half of all voters actually going to a polling station on election day.</p>
<p>If the same voting patterns apply to the referendum, this means more than half of Australians, particularly <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/correlates-of-early-voting/49D19E94A1D26F9AFE1B72DCB56AFF3F">older voters</a>, may have cast a vote before voting day on October 14. </p>
<h2>What’s happening in the polls?</h2>
<p>Public polls indicate support for the “yes” campaign continues to decline, despite, as we’ve shown below, huge spending on advertising and extensive media coverage of its message.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://simonjackman.github.io/poll_averaging_voice_2023/poll_averaging.html">Professor Simon Jackman’s</a> averaging of the polls, “no” currently leads “yes” by 58% to 42% nationally. If this lead holds, the result would be <a href="https://www.aec.gov.au/elections/referendums/1999_referendum_reports_statistics/1999.htm">even more lopsided</a> than the 1999 republic referendum defeat, where the <a href="https://www.aec.gov.au/elections/referendums/1999_referendum_reports_statistics/summary_republic.htm">nationwide vote </a> was 55% “no” to 45% “yes”. </p>
<p>The rate of decline in support for “yes” continues to be about 0.75 of a percentage point a week. If this trend continues, the “yes” vote would sit at 39.6% on October 14, 5.5 percentage points below the “yes” vote in the republic referendum. </p>
<p>If “yes” were to prevail on October 14, it would take a colossal reversal in public sentiment, or it would indicate there’s been a stupendously large, collective polling error. Or perhaps both.</p>
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<iframe src="https://simonjackman.github.io/poll_averaging_voice_2023/level_plot_standalone.html" style="width:100%;" width="100%" height="688"> </iframe>
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<h2>What’s happening in the news and social media?</h2>
<p>Using Meltwater data, we have seen a massive spike in Voice media coverage since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the referendum date at the end of August.</p>
<p>In the most recent week we analysed, from September 14-21, we saw a huge jump of mentions of the Voice to Parliament (2.86 million) in print media, radio, TV and social media. This compares to about a quarter million mentions in the first week of the “yes” and “no” campaigns, which we documented in our <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-no-campaign-is-dominating-the-messaging-on-the-voice-referendum-on-tiktok-heres-why-212465">last report</a> of this series monitoring both campaigns. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-no-campaign-is-dominating-the-messaging-on-the-voice-referendum-on-tiktok-heres-why-212465">The 'no' campaign is dominating the messaging on the Voice referendum on TikTok – here's why</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>Voice coverage now constitutes 6.7% of all Australian media reporting, up from 4.2% in week one. To put that in perspective, mentions of Hugh Jackman’s marriage split from Deborra-Lee Furness comprised 1.5% of total weekly coverage, while mentions of the AFL and NRL amounted to 4.1% and 1.7%, respectively.</p>
<p>Media coverage of the Voice peaked on September 17 with 38,000 mentions, thanks to widespread coverage of the “yes” rallies that day around the country. </p>
<p>This was followed closely by 35,000 Voice mentions the next day, led by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/voice-will-see-lawyers-in-sydney-and-melbourne-get-richer-dutton/video/40349a54a9f0c2f48baec7ba7263a000">claim</a> on Sky News that a Voice to parliament would see lawyers in Sydney and Melbourne “get richer” through billions of dollars worth of treaty negotiations. </p>
<p>Our analysis of X (formerly Twitter) data provides further insight to these trends, showing the nationwide “yes” rallies on September 17 received the most public engagement about the Voice during the week we analysed.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549754/original/file-20230922-21-tp54x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">X (Twitter) data accessed via Meltwater.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<h2>Who is advertising online?</h2>
<p>This week, we specifically turned our attention to the online advertising spending of the campaigns. We also examined the types of disinformation campaigns appearing on social media, some of which are aimed at the Australian Electoral Commission, similar to the anti-democratic disinformation campaigns that have roiled the US.</p>
<p>The main online advertising spend is on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. We have real-time visibility of this spending thanks to the ad libraries of Meta and Google. </p>
<p>The Yes23 campaign has far outspent any other Voice campaigner on these platforms. In the last three months, its advertising expenditure exceeds $1.1 million, compared to just under $100,000 for Fair Australia, the leading “no” campaign organisation.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=241&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=241&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=241&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=303&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=303&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549942/original/file-20230925-23-7tl134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=303&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Top five Voice campaign spenders on Facebook and Instagram since June 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Meta ad library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>Yes23 has also released a far greater number of new ads in September (in excess of 3,200) on both platforms, compared to Fair Australia’s 52 new ads. The top five spenders from both sides are listed below.</p>
<p>As early voting nears, this graph shows Yes23 ad spending outpaced Fair Australia on both Google and Meta platforms in week three, as well.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549762/original/file-20230922-23-1bi7ov.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Campaign ad spending on digital platforms from Sept. 14-21.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Authors provided.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>The advertising spending data shows how drastically different the strategies of the two main campaigns are. Yes23’s approach is an ad blitz, blanketing the nation with hundreds of ads and experimenting with scores of different messages.</p>
<p>In contrast, the “no” side has released far fewer ads with no experimentation. The central message is about “division”, mostly delivered by the lead “no” campaigner, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. All but eight of the ads released by the “no” side in September feature a personal message by Price arguing that the referendum is “divisive” and “the Voice threatens Aussie unity.”</p>
<p>To win, “yes” requires a majority of voters nationwide, as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states. The “no” side is strategically targeting its ads to the two states it believes are most likely in play – South Australia and Tasmania. It only needs to win one of these states to ensure the “yes” side fails. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549949/original/file-20230925-20-zgr4wg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Campaign ad spend on Meta platforms across the states since mid-August. (Dark blue = greater the ad spend).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<h2>Referendum disinformation</h2>
<p>The Meltwater data also reveal a surge in misinformation and disinformation targeting of the AEC with American-style attacks on the voting process.</p>
<p>Studies show disinformation surrounding the referendum has been <a href="https://osf.io/qu2fb/">prevalent</a> on X since at least March. To mitigate the harms, the AEC has established a <a href="https://www.aec.gov.au/media/disinformation-register-ref.htm">disinformation register</a> to inform citizens about the referendum process and call out falsehoods.</p>
<p>We’ve identified three types of disinformation campaigns in the campaign so far. </p>
<p>The first includes attempts to redefine the issue agenda. Examples range from the false <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-02/fact-check-indigenous-australians-support-for-the-voice/102673042">claims</a> that First Nations people do not overwhelmingly support the Voice to <a href="https://stephenreason.substack.com/p/the-voice-to-parliament-the-united">conspiracy myths</a> about the Voice being a globalist land grab. </p>
<p>These falsehoods aim to influence vote choice. This disinformation type is not covered in the AEC’s register, as the organisation has no provisions to enforce truth in political advertising.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-it-legal-to-tell-lies-during-the-voice-referendum-campaign-209211">Why is it legal to tell lies during the Voice referendum campaign?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The register does cover a second type of disinformation. This includes spurious claims about the voting process, such as that the referendum is voluntary. This false claim aims to depress voter turnout in yet another attempt to influence the outcome.</p>
<p>Finally, a distinct set of messages targets the AEC directly. The aim is to undermine trust in the integrity of the vote. </p>
<p>A most prominent example was Dutton’s <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/voice-voting-rules-confusion-stinks-dutton-20230824-p5dz41">suggestion</a> the voting process was “rigged” due to the established rule of counting a tick on the ballot as a vote for “yes”, while a cross will not be accepted as a formal vote for “no”. Sky News host Andrew Bolt <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1256952825005993">echoed</a> this claim in his podcast, which was repeated on social media, reaching 29,800 viewers in one post.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Attention to the tick/cross issue spiked on August 25 when the AEC <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/25/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-referendum-aec-poll-unfairness-claims-rejected">refuted</a> the claim (as can be seen in the chart below). Daily Telegraph columnist and climate change denialist Maurice Newman then linked the issue to potential <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/maurice-newman-aec-rules-on-voting-could-create-confusion-uncertainty/news-story/c76bc3e1e031c2f349710dd1e9f3b51e?btr=15aad1c65d873d8f896d09618a96e228">voter fraud</a>, mimicking US-style attacks on the integrity of voting systems.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549852/original/file-20230924-23-ob3ltn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Disinformation attacking AEC or referendum over past month.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Authors provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>The volume of mentions of obvious disinformation on media and social media may not be high compared to other mentions of the Voice. However, studies show disinformation disproportionately grabs people’s attention due to the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0224-y">cognitive attraction</a> of pervasive negativity, the focus on threats or arousal of disgust. </p>
<p>All three types of disinformation campaigns attacking this referendum should concern us deeply because they <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140231193008">threaten trust</a> in our political institutions, which undermines our vibrant democracy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213749/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Carson receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project and from the ARC for a Discovery project on media and political trust.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Max Grömping receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP220100050; DP230101777). He is an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and member of the Electoral Integrity Project‘s International Advisory Board.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Strating receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project. She is a recipient of external grant funding, including from the governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, the Philippines and Taiwan. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Jackman is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and a past recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation (USA) and was one of the principal investigators of the Australian Election Survey (funded by the Australian Research Council). </span></em></p>Yes23 is blanketing the nation in hundreds of ads, while Fair Australia is sticking with a singular message and targeting specific states that will ensure a ‘no’ victory.Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe UniversityMax Grömping, Senior Lecturer, Griffith UniversityRebecca Strating, Director, La Trobe Asia and Associate Professor, La Trobe University, La Trobe UniversitySimon Jackman, Professor, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2133502023-09-19T05:13:16Z2023-09-19T05:13:16ZSupport for both the Voice and Labor drop in latest Essential poll<p>A majority of Australians have indicated they will vote “no” in the upcoming referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, according to a national <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/19-september-2023">Essential poll</a> conducted Sept. 13–17 from a sample of 1,135 people. </p>
<p>The poll gave the “no” side a 51–41% lead over the “yes” side, compared to a 48–42% lead two weeks ago.</p>
<p>On voter strength, 42% said they were a hard “no” (up one percentage point), 28% were a hard “yes” (down two points), 12% were a soft “yes” (steady) and 8% were a soft “no” (up one point). The figures don’t add up to the overall “yes” and “no” totals due to rounding.</p>
<p>Below is the updated 2023 Voice aggregated polls graph. Essential has been the best pollster for “yes”, but now even this poll is showing a 10-point national lead for “no”. In every poll conducted since June by all pollsters, support for the “yes” side has been declining steadily.</p>
<p>The polling indicates the Voice referendum is headed for a heavy defeat. I wrote in my article on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/albanese-records-first-net-negative-newspoll-approval-as-voice-support-slumps-further-212368">last Newspoll</a> that it was a blunder to hold this referendum as a standalone vote rather than with a general election, given the long history of failed referendums in Australia.</p>
<p>Large crowds at <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/thousands-gather-in-melbourne-cbd-for-walk-for-yes-rally-20230917-p5e593.html">weekend rallies</a> for the “yes” side do not imply the polls are wrong, as people who attend political rallies are very unrepresentative of the overall voting-age Australian population. Analyst Kevin Bonham has more in <a href="https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2023/09/australian-polling-denial-and.html">this long article</a> debunking “poll denial” themes.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/albanese-records-first-net-negative-newspoll-approval-as-voice-support-slumps-further-212368">Albanese records first net negative Newspoll approval as Voice support slumps further</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Labor at post-election low in Essential’s voting intentions</h2>
<p>In Essential’s <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/federal-political-insights">two-party estimate</a> that includes undecided voters, Labor led the Coalition by 49–45%, down from a 51–43% lead a fortnight ago. </p>
<p>This is the lowest Labor lead in Essential’s fortnightly polls since it started asking about voting intentions in December 2022. The previous lowest Labor lead was five points in March and July.</p>
<p>Primary votes were 32% Coalition (steady), 31% Labor (steady), 13% Greens (down two points), 8% One Nation (up one point), 2% UAP (steady), 8% for all others (up one point) and 6% undecided (steady). The drop for the Greens means fewer preferences for Labor.</p>
<p>On what was causing the rising cost of living, 49% of those polled thought businesses maximising profits for shareholders contributed more than wage and salary increases for workers, while 32% blamed workers’ salaries more.</p>
<p>On power in the workplace, 42% thought it tilted too much in favour of employers, 12% said it was too much in favour of workers, and 46% thought the balance about right.</p>
<p>A majority of respondents supported the three <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/03/employers-deliberately-underpaying-workers-to-face-million-dollar-fines-or-up-to-10-years-in-jail">proposed changes to workplace laws</a>, with </p>
<ul>
<li><p>79% backing a new offence for employers to knowingly underpay their workers</p></li>
<li><p>66% supporting the closure of loopholes to prevent employers from using labour hire workers to undercut full-time workers</p></li>
<li><p>and 54% supporting minimum rights and entitlements for gig workers.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>In other Canberra news, there will be no double dissolution election over Labor’s housing bill after <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-14/housing-australia-future-fund-passes-parliament/102844098">it passed parliament</a> on Sept. 14 with Greens support after the two parties reached a deal, ending months of conflict.</p>
<h2>Other national polls</h2>
<p>In last week’s <a href="https://www.roymorgan.com/">Morgan federal poll</a>, conducted Sept. 4–10 from a <a href="https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/9489-roy-morgan-update-september-12-2023">sample</a> of 1,382 people, Labor led the Coalition by 52.5–47.5%, a 0.5-point gain for the Coalition from the previous week. Primary votes were 37% Coalition, 32% Labor, 13.5% Greens and 17.5% for all others.</p>
<p>I <a href="https://theconversation.com/voice-support-and-albaneses-ratings-continue-to-tumble-in-resolve-and-other-polls-212872">previously covered</a> the continued tumble in Voice support and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s ratings from a national Resolve poll for Nine newspapers that was conducted September 6–9 from a sample of 1,604 people.</p>
<p>In other questions <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/politician-qantas-lounge-freebies-earn-the-ire-of-voters-20230911-p5e3m4.html">related to Qantas</a> in that poll, 64% thought foreign airlines should be granted more flights to Australia to increase competition, while just 15% thought they should be limited in the national interest. </p>
<p>By a 69–17% margin, participants thought it unacceptable for politicians to accept free lounge memberships from Qantas.</p>
<p>Participants were also asked to give a positive, negative or neutral rating for each airline. More respondents had a negative view of Qantas (42%) than positive (26%), and a negative view of former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce (54–6%).</p>
<p>Both Virgin Australia and Qatar Airways had higher positive ratings of 41% and 29%, respectively, than negative.</p>
<h2>NSW Resolve poll: Labor drops but still well ahead</h2>
<p>A New South Wales <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/nsw/honeymoon-over-as-nsw-labor-suffers-hit-to-primary-vote-20230913-p5e4dt.html">Resolve poll</a> for The Sydney Morning Herald, conducted with the federal August and September Resolve polls from a sample of 1,019 people, gave Labor 38% of the primary vote (down three points since July), the Coalition 36% (up four points), the Greens 9% (down one point), independents 13% (up two points) and others 4% (down one point).</p>
<p>No two-party estimate was provided by Resolve, but <a href="https://www.pollbludger.net/2023/09/14/resolve-strategic-labor-38-coalition-36-greens-9-in-nsw/">The Poll Bludger</a> estimated Labor would lead the Coalition by 54–46%, a 4.5-point gain for the Coalition since July. This is close to Labor’s 54.3–45.7% win at the March state election.</p>
<p>Labor incumbent Chris Minns maintained a 41–14% lead over the Liberals’ Mark Speakman as preferred premier (compared to 39–12% in July).</p>
<p>Respondents were also asked about a recent scandal involving Tim Crakanthorp, Labor MP and former minister for the Hunter, over revelations that his family owned several commercial properties in the Hunter region that he had not disclosed.</p>
<p>On the appropriate action, 48% thought Crakanthorp should be stood down and independently investigated, while 29% thought he should be disciplined by the party or parliament and 7% thought no action should be taken.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213350/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the national poll, 42% of respondents said they were a hard ‘no’, compared to 28% who said they were a hard ‘yes’.Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2124652023-09-11T20:07:38Z2023-09-11T20:07:38ZThe ‘no’ campaign is dominating the messaging on the Voice referendum on TikTok – here’s why<p>In the first week after the prime minister revealed October 14 as the Voice to Parliament referendum date, the “yes” and “no” campaigns recast their messages, resulting in unprecedented news coverage and public engagement with the debate.</p>
<p>Using data from Meltwater, a global media monitoring company, we are looking at the messaging and media coverage of the two campaigns. In the second report in <a href="https://theconversation.com/voice-referendum-is-the-yes-or-no-camp-winning-on-social-media-advertising-spend-and-in-the-polls-208956">our series</a>, we identified more than one quarter of a million media mentions of the referendum on print, radio, TV and social media in week one – up 11.5% on the week before. </p>
<p>While that might sound like a lot – and it is – it still only constitutes 4.2% of all weekly media coverage in Australia. To put that in perspective, mentions of outgoing Qantas CEO Alan Joyce constituted 1.6% of total weekly coverage, while mentions of the AFL amounted to 2.2%.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/voice-referendum-is-the-yes-or-no-camp-winning-on-social-media-advertising-spend-and-in-the-polls-208956">Voice referendum: is the 'yes' or 'no' camp winning on social media, advertising spend and in the polls?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What’s happening in the news</h2>
<p>Australians woke up on September 3 to TV programs ringing out with John Farnham’s 1986 Aussie classic “You’re the Voice” as the soundtrack to the <a href="https://communityfoundation.org.au/voices-for-impact/uluru-dialogue">Uluru Dialogue’s</a> new ad launching their “yes” campaign. </p>
<p>The night before, TV personality Rove McManus had hosted the ad launch in Melbourne. The packed crowd, some wearing T-shirts featuring the ad’s core message, “You’re the Voice,” cheered organisers Megan Davis and Aunty Pat Anderson and applauded songs from Paul Kelly, Jess Hitchcock, Mitch Tambo and The Farnham Band. </p>
<p>Farnham’s headline-grabbing gifting of his famous song – described by The Australian as a “<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/music/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-how-the-yes-campaign-secured-john-farnham-for-the-voice-referendum/news-story/aac985d76cdc21b536bc99baa8c7d0bc">titanic power ballad</a>” – was celebrated by “yes” supporters. However, the ad (and even Farnham) faced a backlash from some of the “no” camp on talkback radio and social media. As La Trobe University historian Clare Wright, the instigator of engaging Farnham, posted: </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1699303619097661495"}"></div></p>
<p>Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on Sky News competed with the Farnham scoop with his promise of a <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/peter-dutton-says-there-is-overwhelming-support-for-constitutional-recognition-after-pitching-second-referendum-if-voice-fails/news-story/931d6136e1437a3d204ee1c4e3c6ad41">second referendum</a> if the first one fails and the Coalition is elected. </p>
<p>Dutton’s pledged to return Australians to the ballot box to recognise First Australians in the Constitution, minus the Voice to Parliament mechanism. His timing was likely aimed at diverting attention from the “yes” campaign and eroding support for the constitutionally enshrined Voice by offering an alternative. He did this without the support of the Coalition’s Indigenous Australians spokesperson, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. </p>
<p>Tracking the impact of the two messages, we find the Farnham ad story far outpaced the “second referendum” in the free media sphere, as shown below.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547307/original/file-20230909-41058-vuv5u4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Media coverage of Voice campaign stories in the first week after the referendum date announcement.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Authors using Meltwater data (Voice keyword searches)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What is happening in the polls</h2>
<p>But despite the Farnham ad getting media traction (although not all positive), it has not stemmed the declining “yes” vote. That said, the next polls later this month will better capture the ad’s impact on voter intention. </p>
<p>Pooling the most recent commercial polls in a blog post on September 11, <a href="https://simonjackman.github.io/poll_averaging_voice_2023/poll_averaging.html">political scientist Simon Jackman</a> calculates the “yes” campaign has fallen to 42.4% support nationally (with a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points), from 46% recorded in our first <a href="https://theconversation.com/voice-referendum-is-the-yes-or-no-camp-winning-on-social-media-advertising-spend-and-in-the-polls-208956">report</a>. </p>
<p>To win, the “yes” campaign needs to get a majority of voters nationally and in a majority of states (four of six). This poll result is bad news for the “yes” side. </p>
<iframe src="https://simonjackman.github.io/poll_averaging_voice_2023/level_plot_standalone.html" style="width:100%;" width="100%" height="400"> </iframe>
<h2>What’s trending on social media</h2>
<p>The analysis of X (formerly Twitter) data shows the Farnham ad and “second referendum” stories also created a new high in public engagement about the Voice on the site this year.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=239&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=239&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547308/original/file-20230909-19091-im1bt4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=239&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Key events stimulating engagement with the Voice debate on X (formerly Twitter) this year.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Authors using Meltwater data of Twitter (Voice keyword searches)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This week, however, our focus is on the campaigns’ reach and engagement on TikTok. </p>
<p>According to <a href="https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats?utm_source=DataReportal&utm_medium=Country_Article_Hyperlink&utm_campaign=Digital_2023&utm_term=Australia&utm_content=Facebook_Stats_Link">TikTok’s 2023 data</a>, its largest audience share is aged 18-24 and the second largest is aged 25-34. Together, these two age groups make up 71% of its global users. </p>
<p>While there are no public Australian age profiles of TikTok consumers, we know <a href="https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2023-australia">8.3 million</a> Australians aged over 18 use TikTok. Further, of Australia’s 26 million population, nearly one quarter (23.3%) are <a href="https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2023-australia">aged 18–34</a>. With no reason to believe the Australian TikTok’s age profile is different to its global audience, TikTok is a logical space to reach younger voters with campaign messages.</p>
<p>We see the “no” campaigns recognise this and are having much greater engagement and visibility on TikTok than the “yes” campaign. </p>
<p>The right-wing activist group Advance Australia’s Fair Australia campaign topped the charts with the most views and engagements relating to the Voice coverage on TikTok (as seen in the Meltwater data) in week one. This is largely owing to Price’s <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@fairaustralia/video/7274144202714303751">TikTok</a>, which garnered 1.2 million views and 83,100 likes. </p>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-916" class="tc-infographic" height="400px" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/916/f41b6643291642b538a8888e944fdecec6902873/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>To put this in a broader context, Fair Australia has attracted tens of millions of views of its Voice content since it started using TikTok in May.</p>
<p>While engagement does not necessarily impact voter behaviour, Fair Australia’s strategy is a direct attempt to influence younger voters who are far more likely to vote “yes”, according to some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/ng-interactive/2023/sep/04/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-poll-results-polling-latest-opinion-polls-referendum-tracker-newspoll-essential-yougov-news-by-state-australia">polls</a>. </p>
<p>So far, Fair Australia is successfully engaging Australians on TikTok by combining volume (posting multiple TikToks a day) with three key elements: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>authenticity (by prioritising Indigenous “no” supporters)</p></li>
<li><p>use of personal narratives</p></li>
<li><p>humour – especially by young adults for young adults.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>In contrast, the two formalised “yes” campaigns, Uluru Statement (43,000 likes) and Yes23 (49,000) fail to get close to the top-viewed TikToks. </p>
<p>More generally, their content is noticeably different, relying heavily on news snippets and didactic speeches from prominent “yes” figures. While the “yes” campaigns have amassed 92,000 likes combined since they were created this year, they are well behind Fair Australia’s 860,000 likes. </p>
<p><iframe id="8GeBj" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/8GeBj/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Certainly, this is just one snapshot of an aspect of the campaign and tells us only so much. The major “yes” campaigns have strong followings on other social media sites (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), and other “yes” supporters are individually posting to these platforms with varying success. </p>
<p>However, the formal “yes” campaigns lag noticeably behind on TikTok, a key social media platform for reaching young people. </p>
<p>This may be because the “yes” organisers feel confident about their strong appeal to the youth vote and are committing resources elsewhere. In any case, the “no” camp is pitching to this social media-savvy youth audience and is getting noticed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212465/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research work is funded by a La Trobe University Synergy grant</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Strating receives funding from La Trobe University Synergy grant.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Jackman is a past recipient of funding from the National Science Foundation and, currently, LaTrobe University and the Australian Research Council. He is a life member of the Australian Republican Movement.</span></em></p>The ‘no’ side is successfully engaging young people on TikTok by combining volume (posting multiple TikToks a day) with authenticity, use of personal narratives and humour.Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe UniversityRebecca Strating, Director, La Trobe Asia and Associate Professor, La Trobe University, La Trobe UniversitySimon Jackman, Professor, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2043612023-05-01T20:01:19Z2023-05-01T20:01:19ZJournalists reporting on the Voice to Parliament do voters a disservice with ‘he said, she said’ approach<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523104/original/file-20230426-18-3i5rey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lukas Coch/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For much of the past two decades, polarisation and hyper-partisanship have weakened Western democracies, most notably in the United States and Britain. Australia has not escaped, although the consequences here have been nothing as compared with Brexit or the insurrection in Washington on January 6, 2021.</p>
<p>Social media has been the primary agent of this democratic dysfunction, but parts of the professional mass media have also contributed.</p>
<p>Impartial news reporting is an antidote to polarisation. The Voice referendum, with its impassioned arguments on both sides, presents the Australian media with an opportunity to show their capacity for truth-telling and impartiality.</p>
<p>While the overall performance so far is patchy, there does seem to be a lessening in the polarisation that was such a significant feature of federal political reporting between the overthrow of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard in 2010 and the defeat of the Morrison government in 2021.</p>
<p>A straw in the wind was <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/raging-moral-coercion-on-voice-is-failing/news-story/e3dc9a7cce2ce0fd85bd525ba30d0e7d">a column</a> by Chris Mitchell, the former editor-in-chief of The Australian, in a recent commentary on coverage of the referendum. While supportive of the referendum’s critics, he made an appeal to both sides to respect the other. </p>
<p>It was an important point. As the Harvard political scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have argued in their book <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/">How Democracies Die</a>, it is lack of respect for the opposing side that has been so corrosive of democracy, especially in the US, over the past two decades.</p>
<p>There are other signs the Australian media are approaching the task of covering the referendum in a way that serves the public interest. Many platforms, for example <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8156075/the-voice-to-parliament-referendum-what-it-is-how-it-will-be-conducted-and-what-it-means/">the Canberra Times</a> and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCnv3G0rDLo">ABC</a>, have published factual and straightforward “explainers” setting out the basics of the referendum.</p>
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<p>This is one way in which the media are doing their essential job of providing the public with a bedrock of reliable information. Another is by tracking public opinion through polls, and these have been reported at frequent intervals, revealing a slow but steady increase in support for the Voice proposal.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/yes-vote-for-the-voice-is-leading-in-every-state-and-territory-poll-20230429-p5d482.html">latest YouGov poll</a> is particularly informative because it shows results state-by-state as well as nationally. On those data, the “yes” side has majority support nationally and in four of the six states, which meets the double-majority requirement for a referendum to succeed. </p>
<p>So far so good in terms of coverage. But achieving impartiality in news is also challenging the media to abandon some bad old habits, and not everyone so far is up to the task.</p>
<p>There are plentiful examples where journalists have succumbed to the temptation to fall back on the simplest, safest yet professionally inadequate way to achieve impartiality: by simply reporting what someone says and then finding someone else to oppose it.</p>
<p>It is tempting because it saves time and does not demand independent evaluative thinking. It is professionally inadequate because it is journalism as stenography, rightly dismissed nowadays as “he said, she said” journalism.</p>
<p>The result is that absurd or far-fetched propositions go unchallenged other than by an opposing political voice. When this happens, journalism’s evaluative element goes missing, leaving the audience to figure out the rights and wrongs for themselves.</p>
<p>Maintaining impartiality does not require the media to publish nonsense, and certainly does not require them to publish nonsense without drawing attention to the facts or contrary evidence.</p>
<p>The starkest examples come from stories about the scope and power of the proposed Voice.</p>
<p>There is plenty of material against which to test what people say about this:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>the <a href="https://voice.gov.au/">final report</a> of the Indigenous Voice Co-design group, which is the basis for the government’s approach </p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Aboriginal_and_Torres_Strait_Islander_Voice_Referendum/VoiceReferendum/Submissions">submissions</a> to the parliamentary select committee inquiring into the matter from constitutional experts </p></li>
<li><p>the opinion of Commonwealth Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue, contained in <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Aboriginal_and_Torres_Strait_Islander_Voice_Referendum/VoiceReferendum/Submissions">his submission</a> to that inquiry </p></li>
<li><p>the <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr7019_ems_30a282a6-7b5a-4659-b9cb-13da5698bca1%22;src1=sm1">exact wording</a> of the proposed constitutional amendment.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>The best of the reporting so far imposes these tests. A good example was the challenge on Melbourne commercial radio 3AW by Tony Jones to Sussan Ley, deputy leader of the Liberal Party, who opportunistically seized on the approach of Anzac Day to say the Voice could seek to alter Australia’s national public holidays. </p>
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</figure>
<p>The worst of the reporting does not impose these tests. An example was a front-page story in The Australian, amplified by Sky News, in which Opposition Leader Peter Dutton <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/voice-to-parliament-could-influence-every-decision-of-government-peter-dutton/video/2db297df2bcd68f9c89c49aa7a9f9b3b">said the Voice</a> could offer advice on interest rates. </p>
<p>Attempts like this to panic the population have their parallels in the scaremongering over native title 30 years ago. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mabo-decision-and-native-title-74147">Australian politics explainer: the Mabo decision and native title</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Then, the likes of Jeff Kennett, as Liberal premier of Victoria, promoted the populist furphy – which <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/i-was-wrong-on-mabo-kennett-20020601-gdu9dt.html">he later repudiated</a> – that native title represented a threat to people’s backyard. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr7019_ems_30a282a6-7b5a-4659-b9cb-13da5698bca1%22;src1=sm1">proposed new section 129</a> of the Constitution, which would establish the Voice, states the function of the Voice in these terms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Commonwealth Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The key word is “representations”. As various legal opinions make clear, this word was carefully chosen in preference to “advice” because it has less forceful connotations.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-happens-if-the-government-goes-against-the-advice-of-the-voice-to-parliament-200517">What happens if the government goes against the advice of the Voice to Parliament?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A second argument against the Voice – that its representations would lead to a cascade of litigation – can be tested against the opinions of Professor Emerita <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-happens-if-the-government-goes-against-the-advice-of-the-voice-to-parliament-200517">Anne Twomey</a>, Donaghue and other constitutional law experts, who say this would not happen.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/pauline-hanson-slams-voice-to-parliament-as-australias-version-of-apartheid/news-story/b04fc5ac4052993b407ff109dc73118f">third argument</a> is that the Voice is a mechanism to enshrine racial difference as a feature of the Constitution. </p>
<p>The final report of the co-design group argues Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are, in practice, the only racial groups in Australia for whom laws are made exclusively. The implication is that racial difference is already part of the basis for law-making in certain circumstances, and that fairness dictates those people directly affected by such laws should have a say in their formulation.</p>
<p>People who put forward arguments against the Voice deserve a fair hearing. Inconsistencies in the wording of some of the documentation raise legitimate questions, and it is also legitimate to question why the executive government has been included alongside the parliament as an institution to which the Voice can make representations.</p>
<p>However, impartiality requires that where answers to these questions exist, they should be reported, not left hanging in the air for the audience to make of it what they will. With an issue as ripe for polarisation as the Voice, that is not good enough.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204361/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Maintaining impartiality does not require the media to publish nonsense, and certainly does not require them to publish nonsense without drawing attention to the facts or contrary evidence.Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2026862023-03-31T12:01:09Z2023-03-31T12:01:09ZDonald Trump: polling suggests criminal charges won’t dampen his support<p>Donald Trump’s impending court case marks a historic moment in US politics. He will be the first former president of the United States to face criminal charges and trial by a jury. He and his supporters are already <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/us/politics/trump-indicted-republican-response.html">calling</a> the case a political manoeuvre designed to reduce his chances in the 2024 presidential election.</p>
<p>The court case will affect his campaign but it will not exclude him for running for office next year. Early indications suggest that his political base will continue to rally around him. Within hours of the news, his followers were <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-melania-florida-home-indictment-b2311432.html">gathering</a> outside his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida to express their support.</p>
<p>The indictment comes after a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/30/nyregion/trump-indictment-news">grand</a> jury in New York agreed that there was enough evidence to charge the former president. The investigation, led by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, looked into the legality of hush money <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-stormy-daniels-trial-indictment-b2309381.html">payments</a> to former adult film star Stormy Daniels.</p>
<p>The exact nature of the charges will not be known until Trump is arraigned next week. According to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-2024-campaign-charged-convicted-become-president/">US reports</a>, he is likely to be accused of more than one count of falsifying business records (classed as a <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/misdemeanor">misdemeanour</a>, a lesser crime in the US legal system), after Trump allegedly recorded the payment as a business expense. If found guilty, he could face a fine. </p>
<p>He might also be charged with breaking election campaign laws, which is a more serious <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/felony">felony offence</a> and carries a potential prison sentence. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.</p>
<p>Any criminal charges, or even a jail sentence, would not restrict Trump from <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-2024-campaign-charged-convicted-become-president/">running for office</a> under the US constitution. He has previously <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-2024-criminal-charges-georgia-b2294320.html">stated</a> that he would do so even <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-ii?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0vLQ-dbH_QIVqRitBh3IXQD5EAAYAyAAEgLc0vD_BwE">if he was charged</a>. Historically, there are <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/run-president-prison-ask-smithsonian-180974594/">instances</a> of individuals running for president while facing charges or even from a prison cell.</p>
<h2>Problems for campaign</h2>
<p>What may affect his chances is the amount of time that he will need to commit to dealing with the charges laid against him. To date, his campaign has been relatively quiet, but it will need to gain momentum in the lead up to the Republican <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/21/politics/republican-national-convention-2024-dates/index.html">convention</a> in July 2024.</p>
<p>On March 25 and 26, Trump held his first campaign rally for the 2024 election at Waco, Texas. Despite <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-expects-to-be-arrested-tuesday-as-da-eyes-charges/">predicting</a> that he would be arrested, thousands turned up to show their support.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/26/trump-waco-texas-2024-election-final-battle-january-6">Claiming</a> that the 2024 election would be “the final battle”, Trump criticised the prospects of potential challengers, such as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and stated that the investigation was like something out of Stalinist Russia. He <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/trump-investigations-are-straight-out-of-stalinist-russia-horror-show-12842731">told</a> his supporters “from the beginning it has been one witch-hunt and phony investigation after another”.</p>
<h2>Popularity in the polls</h2>
<p>Trump’s immense popularity with Republicans is unlikely to be damaged by any indictment resulting from the New York <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/29/1166890507/manhattan-jury-investigating-trump-break-april">investigation</a>. One <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3919981-most-in-new-poll-say-trump-investigations-are-fair/#:%7E:text=An%20overwhelming%20majority%20of%20Republicans,thought%20the%20probes%20were%20fair.">poll</a> showed that most Republicans believe that the investigation is politically motivated, while <a href="https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-march-3/">another</a> indicated that most Americans think that Trump will be acquitted of the charges.</p>
<p>The Harvard/Harris <a href="https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-march-3/">poll</a> shows that popular support for the charges is split along party lines – 80% of Democrats believe he should be indicted, while 80% of Republicans believe he should not. And 57% <a href="https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/HHP_March_2023_KeyResults.pdf">of Republicans</a> think a trial could help Trump in the election run.</p>
<p>Republicans lawmakers have already come out in support of Trump. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/30/politics/republican-reaction-trump-indictment-congress/index.html">said</a> that the indictment was an “unprecedented abuse of power”. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveScalise/status/1641565912120582148?s=20">tweeted</a> that the charges were “one of the clearest examples of extremist Democrats weaponizing government to attack their political opponents”.</p>
<p>Even Trump’s potential rivals for the 2024 nomination have come out in support of the former president. DeSantis <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trumps-2024-presidential-rivals-jump-defense-indictment-rcna77529">said</a> the charges were “un-American” and a “weaponization of the legal system”, while Pence called the indictment “an outrage”.</p>
<p>For many observers, the question remains: why does Trump still figure so highly in the Republican polls after everything that has happened?</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-v-desantis-how-the-two-republican-presidential-heavy-hitters-compare-202010">Trump v DeSantis: how the two Republican presidential heavy-hitters compare</a>
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<p>A Harvard/Harris <a href="https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-march-3/">poll</a> from mid March, shows that Trump has increased his favourability among Republican voters to 50%, giving him a 26-point lead over DeSantis, if the presidential nomination was decided now. Former vice president Mike Pence is a distant third with just 7%. A more recent Fox News <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-is-enormously-popular-far-more-so-than-desantis-fox-news-panel-reacts-to-new-republican-primary-poll/">poll</a> estimates the gap between Trump and DeSantis to be even greater at 30%.</p>
<p>Worryingly for Democrats, those <a href="https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-march-3/">polled</a> of all political persuasions give Trump a four-point lead over Biden. There is a glimmer of hope for the Democrats, though, in that 14% of those polled were undecided on either Trump or Biden. It’s a significant number, and those individuals will be key to deciding who wins the election in November next year.</p>
<p>Trump’s immense popularity with Republicans is unlikely to be damaged by any indictment resulting from the New York <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/29/1166890507/manhattan-jury-investigating-trump-break-april">investigation</a>. This is because the Republican Party is still the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/170672/donald-trump-is-the-republican-party">party</a> of Donald Trump. His base support has never fluctuated since 2016. Many of them feel he stands up for them when no-one else does.</p>
<p>His Republican opponents, such as DeSantis, are trying to <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/02/17/desantis-classical-learning-test-college-board-ap-sat/">outdo</a> Trump at being Trump. But they are pale imitations, and Trump knows this.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZ7fCzkMaM">told</a> the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference: “I am your warrior, I am your justice.” And they believe that. His supporters believe that he is the only person capable of protecting their values and way of life.</p>
<p>In a supporting speech at Waco, Trump-ally, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/25/donald-trump-waco-rally-retribution-justice/">said</a>: “Trump is the man for the hour. He’s the only man who can take on Washington in the times that we live in.”</p>
<p>While the indictment might make some moderate Republicans rethink their loyalty to the former president, his base will back him to the bitter end.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202686/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dafydd Townley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The US constitution would not restrict Donald Trump from running for president, even if he is in the middle of a court case, or was convicted.Dafydd Townley, Teaching Fellow in International Security, University of PortsmouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2012892023-03-14T01:58:59Z2023-03-14T01:58:59ZNSW election preview: Labor likely to fall short of a majority, which could result in hung parliament<p>The New South Wales state election will be held in 11 days, on March 25. At the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_New_South_Wales_state_election">March 2019 NSW election</a>, the Coalition won 48 of the 93 lower house seats, Labor had 36 and the Greens, the Shooters and independents took three seats each. At a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/nsw-byelection-2022-results?filter=all&sort=az">February 2022 byelection</a>, Labor gained Bega from the Liberals.</p>
<p>Ignoring defections, the Coalition begins with 47 of the 93 seats and Labor 37. So, a single net seat loss for the Coalition would be enough for it to lose its majority, but Labor needs to gain ten seats to win its own majority.</p>
<p>The Coalition won the 2019 election by a 52-48% statewide margin, so the polls taken in late February that gave Labor between 52% and 53% of the statewide, two-party vote imply a 4-5% swing to Labor from 2019.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/labor-slides-in-a-federal-newspoll-nsw-polls-give-labor-a-modest-lead-200734">Labor slides in a federal Newspoll; NSW polls give Labor a modest lead</a>
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<p>On the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/nsw/2023/guide/pendulum">pendulum</a>, the Coalition holds seven seats by margins of between 5% and 7.3% against Labor, and only four seats by under 3.1%. So, for Labor to win a majority, it would probably need those four seats and six of the seven held by between 5% and 7.3%.</p>
<p>On current polling, Labor is unlikely to make the gains it needs to secure its own majority, so there’s a strong likelihood of a hung parliament.</p>
<p>Unlike other Australian jurisdictions, NSW uses optional preferential voting for its lower house elections. Voters are required only to number one candidate for a formal vote, instead of needing to sequentially number all the boxes. If they choose, though, voters can continue to number beyond a first preference.</p>
<p>When votes do not reach the final two candidates for a seat, they are said to “exhaust”. At the 2019 election, ABC election analyst <a href="https://antonygreen.com.au/preference-flows-by-party-2019-nsw-election/">Antony Green</a> said, 53% of the total votes that were not for the major parties did not preference either Labor or the Coalition.</p>
<p>The Greens had a lower exhaust rate than for all minor parties, with 53% going to Labor, 40% exhausting and 8% to the Coalition. The exhaust rate was high for minor right-wing parties, with 67% of Shooters and 71% of One Nation preferences exhausting.</p>
<p>Owing to this large exhaust rate, primary votes are more important in NSW than in compulsory preferential elections, as exhausted votes make it harder for the trailing party to overtake the party in the lead.</p>
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<p><a href="https://antonygreen.com.au/summary-of-candidates-and-parties-contesting-the-2023-nsw-election/">Green</a> said there are 562 total lower house candidates at this election, down slightly from 568 in 2019. This is an average of six candidates per seat.</p>
<p>The Coalition, Labor and Greens will contest all 93 seats, Sustainable Australia 82, Animal Justice 33, Legalise Cannabis 23, the Shooters 20, One Nation 17 and the Liberal Democrats 17. It will help the Coalition that One Nation is contesting only 17 seats given their high exhaust rate in 2019.</p>
<p>Redbridge <a href="https://redbridgegroup.com.au/redbridge-parramatta-and-penrith-poll/">seat polls</a> conducted February 27 to March 2 from a combined sample of 1,250 people gave Labor a 54-46% lead in Parramatta (held by the Liberals on a 6.5% margin). The Liberals, however, retained a 51-49% lead in Penrith (held by the Liberals on 0.6% margin).</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/the-sydney-seat-that-could-secure-a-labor-election-victory-20230307-p5cpzd">Freshwater poll</a> for The Financial Review of Riverstone (held by the Liberals on a 6.2% margin) gave Labor a 54-46% lead. </p>
<p>Seat polls can be accurate, but are often wrong. Statewide or national polls are far more reliable.</p>
<h2>What about the upper house?</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_Legislative_Council">NSW upper house</a> has 42 members, with 21 up for election every four years, so members serve eight-year terms. The Coalition has 17 seats, Labor 14, the Greens three and One Nation, the Shooters, Animal Justice and independents hold two seats each.</p>
<p>One of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_New_South_Wales_Legislative_Council,_2019%E2%80%932023">independents</a> is a former Green. The other is former Christian Democrat and long-time upper house member Fred Nile. Both face re-election this year.</p>
<p>The upper house members who were last elected in 2015 will be the ones up for election this year. At <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_New_South_Wales_state_election">that election</a>, the Coalition won nine of the 21 seats up for election, Labor seven, the Greens two and the Shooters, Christian Democrats and Animal Justice one each.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/itll-be-tough-for-perrottet-to-win-the-nsw-election-but-labor-wont-romp-home-either-198892">It'll be tough for Perrottet to win the NSW election. But Labor won't romp home either</a>
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<p>Right-wing parties (the Coalition, One Nation, Shooters and Christian Democrats) currently have a 22-20 upper house majority over left-wing parties (Labor, the Greens and Animal Justice). </p>
<p>The right won the seats elected in 2015 by an 11-10 margin, so the left needs a two-seat gain, or a 12-9 margin at this election, to gain control of the upper house.</p>
<p>All 21 seats are elected by statewide proportional representation with preferences, so a quota for election is 1/22 of the vote, or 4.5%. As above-the-line preferences are optional, half a quota, or 2.3%, on primary votes gives a candidate a good chance of being elected.</p>
<p>With Labor’s current modest lead in the statewide lower house polls, the left is most likely to win 11 of the 21 seats up for election. That would give the left a one-seat gain, but the upper house would be tied at a 21-21 left-right split.</p>
<p>To get an above-the-line box, at least 15 candidates need to nominate for a party. At this <a href="https://antonygreen.com.au/summary-of-candidates-and-parties-contesting-the-2023-nsw-election/">election</a> Green said six of the 21 groups will not get an above-the-line box as they failed to meet this requirement. </p>
<p>Only people who vote below the line and fill out at least 15 preferences will be able to vote for these groups. As a result, these groups have no chance of anybody being elected.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201289/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The polls in late February suggest a 4-5% swing in the overall, two-party vote to Labor. However, Labor needs to pick up ten seats in total to win its own majority.Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1990022023-02-05T19:04:22Z2023-02-05T19:04:22ZHow much has support for the Voice fallen? It depends on how you ask<p>Support for embedding an Indigenous Voice to parliament in the Constitution has fallen. The polls provide good evidence once you work out how to find it.</p>
<p>However, the voters who have shifted are not Labor voters or those who vote for the Greens – they are Coalition voters.</p>
<p>These voters have not shifted to the “undecided” column or joined the “don’t knows”, as some pollsters suggest; they have shifted to the “no” column.</p>
<p>This may not be fatal to the referendum’s prospects, but with the campaign barely begun and support slipping in the final weeks of other referendum campaigns, it is serious.</p>
<h2>Comparing different polls that asked the same question</h2>
<p>One way of establishing whether support has shifted is to compare polls taken by the same pollster using the same question, some time apart. </p>
<p>From May (59%) through August (57%) to October (55%), SEC Newgate <a href="https://www.secnewgate.com.au/sec-newgate-mood-of-the-nation-may-2022/,">reported</a> a decline of four percentage points in favour of inscribing a Voice in the Constitution. </p>
<p>Between September (65%) and October (60%), Compass reported a decline of five percentage points in polling that was made available to me.</p>
<p>And from <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/questions/support-for-voice-to-parliament-referendum-question">August</a> (65%) to <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/13-december-2022">December</a> (63%), a much longer period, Essential Media, whose polls are published in the Guardian, reported a smaller decline.</p>
<p>While the shifts were all in the same direction, their disparate sizes are difficult to reconcile. The task of estimating the overall shift, from the earliest date (May) to the latest (December), is more difficult still.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/most-australians-support-first-nations-voice-to-parliament-survey-157964">Most Australians support First Nations Voice to parliament: survey</a>
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<p>Recently, David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/voice-case-being-lost-in-slow-motion-as-campaigners-struggle-20230123-p5ces5.html">reported</a> that support for an Indigenous Voice to parliament had fallen from 53% to 47%, though when forced to choose between “yes” and “no”, support had fallen less steeply, from 64% to 60%. </p>
<p>Crowe’s report was based on a comparison between the latest Resolve poll (December-January) and an earlier poll Resolve had run (August-September).</p>
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<h2>The best way to see how far support has fallen</h2>
<p>In the absence of a panel, where the shift in views of individual respondents are tracked, the best way of seeing how far opinion has changed is to compare the seven national polls conducted between late May and September (by Dynata, Essential, Resolve, Scanlon, and SEC Newgate) and the four conducted between October and January (by Freshwater, Morgan, Resolve, and SEC Newgate). </p>
<p>All of these polls meet acceptable standards for question wording and are similar in their range of response options.</p>
<p>This way, we can look at a larger number of polls, avoid the problem of overlapping timeframes when making comparisons, and allow differences in question wording and in response formats to wash out.</p>
<p>Across the two periods, the proportion of respondents saying “yes” declined from 58 to 51%, while the proportion saying “no” increased from 18 to 27%. These are averages across the two sets of polls; the medians are little different. </p>
<p>This suggests a decline of about seven percentage points in support for inscribing a Voice in the Constitution and an increase of around nine points in opposition.</p>
<h2>Which voters have moved – and where have they moved</h2>
<p>We can also compare the averages of the polls that break down results by party in order to see how support for the Voice has shifted among voters who support the Coalition, Labor, the Greens or other parties. </p>
<p>Between late May and September, support among Coalition voters averaged 45% in the six polls that broke down the results by party. Among Labor voters, support averaged 64%; among the Greens, 80%; and among others, 53%. </p>
<p>Between October and January in the three polls that broke the results down by party, support among Coalition voters averaged just 36%; among Labor voters it averaged 67%; among the Greens, 80%; and among others, 52%.</p>
<p>In short, while support among Coalition voters dropped by nine percentage points, on average, among other voters it remained steady or increased. If respondents in the two sets of polls shifted from “yes” to “no”, then Coalition voters must have shifted from “yes” to “no” – not to “don’t know”.</p>
<p>Moving to “don’t know” might have suggested they were open to coming back; moving to “no” suggests they are not, especially for Nationals happy to follow the party line. (Unfortunately, the polls do not distinguish Liberal voters, National voters and those in Queensland who vote for the LNP.)</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/could-the-nationals-refusal-to-support-a-voice-to-parliament-derail-the-referendum-195552">Could the Nationals' refusal to support a Voice to Parliament derail the referendum?</a>
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<h2>Parties as influencers</h2>
<p>One of the questions keeping some in the “yes” campaign up at night is how much support would decline if the Liberals (or the Greens) came out against the Voice, or became increasingly divided.</p>
<p>Others have slept well in the belief that the standing of the major parties is so attenuated it no longer matters what the Liberals decide to say.</p>
<p>Just how far parties as opinion leaders have declined is one thing the referendum may help reveal. With the prime minister loud in his support, the opposition leader expressing his doubts, and the Nationals saying no, perhaps it has started to do so already.</p>
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<p><em>EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally reported that Resolve’s polling used differently worded questions in its August-September 2022 poll compared with its subsequent poll in December-January. The article’s analysis was based on publicly available newspaper reports of the survey, which did not include the full wording of all the original survey questions. While the newspaper reports of these surveys do indeed refer to differently worded questions, Resolve has told The Conversation that the wording did not change between successive surveys, and that the various newspaper reports refer to multiple questions, all of which were presented to survey respondents on each occasion. The article has been amended to reflect these details.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199002/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Murray Goot does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Comparisons of national polls over an eight-month period show support falling only among Coalition voters. This may not be fatal to the referendum’s chances, but it is serious.Murray Goot, Emeritus Professor of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1949722022-12-06T13:34:58Z2022-12-06T13:34:58ZEarly and mail-in voting: Research shows they don’t always bring in new voters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496871/original/file-20221122-26-sz3ow1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5142%2C3423&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">More than 110 million votes were cast in the U.S. midterm elections of November 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/hispanic-voter-voting-in-polling-place-royalty-free-image/138711489?phrase=U.S.%20voting&adppopup=true">Hill Street Studios/Digital Vision via Getty Iag</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>SciLine interviewed <a href="https://www.american.edu/spa/faculty/leighley.cfm">Jan Leighley</a>, professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 4, 2022. Leighley discussed how early voting affects turnout, how turnout differs for midterm and presidential elections, how pollsters predict turnout and how to understand the persistent gap between people’s intention to vote and actual turnout.</em> </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jan Leighley, professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University, discusses voter turnout.</span></figcaption>
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<p><em>Below are some highlights from the discussion. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.</em></p>
<p><strong>How do we know after an election how many people ultimately voted?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jan Leighley:</strong> It’s usually January by the time we really have a good sense <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90807427/midterm-election-results-2022-when-timeline">of how many people voted</a>, and there can be corrections after that. Now those are usually small corrections. But it takes a lot of people a lot of time even to <a href="https://www.electproject.org/2022g">ensure that number is correct</a>. </p>
<p><strong>How do newer forms of voting, such as early voting or mail-in voting, affect turnout?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jan Leighley:</strong> The assumption has always been if we make it easier to vote using these methods, more people will vote. (But) most research suggests that the people who take advantage of these newer ways of voting <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12063">would have voted anyway on Election Day</a> if they weren’t able to vote in those other ways. </p>
<p>The original intention of those reforms was to get new people into the voting pool. We have a little bit of evidence that – under some circumstances – we can indeed increase turnout in the range <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691159355/who-votes-now">of 2 percentage points or so</a>. </p>
<p>But it depends on what parties do. It depends on the competitiveness of elections and other factors unique to specific elections. </p>
<p><strong>How does turnout differ between midterm and presidential elections?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jan Leighley:</strong> Presidential turnout is <a href="https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present">substantially higher than midterm elections</a>, when members of Congress and a set of senators and governors might be up for re-election or election.</p>
<p>Turnout in presidential elections tends to be around 50% to 60%, depending on various circumstances associated with the election. Midterms are usually in the 30% to 40% range. Again, depending on candidates, competitiveness, economic conditions and what the parties do to try to mobilize turnout.</p>
<p><strong>Does higher turnout mean better representation of the voter population?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jan Leighley:</strong> The turnout level, which is what we hear about the most, isn’t the only feature that’s important. The other feature is whatever 50% or 30% of voters who do show up, who they are. </p>
<p>And so, low turnout levels – like 30%, if you believe that’s low – that are nonetheless representative of all eligible voters, wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for representation … if those 30% of voters were like that larger pool of everyone who’s eligible. </p>
<p>And, in fact, what we find in midterms compared to presidential elections is that one group – younger individuals – (are) especially underrepresented in midterms. </p>
<p>The sense is younger individuals who are getting established as voters and figuring out how to vote and deciding whether it’s a priority, <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/behind-2018-united-states-midterm-election-turnout.html">they vote far less in midterms</a> than they do in presidential elections. And so that’s a voice that isn’t heard perhaps as strongly as you might hope. </p>
<p><strong>How do pollsters predict voter turnout?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jan Leighley:</strong> Pollsters predict voter turnout <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/course/public-opinion-polling-basics/">using a variety of means</a>. They have extensive databases on past turnout behavior of citizens, and they use past behavior to predict what will happen in the current environment. (The pollsters) connect those historical details with the current environments and attitudes of their potential voters to predict what voter turnout will look like.</p>
<p><strong>What drives the persistent gap between people’s intentions to vote and their actions?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jan Leighley:</strong> I think voting is like a lot of things that we have good intentions to do, right? It takes time, it takes effort, it takes presence of mind, and life is complicated. And, oftentimes, the short-term, immediate, right-in-front-of-our-faces issues or problems or tasks take precedence. </p>
<p><em>Watch the <a href="https://www.sciline.org/elections/voter-turnout-science/">full interview</a> to hear about voter turnout.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.sciline.org/">SciLine</a> is a free service based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194972/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Leighley received funding from Pew Research Center around 2010.</span></em></p>Compared with past midterms, voter turnout among young people jumped in 2022 – but it was still below 30%.Jan Leighley, Professor of Government, American University School of Public AffairsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1953242022-11-29T17:21:01Z2022-11-29T17:21:01ZTrust in UK politics has taken a hit after recent chaos – and historical data suggests only a change of government can fix it<p>A <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/is-the-conservative-trustworthy-or-untrustworthy?crossBreak=c2de">YouGov poll</a> conducted in October this year asked respondents if they trusted the Conservative party. Some 68% said that the party could not be trusted and only 14% said that it could. This followed the ill-advised mini budget from former prime minister Liz Truss and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng that caused turmoil in financial markets and in the Conservative parliamentary party.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/political_party/Labour_Party?content=trackers">trust levels for Labour</a> in the same survey were a bit better, but even then 36% of respondents thought that the party could not be trusted compared with 26% who thought that it could.</p>
<p>The overall conclusion from the data is that the public does not trust British political parties at the moment, particularly not the governing party.</p>
<p>Does this matter? After all a certain amount of distrust in government is an important aspect of democratic accountability. If scrutiny of the government of the day is to work properly, then people should look at government with a certain amount of scepticism. </p>
<p>The problem is that when distrust reaches these kinds of levels, it will affect the ability of parties to actually govern. Much of governing is about persuading people to do (or not to do) things rather than enforcing policies with sanctions. The problem is that this becomes impossible if voters believe that they are being lied to all the time.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-856X.12073?journalCode=bpia">academic research</a> shows that belief in the trustworthiness of governments is actually quite volatile in Britain. And it can change rather rapidly in response to events. This is illustrated in the figure below which measures the percentage of Britons who thought that the government of the day was honest and trustworthy in monthly surveys conducted over 17-year period from 1997 up to 2014.</p>
<p><strong>Trust in the honesty of government 1997 to 2014</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A chart showing how trust in the government declined after various scandals in the 1990s." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497220/original/file-20221124-22-ugdq11.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trust takes a hit as scandal strikes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Shortly after arriving in office in 1997, Labour was trusted by more than 80% of the public. The party leadership immediately embarked on a daily battle to control the media agenda in its favour, a project led from the very top by Tony Blair and his spin doctor Alistair Campbell. This produced what amounted to a continuous election campaign – which has now become a standard feature of British politics.</p>
<p>However, as the chart shows, these relentless efforts to manage the news agenda in order to paint government policies in a positive light was ultimately associated with a rapid decline in trust in government, which highlights the dangers of excessive “spin control” in politics.</p>
<p>Specific events during this period also played an important role in influencing trust. The political turmoil associated with Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war in 2003 and the fact that many believed Blair lied to Parliament about the threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction preceded a sharp reduction in trust in government.</p>
<h2>Expenses scandal</h2>
<p>But the biggest threat to trust during this period came from the MPs expenses scandal in 2009, which arose from <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mps-expenses-scandal/">revelations published by the Daily Telegraph</a> that many MPs were claiming expenses for all kinds of illegitimate things. These included upgrading second homes, non-existent travel expenses and a duck house in a garden pond. The scandal eventually led to criminal charges being brought against four MPs who were all subsequently jailed. </p>
<p>The scandal revealed that when backbench MPs from different parties are embroiled in behaviour which the public regards as unacceptable, the government of the day takes a good deal of the blame. The logic of this is simply that the government is in charge and so it should be held responsible for what happens. The behaviour in “partygate” during Boris Johnson’s tenure in Downing Street and the subsequent mistakes made by Truss and Kwarteng which spooked financial markets illustrates that governing parties which behave badly are likely to lose trust. </p>
<p>But it is also evident from the expenses scandal which involved MPs from different parties in Parliament can add to this distrust. This is because the public are likely to conclude that “they are all in it together” and “they are all as bad as each other”. </p>
<p>One interesting thing stands out in the data – namely that a change of government has a big effect on boosting trust, while a general election which the governing party wins does not. This was evident when Labour was elected in 1997 and also when it lost power in 2010. It looks like it will require a change of government to restore trust to reasonable levels, something which is urgently needed if British government is to be effective in the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195324/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC. </span></em></p>When the rot sets in, past governments have found it hard to win back the public.Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1947002022-11-17T17:03:59Z2022-11-17T17:03:59ZSome midterm polls were on-target – but finding which pollsters and poll aggregators to believe can be challenging<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495751/original/file-20221116-24-l5jodd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C16%2C5427%2C3588&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A prominent GOP poll said Democratic U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire would lose her re-election bid to a Republican. Hassan won by 9 percentage points.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/Election2022NewHampshireSenate/a8681d6dd9ff4d26b121a95fc35f7043/photo?Query=Maggie%20Hassan&mediaType=photo&sortBy=creationdatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=740&currentItemNo=14">AP Photo/Charles Krupa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pollsters indulged in breezy self-congratulation in the aftermath of the 2022 <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-memories-of-embarrassments-still-fresh-election-pollsters-face-big-tests-in-2022-midterm-elections-192700">midterm</a> elections. Pre-election polls, they declared, did well overall in signaling outcomes of high-profile U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races.</p>
<p>In an allusion to polling’s stunning misfires of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark/">2016</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/election-polls-in-2020-produced-error-of-unusual-magnitude-expert-panel-finds-without-pinpointing-cause-164759">2020</a>, Joshua Dyck, director of the opinion research center at UMass Lowell, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/11/10/midterm-polls-red-trickle-experts/">asserted</a> as the 2022 results became known: “The death of polling has been greatly exaggerated.”</p>
<p>Nate Silver, a prominent data journalist and election forecaster, <a href="https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1590461764516610048">took to Twitter</a> to proclaim the 2022 midterms were “one of the most accurate years for polling ever.”</p>
<p>Yet, a sense of doubt lingered: While they did not repeat their <a href="https://theconversation.com/epic-miscalls-and-landslides-unforeseen-the-exceptional-catalog-of-polling-failure-146959">failures</a> in recent national elections, polls in 2022 were more spotty than spectacular in their accuracy, and performance assessments often depended on which poll was consulted. Or perhaps more precisely, on which polling aggregation site was consulted. <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Election-Polling-Resources/Poll-Aggregators.aspx">Aggregators</a> typically compile and analyze results reported by a variety of pollsters. They often adjust the composite data to emphasize findings of recently completed surveys or to minimize effects of unusual or “<a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-handle-an-outlier-poll/">outlier</a>” polls.</p>
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<h2>Misses, near and far</h2>
<p>As compiled by the widely followed <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/">RealClearPolitics</a> site, polls collectively missed the margins of victory by more than 4 percentage points in key 2022 Senate races in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/senate/nh/new-hampshire-senate-bolduc-vs-hassan-7379.html">New Hampshire</a>, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/senate/pa/pennsylvania_senate_oz_vs_fetterman-7695.html">Pennsylvania</a> and Washington.</p>
<p>Differences between polling averages and outcomes were especially striking in Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire and Washington, where incumbents won easily. In gubernatorial races, deviations from polling averages of 4 percentage points or more figured in the outcomes in <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/governor/az/arizona_governor_lake_vs_hobbs-7842.html">Arizona</a>, Colorado, Florida, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/governor/mi/michigan_governor_dixon_vs_whitmer-7545.html">Michigan</a>, Pennsylvania and <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/governor/wi/wisconsin_governor_michels_vs_evers-7761.html">Wisconsin</a>.</p>
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<p>Forecasts posted at Silver’s <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/">FiveThirtyEight.com</a> diverged from outcomes somewhat less markedly than those of RealClearPolitics — but still anticipated closer Senate races than what transpired in Colorado, New Hampshire and <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/pennsylvania/">Pennsylvania</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/us/politics/democrats-midterm-elections.html">Expectations</a> that Republicans would score sweeping victories no doubt were buoyed by the <a href="https://twitter.com/TomBevanRCP/status/1590034788345614342">predictions</a> of RealClearPolitics. It projected that the GOP stood to gain three Senate seats and control the upper house by 53 seats to 47 — an outcome that proved illusory.</p>
<p>While hedged, the <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2022-election-forecast/">final, so-called “Deluxe” forecast</a> posted at Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com and updated on Election Day did little to dampen expectations of a GOP wave. The forecast said Republicans had a 59% chance of winning control of the Senate.</p>
<p>“To be blunt,” Silver <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2022-election-forecast/">wrote</a>, “59 percent is enough of an edge that if you offered to let me bet on Republicans at even money, I’d take it.”</p>
<h2>Elections and polling controversies</h2>
<p>To say that polling performance was spotty in 2022 is not to say that election surveys were all off-target. </p>
<p>Far from it. </p>
<p>The final <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/31/upshot/senate-polls-az-ga-nv-pa-toplines.html">Siena College/New York Times surveys</a>, for example, accurately signaled the direction of Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>Even so, as I noted in my book, “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300965/lost-in-a-gallup">Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections</a>, "It is a rare election that does not produce polling controversies of some sort.” And that’s not so surprising, given that polls are conducted by a variety of public entities, some of which have partisan orientations. </p>
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<p>This time, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/upshot/polling-averages-midterm-election.html">controversy</a> swirled around Republican-leaning pollsters such as <a href="https://www.thetrafalgargroup.org/">Trafalgar Group</a> and the inclusion of those polls in averages compiled by RealClearPolitics. Incorporating such data, <a href="https://gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/the-pollsters-got-the-midterms-right">critics claimed</a>, led RealClearPolitics to overstate Republican prospects. The senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/17/what_happened_148483.html">disputed</a> such an interpretation as a “theory that doesn’t work well.”</p>
<p><a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/trafalgar-group-founder-robert-cahaly-on-the-2022-midterms.html">Trafalgar</a>, which in 2021 had been rated <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/trafalgar-group/">A-minus</a> for accuracy by FiveThirtyEight.com, saw its surveys <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/trafalgar-group-terrible-polling-2022.html">conspicuously misfire</a> in 2022. In New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate race, for example, Trafalgar’s final pre-election poll indicated that Republican Don Bolduc <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-hampshire-could-see-general-election-as-bolduc-takes-lead-in-trafalgar-daily-wire-poll">had taken a narrow lead</a>. Bolduc <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2022/state/nh/senate/">lost</a> to incumbent Maggie Hassan by 9 percentage points.</p>
<p>Trafalgar also estimated that Republican Tudor Dixon <a href="https://www.thetrafalgargroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MI-Gen-Poll-Report-1107.pdf">held a slim lead</a> at campaign’s end over Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. Whitmer won by 10.5 points.</p>
<p>Those were no small misses, and Trafalgar’s inaccuracies attracted criticism even from friendly sources. “They were not reliable indicators of what was to come,” <a href="https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/11/after-last-night-41.php">wrote</a> Scott Johnson at the Republican-oriented “Powerline” blog. Trafalgar did not respond to an email seeking comments about its 2022 polling performance.</p>
<p>Polling misses tended to be bipartisan, though. <a href="https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2022/11/dfp_az_final_midterm_tabs.pdf">Data for Progress</a>, a Democratic-leaning pollster <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/data-for-progress/">graded as a “B”</a> in 2021 by FiveThirtyEight, <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2022/11/8/final-battleground-polls-arizona-georgia-nevada-new-hampshire-wisconsin-ohio-colorado-north-carolina-florida-and-oregon-polls">estimated closer Senate races</a> than what transpired in Colorado and New Hampshire, and signaled the wrong winners in Arizona and Nevada.</p>
<p>Data for Progress nonetheless seemed eager to assert success for its polls, posting online what appeared to be an <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/2444/Webpage_pollsters.pdf?1668776027">incomplete draft of a post-election news release</a> that said it “outperformed the polling averages, and was more accurate than any other pollster” in the midterms. The draft contained several placeholders marked “xx,” indicating where data points were to be inserted. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Advertisement that says 'The Gallup Poll Sets a New Record for Election Accuracy!'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=206&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=206&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366241/original/file-20201028-17-l4rpry.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1940, Gallup crowed about the accuracy of its polling in an ad in the newspaper industry publication Editor & Publisher.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot, Editor & Publisher, 11/9/1940</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Pollsters not shy about congratulating selves</h2>
<p>So, what can be taken away from polls of the 2022 midterms?</p>
<p>The outcomes confirmed anew that election polling is an uneven and high-risk pursuit, especially at a time when some pollsters are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/24/opinion/frustrated-with-polling-pollsters-are-too.html">experimenting</a> with new methodologies to reach would-be respondents while others are still relying on traditional, telephone-based techniques.</p>
<p>The 2022 outcomes also confirmed a self-congratulatory impulse that is never very distant for practitioners in a field that has known much error and disappointment. </p>
<p>Pollsters are not necessarily shy about boasting if their estimates are reasonably close to election results. This tendency has been apparent intermittently for more than 80 years, since George Gallup placed double-page ads in Editor & Publisher magazine in 1940 and 1944 to proclaim the accuracy of his polls in presidential elections those years.</p>
<p>The midterms also confirmed the news media’s insatiable appetite for poll results. Fresh polling data — much of it produced or commissioned by news outlets themselves — seemed inescapable during the closing days of the 2022 campaign. As they usually do in national elections, polls <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3732986-what-happened-expectations-polls-and-the-red-mirage/">shaped expectations</a> which, in some cases, faded as votes were counted.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>W. Joseph Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Polling for the 2022 midterms was more accurate than the dramatically wrong predictions of 2016 and 2020, leading one pollster to boast, ‘The death of polling has been greatly exaggerated.’W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of CommunicationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1945072022-11-17T16:48:56Z2022-11-17T16:48:56ZYoung U.S. voters reduced the ‘Red Wave’ to a ‘Pink Splash’ in the midterm elections — why didn’t polls predict it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495671/original/file-20221116-25-3t8i35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5465%2C3640&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A young voter fills out her ballot at a polling site in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Nov. 8, 2022. Public polling underestimated the strength of the youth vote in the recent U.S. midterms.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/John Minchillo)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/young-u-s--voters-reduced-the--red-wave--to-a--pink-splash--in-the-midterm-elections-—-why-didn-t-polls-predict-it" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>It increasingly seems that projections of election results based on public polling are unreliable. The 2022 midterm elections in the United States are a prime example.</p>
<p>Americans appeared set to vote Republican en masse — in a so-called “Red Wave” — on the morning of Nov. 8. </p>
<p>Amid <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/01/voters-under-40-apathetic-towards-biden-concerned-about-inflation-ahead-of-midterms.html">high inflation, a precarious House of Representatives majority and low approval ratings for President Joe Biden</a>, a perfect storm was brewing. Polls suggested a huge Republican win was imminent and the party was poised to secure control of the House and the Senate with a sizeable majority. </p>
<p>We now know those predictions did not materialize. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/16/republicans-win-house-majority/">Democrats held onto the Senate and almost held onto the House</a>. Republican results were lacklustre at best. </p>
<p>Youth voters have been hailed as the catalyst that turned the <a href="https://time.com/6231293/red-wave-pink-splash-election-republicans/">Red Wave into a “Pink Splash</a>.” <a href="https://circle.tufts.edu/2022-election-center">Twenty-seven per cent of voters aged 18-29</a> cast a ballot — the second highest youth voter turnout in nearly 30 years. Further still, roughly 63 per cent of youth voters backed Democratic candidates — the only age group in which a strong majority supported Democrats.</p>
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<p>The reality of election results and the glaring absence of youth voter impact on projections begs the question: are we accurately capturing public opinion?</p>
<h2>What went wrong for pollsters</h2>
<p>Historically, there are two methods determining election result projections: <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2022/11/07/the-final-forecasts-of-the-2022-election-00065376">statistical models</a> based on trends and political theory or probability sampling. Regardless of the framework, these predictions rely on one thing: accurately representing public opinion. </p>
<p>Though voting methods have slowly begun to adapt to the technological societal shift, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/08/online-voting-304013">such as online options in 2020</a>, public opinion polling remains rooted in the past. </p>
<p>Despite its vital importance to determining election forecasts, the presidential approval rating is <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/101872/how-does-gallup-polling-work.aspx">“based on interviews conducted by landline and cellular telephones.”</a> Similarly, while probability sampling often relies on aggregating data from several sources, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/27/phone-polling-crisis-1191637">most major media polls are conducted using a traditional phone methodology</a>. </p>
<p>Pop culture is ripe with anecdotes of people ignoring “cold calls,” yet public polling efforts continue to engage — or, rather, disengage — youth voters by failing to understand where they spend their time online.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A young woman is photographed from behind opening the TikTok app on her smartphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495687/original/file-20221116-12-30ja91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pollsters are failing to engage young voters in places where they spend their time online.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How do young voters engage?</h2>
<p>In the wake of U.S. midterms results that stunned political analysts, social media buzzed with commentary from young voters. </p>
<p>One user wrote: “Before the next election, you might want to find a better way to poll anyone under the age of 30 since they would rather pick up a pinless grenade than a call from an unknown number.” </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1590223092315750403"}"></div></p>
<p>Of course, this was intended as a joke, but there is some factual basis in the sentiment. Millennials have already been blamed for <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/briannawiest/2019/11/04/millennials-hate-phone-calls-they-have-a-point/?sh=3929a57b517e">the death of the phone call</a>, with <a href="https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/why-millennials-ignore-calls#data">75 per cent finding them “too time-consuming” and 81 per cent admitting to feelings of anxiety before making a call.</a> </p>
<p>In any other industry, this data would signal an immediate need to pivot to a digital platform. </p>
<h2>Engaging in the right place</h2>
<p>The question of public engagement goes beyond “how” citizens are being polled. It must also ask “where.”</p>
<p>It’s not enough to simply shift polling methods from telephone-based to online. The platform where engagement happens matters. </p>
<p>Though some pollsters administered online surveys, often these were via traditional news sources. For an opinion poll to be arbitrarily administered within the same echo chamber of legacy media doesn’t bridge the gap that exists in elections data. </p>
<p>The way each generation consumes content online, particularly news, changes rapidly. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-search-engine.html">More than 40 per cent of Gen Zers report TikTok as their preference for online searches</a>, even over Google. Increasingly, advertisers have begun to embed their consumer polling through platforms like YouTube and TikTok. </p>
<p>Other political outreach organizations have begun to recognize this and adapt their methodology. </p>
<p>In late August 2022, Élections Québec launched a <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@electionsquebec">TikTok campaign</a> to generate interest in the provincial election. Playing into viral videos (<a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@electionsquebec/video/7145604051676253446?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">like the so-called “corn kid”</a>), some of its content garnered more than 350,000 views. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495520/original/file-20221115-20-g9ji9f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A TikTok screenshot shows the Élections Québec youth vote campaign.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite predictions of a low voter turnout in Québec, <a href="https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/voter-turnout-in-2022-quebec-election-on-par-with-2018-1.6095056">66 per cent of the total population voted</a>.</p>
<p>While it’s difficult to empirically measure the impact of this specific political outreach method on election results, the sheer engagement on the platform and youth voter turnout speaks volumes. </p>
<h2>Looking to the future</h2>
<p>Above all else, the 2022 U.S. midterms offer a positive glimpse into the future. No longer can young voters be cast as apathetic and disconnected. </p>
<p>There’s now a generational shift away from voter apathy, which is beneficial across the political spectrum. </p>
<p>The disconnected, in fact, seem to be those trying to accurately measure public opinion. </p>
<p>The “Pink Splash” offers a tough lesson in engagement for pollsters. If they continue to use traditional methods, election polls will never provide an accurate representation of what’s going to happen when voters cast their ballots.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194507/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Rodgers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The U.S. midterms revealed a generational shift away from youth voter apathy. The apathetic, in fact, seem to be those trying to accurately measure public opinion using outdated methods.Julia Rodgers, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Dalhousie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1933502022-10-31T16:04:47Z2022-10-31T16:04:47Z70 years of data suggest the Conservatives will suffer a big defeat at the next election – here’s how I worked it out<p>With the UK’s new prime minister in office, it looks like the political turmoil of the last few months is likely to ease, at least for the time being. Rishi Sunak and his fellow MPs must put their political differences aside to focus on stabilising the economy and calming financial markets. But Sunak will of course have one eye on the next election, which he must call before January 2025.</p>
<p>It might seem ambitious to predict what will happen in that election. Indeed, pollsters always emphasise that the information they give us about what voters think represents a snapshot of the current moment rather than a prediction. They are projections of what would happen were an election held immediately rather than in a few years time. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election">huge volatility</a> of voting intentions in the polls taken since the last general election reinforces this point.</p>
<p>But if you look at polls over a very long period, you can see there is a lot of inertia in voting intentions. It is true that major shocks such as the financial crash of 2008 or the Brexit referendum in 2016 can change the public’s minds quite rapidly, but if we zoom out to take in a long enough time period these shocks to the system tend to average out. </p>
<p>It turns out that voting intentions in monthly polls collected over more than 70 years are highly correlated with each other over time (r = 0.95). In other words, this month’s voting intentions are highly predictable from last month’s voting intentions.</p>
<h2>The seats-votes model</h2>
<p>This fact is the basis of an electoral forecasting model known as the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026137941500222X">seats-votes model</a>. The model is based on an earlier analysis of the relationship between vote shares and seat shares in the House of Commons in general elections, known as the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/588113">law of cubic proportion</a>. </p>
<p>This was formalised by statisticians Kendall and Stuart in a landmark paper published in 1950 which represents the starting point of electoral forecasting in Britain. There is an advantage in focusing on seats rather than vote shares, since parties win general elections in Britain by gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons, not a majority of votes in the country.</p>
<p>The seats-votes model is very simple. It predicts seat shares in elections for the political parties in the House of Commons based on the seats won in the previous election, updated with current voting intentions in the polls. The inertia in voting intentions means that we don’t have to wait until just before an election to predict what is likely to happen. Instead, we can use voting intentions in the polls many months prior to the election, although the strength of the relationship between current and past polls weakens <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-accurate-are-polls-when-forecasting-election-outcomes/">the further back in time we go</a>.</p>
<p>May is the most common month to have a general election in Britain. Of the 21 national votes that have been held since the second world war, six have taken place in May. With that in mind, let’s assume that the next general election takes place in May 2024, in 19 months. </p>
<p>We can use Conservative seat shares in the House of Commons in the last general election plus voting intentions 19 months prior to our 2024 election to make a forecast, both of which are known today. But to estimate the model we need to look at voting intentions 19 months before all 21 general elections since 1945. </p>
<p>We do this using the Pollbase database created by the prolific polling analyst, Mark Pack. This database has voting intentions data <a href="https://www.markpack.org.uk/opinion-polls/database">which goes back to 1943</a>. For example the Conservatives took 44% of the vote when Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election and a Gallup poll conducted 19 months prior to that election predicted they would get 45%</p>
<p><strong>Conservative seats won and predictions of seat wins, 1945 to 2024</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A chart showing that the Conservatives are on course to lose a lot of seats in the next election." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492314/original/file-20221028-23824-1t4gwx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How the forecast performed over the years.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">P Whiteley</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The results of this exercise appear in the figure. The black line is the number of seats won by the Conservatives in each of these elections and the blue line is the number of seats forecast by the model. The average number of seats won by the party in these elections was 300 and the average number of forecast seats won was 297, so the model is fairly accurate. </p>
<p>That said, the party did better than predicted in 1959 under Harold Macmillan and the model did not pick up the surge in support for the party in the turbulent years of the 1970s, when Labour was in power. It did, however, pick up the loss of support for the Conservatives when Tony Blair won the 1997 election.</p>
<h2>On course for a big loss</h2>
<p>The actual seat total line ends in 2019 but the forecast continues further. It predicts that the Conservative party would win just 196 seats if an election were held in May 2024. This is based on the 365 seats the party won in the December 2019 election and their voting intentions in a <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/issue/Voting_Intention?content=surveys">YouGov poll</a> completed on October 22 which gave the party 19%.</p>
<p>The poll was conducted just before Sunak became prime minister, so things were really bad at that time. If he experiences a honeymoon then Conservative vote intentions should increase and the loss of seats would not be so large. But overcoming a deficit of this size and subsequently winning the general election in 2024 looks extremely unlikely. </p>
<p>If the Conservatives lost 169 seats compared with the 2019 total it would amount to a catastrophe. Many prominent figures, most notably former prime minister Boris Johnson, would lose their seats to Labour. The chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, could lose his seat to the Liberal Democrats.</p>
<p>In the absence of a major shock to the system, the Conservatives should expect to be in opposition for some time after the next election.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193350/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC. </span></em></p>Polling only provides a snapshot of the current moment but modelling across decades can help us predict the next election result.Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1927002022-10-24T12:26:58Z2022-10-24T12:26:58ZWith memories of embarrassments still fresh, election pollsters face big tests in 2022 midterm elections<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491085/original/file-20221021-25-d8dvr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C17%2C5982%2C3943&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In Maine's 2020 Senate race, not one poll showed the GOP incumbent, Susan Collins, in the lead. But she trounced her Democratic challenger by 9 points.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/Election2020SenateCollins/4302c0740b4541308ff14ebe8a102b81/photo?Query=susan%20collins%20sara%20gideon&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=81&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When it became clear his poll had erred in the 2021 New Jersey governor’s race, Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, acknowledged:</p>
<p>“I blew it.”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_nj_102721/">campaign’s final Monmouth poll</a> estimated Gov. Phil Murphy’s lead over Republican foe Jack Ciattarelli at 11 percentage points – a margin that “did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race,” Murray later said in a newspaper commentary. Murphy won by 3.2 points.</p>
<p>It was a refreshingly candid acknowledgment by an election pollster.</p>
<p>More broadly, the error was <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-embarrassing-failure-for-election-pollsters-149499">one of several in the recent past</a> and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/26/pollsters-fear-elections-2024-00058506">looms among the disquieting</a> omens confronting pollsters in the 2022 midterm elections. Will they be embarrassed again? Will their polls in high-profile U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races produce misleading indications of election outcomes? </p>
<p>Such questions are hardly far-fetched or irrelevant, given election polling’s tattered recent record. A few prominent survey organizations in recent years <a href="https://time.com/4067019/gallup-horse-race-polling/">have given up on election polling</a>, with no signs of returning. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A shocked looking woman in a crowd, with her hand over her mouth." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491086/original/file-20221021-26-8taa0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Worried supporters of Democratic incumbent New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy at an election night event in 2021. Murphy, who one state poll estimated was leading his GOP challenger by 11 percentage points, won by 3.2 points.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/supporters-react-as-new-jersey-governor-phil-murphy-speaks-news-photo/1236310210?phrase=election%20Phil%20Murphy&adppopup=true">Mark Makela/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Treat polls warily</h2>
<p>It is important to keep in mind that polls are not always in error, a point noted in my 2020 book, “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300965/lost-in-a-gallup">Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections</a>.” But polls have been wrong often enough over the years that they deserve to be treated warily and with skepticism.</p>
<p>For a reminder, one need look no further than New Jersey in 2021 or, more expansively, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020-poll-errors/2021/07/18/8d6a9838-e7df-11eb-ba5d-55d3b5ffcaf1_story.html">to the 2020 presidential election</a>. The polls pointed to Democrat Joe Biden’s winning the presidency but underestimated popular support for President Donald Trump by nearly 4 percentage points overall. </p>
<p>That made for polling’s worst collective performance in a presidential campaign in 40 years, and post-election analyses were <a href="https://theconversation.com/survey-experts-have-yet-to-figure-out-what-caused-the-most-significant-polling-error-in-40-years-in-trump-biden-race-160967">at a loss to explain</a> the misfire. One theory was that Trump’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/us/politics/trump-polls.html">hostility</a> to election surveys dissuaded supporters from answering pollsters’ questions.</p>
<p>In any case, polling troubles in 2020 were not confined to the presidential race: In several Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, polls also overstated support for Democratic candidates. Among the notable flubs was the U.S. Senate race in <a href="https://www.bangordailynews.com/2020/11/05/politics/susan-collins-defied-the-polls-heres-what-they-may-have-gotten-wrong/">Maine</a>, where polls signaled defeat for the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins. <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/me/maine_senate_collins_vs_gideon-6928.html">Not one survey</a> in the weeks before the election placed Collins in the lead. </p>
<p>She <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/12/22/the-political-survival-of-susan-collins/">won reelection</a> by nearly 9 points.</p>
<h2>Recalling the shock of 2016</h2>
<p>The embarrassing outcomes of 2020 followed a stunning failure in 2016, when off-target polls in key Great Lakes states <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/upshot/a-2016-review-why-key-state-polls-were-wrong-about-trump.html">confounded expectations of Hillary Clinton’s election to the presidency</a>. They largely failed to detect late-campaign shifts in support to Trump, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/AP-explains-elections-popular-vote-743f5cb6c70fce9489c9926a907855eb">who won a clear Electoral College victory despite losing</a> the national popular vote.</p>
<p>Past performance is not always prologue in election surveys; polling failures are seldom alike. Even so, qualms about a misfire akin to those of the recent past have emerged during this campaign. </p>
<p>In September 2022, Nate Cohn, chief political analyst for The New York Times, cited the possibility of misleading polls in key races, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/12/upshot/polling-midterms-warning.html">writing</a> that “the warning sign is flashing again: Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.”</p>
<p>There has been some shifting in Senate polls since then, and surely there will be more before Nov. 8. In Wisconsin, for example, recent surveys suggest Republican incumbent Ron Johnson has opened a lead over Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes. Johnson’s advantage was <a href="https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2022/10/12/new-marquette-law-school-poll-survey-of-wisconsin-voters-finds-johnson-leading-barnes-in-senate-race-evers-and-michels-in-a-gubernatorial-toss-up/">estimated</a> at 6 percentage points not long ago in a Marquette Law School Poll.</p>
<p>The spotlight on polling this election season is unsurprising, given that key <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/15/senate-swing-state-polls-midterms-00061877">Senate races</a> – including those featuring flawed candidates in Pennsylvania and <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-will-happen-in-georgia/ar-AA12Hpro">Georgia</a> – will determine partisan control of the upper house of Congress.</p>
<h2>Worth doing?</h2>
<p>Polling is neither easy nor cheap if done well, and the field’s persistent troubles have even prompted the question whether election surveys are worth the bother.</p>
<p>Monmouth’s Murray spoke to that sentiment, <a href="https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/11/pollster-i-blew-it-maybe-its-time-to-get-rid-of-election-polls-opinion.html">stating</a>: “If we cannot be certain that these polling misses are anomalies then we have a responsibility to consider whether releasing horse race numbers in close proximity to an election is making a positive or negative contribution to the political discourse.”</p>
<p>He noted that prominent survey organizations such as Pew Research and Gallup <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/gallup-poll-2016-pollsters-214493">quit</a> election polls several years ago to focus on issue-oriented survey research. “Perhaps,” Murray wrote, “that is a wise move.”</p>
<p>Questions about the <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/09/why-horse-race-political-journalism-awesome-223867/">value</a> of election polling run through the history of survey research and never have been fully settled. Early pollsters such as George Gallup and Elmo Roper were at odds about such matters. </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759709376412">Gallup used to argue</a> that election polls were acid tests, proxies for measuring the effectiveness of surveys of all types. <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300965/lost-in-a-gallup">Roper equated election polling to stunts</a> like “tearing a telephone book in two” – impressive, but not all that consequential. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A screenshot of a story in the New York Times about polling mistakes in the US 2016 presidential election." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491088/original/file-20221021-21-vfyg4i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pollsters in 2016 predicted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would win some states that she actually lost.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/upshot/a-2016-review-why-key-state-polls-were-wrong-about-trump.html">Screenshot, New York Times</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Who is and isn’t responding</h2>
<p>Experimentation, meanwhile, has swept the field, as contemporary pollsters seek new ways of reaching participants and gathering data. </p>
<p>Placing calls to landlines and cellphones – once polling’s <a href="https://poll.qu.edu/methodology/">gold standard methodology</a> – is expensive and not always effective, as completion rates in such polls tend to hover in the low single digits. Many people ignore calls from numbers they do not recognize, or decline to participate when they do answer.</p>
<p>Some polling organizations have adopted a blend of survey techniques, an approach known as “methodological diversity.” CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/10/politics/cnn-polling-new-methodology/index.html">announced</a> in 2021, for example, that it would include online interviews with phone-based samples in polls that it commissions. A blended approach, the cable network said, should allow “the researchers behind the CNN poll to have a better understanding of who is and who is not responding.”</p>
<p>During an <a href="https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K012121/">online discussion last year</a>, Scott <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_21-04-06_pollingqa_keeterheadshot/">Keeter</a> of Pew Research said “methodological diversity is absolutely critical” for pollsters at a time when “cooperation is going down [and] distrust of institutions is going up. We need to figure out lots of ways to get at our subjects and to gather information from them.”</p>
<p>So what lies immediately ahead for election polling and the 2022 midterms? </p>
<p>Some polls of prominent races may well misfire. Such errors could even be eye-catching. </p>
<p>But will the news media continue to report frequently on polls in election cycles ahead? </p>
<p>Undoubtedly.</p>
<p>After all, leading media outlets, both national and regional, have been survey contributors for years, conducting or commissioning – and publicizing – election polls of their own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>W. Joseph Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Will some polls misfire in prominent races in the 2022 midterms? Probably. Will such errors be eye-catching? In some cases, perhaps. Will the news media continue to tout polls? Undoubtedly.W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of CommunicationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1917032022-10-04T09:24:06Z2022-10-04T09:24:06ZLiz Truss: how to understand polls that give Labour an enormous lead – and why the Tories are right to fear a major election loss<p>When Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced that he would not be going ahead with his plan to scrap the top rate of tax in the UK, he claimed that he had done so because <a href="https://twitter.com/KwasiKwarteng/status/1576820620293468160">“he listened”</a> to the public. There had indeed been a widespread outcry over his plan, set out in his ironically named “mini-budget” on September 23, but the reversal is more likely because the Conservative government’s own MPs would block its passage through parliament by voting against it.</p>
<p>Some of this resistance was probably a genuine belief that the measures were wrong. But a more likely explanation is that many MPs fear that their seat (and control of government and parliament) would be in danger if they went along with the idea. </p>
<p>That fear is warranted. Recent polling provides very few glimmers of hope for the Conservative party. The mini-budget is merely a chapter in a much longer story. It was already clear in <a href="https://theconversation.com/boris-johnson-four-key-insights-from-recent-polls-can-help-us-see-where-the-crisis-is-heading-186489">July</a> that the darkening perceptions of the Conservative party were unlikely to be improved by anyone – and particularly not Truss (who is an ally of Boris Johnson).</p>
<p>Since then, Labour has been buoyed by a successful party conference. All told, the reversal (or postponement) of the cut to the top rate of tax is likely to do little for the public, even if it takes the heat off the furore.</p>
<h2>What the polls say</h2>
<p>The headline polling figures, which reveal who people would vote for if there was an election tomorrow (or their response to a question to that effect), show an average of a 24 percentage point lead for Labour.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1575874214170484737"}"></div></p>
<p>Some individual polls put Labour ahead by 30 or more percentage points. In truth, these are likely to be over-generous. But even the most pessimistic poll for Labour, the lowest lead (Redfield and Wilton, which gives the opposition a 17-point lead) would still probably deliver a landslide election victory. </p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1576963289153929217">Polling</a> since then indicates these large leads are not pure outliers. It should be noted that this is not a sudden change. Labour has been growing in strength for months, ever since the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/partygate-115248">“partygate” scandals</a>.</p>
<p>The difference in figures is likely due to how the companies deal with voters who answer “don’t know”. Some just remove them from the results, while others distribute them proportionally to the other parties. It may also be a function of how different pollsters treat the likelihood of voting at all. In any case, they all show a significant lead for the opposition.</p>
<h2>It gets worse …</h2>
<p>Vote intention polling doesn’t tell the whole story. Often when we look at the bigger picture, other figures look more positive for the Conservatives. That, however, is changing. And this is a significant point of concern for the government. </p>
<p>The economy, for example, is by far the <a href="https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-25-september-2022/">most important issue</a> for voters, with healthcare a close second, and <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/09/28/labour-twice-trusted-tories-deliver-economic-growt">Labour are much more trusted than the Conservatives</a> to deliver on both (<a href="https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/t3w6hgsi9h/TheTimes_VI_Results_220929_W.pdf">68% think</a> the Conservatives are managing the economy badly). In fact, Labour is now trusted more than the Conservatives to deliver on almost any policy.</p>
<p>Given that the Conservatives number one campaign promise is to deliver economic growth, it is bad news for them that the Labour Party is seen as better on this issue. With an economic turnaround unlikely in the immediate future, this is unlikely to change. </p>
<p>Also, there is a lot of evidence in political science that personal economic fortunes are an important factor in who people vote for. People don’t often vote for governments that have, or will, make them worse off.</p>
<p>The polling around the two leaders is also positive for Labour. Unlike at the start of September, <a href="https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/t3w6hgsi9h/TheTimes_VI_Results_220929_W.pdf">Keir Starmer has a solid lead</a> over Liz Truss when people are asked to choose who would make the best prime minister – 44% answer that he would, versus 15% for her. </p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, only 15% of those polled think Truss is doing “well” as PM, and 65% think she is doing “badly” (60% also think Kwarteng is doing badly as chancellor). The small hope for Conservatives is that many people are unsure, 37% regarding who would make the best PM and 19% regarding who they’d vote for. This means that there’s a sizeable electorate that could still be moved.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487792/original/file-20221003-26-pybjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/6-3-1536x864.png.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Redfield & Wilton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/t3w6hgsi9h/TheTimes_VI_Results_220929_W.pdf">polling does, however, show</a> that a substantial minority of those who voted Conservative in 2019 would now vote for Labour. While previously there was little movement between the two parties (suggesting the Conservatives were still holding firm), this indicates that a migration is now happening. </p>
<p>The hope the Conservatives will have – aside from their projection that the policies will materially improve people’s lives after a difficult winter – is that there are still many people who are not convinced by any party.</p>
<h2>U-turn if you want to</h2>
<p>If Kwarteng was hoping his tax U-turn would be enough to reverse these trends, he is likely to be disappointed. It might calm some of the furore, but it is unlikely to move the public. <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/YouGov/status/1576840608077217792">Most do not think it is a priority</a>. It also does not solve the primary problem – a lack of policies to help people struggling with rising bills, rents and mortgages. </p>
<p>The U-turn is also likely to undermine Truss’s argument that she is a strong leader on a mission to change the country. Just a day before the U-turn, she said she was fully committed to the policy. </p>
<p>MPs and senior Conservative politicians speaking against the budget all contribute to the image (and reality) of a party in disarray. Many will now be left wondering: if this can be overturned by internal rebellion, what else is up for grabs?</p>
<p>There is a growing consensus among political scientists that trust in politics is at a crisis point. Trust in politicians and the government is made up of three key components: the idea that they are acting in your interest, that they are doing so competently, and that they are applying integrity to the task. </p>
<p>Liz Truss’s rise to PM was fuelled more than anything by a lack of integrity from Boris Johnson, accompanied by underlying concerns from the public about the Conservative party’s competence. </p>
<p>The new government may have now completed the trifecta by clearly stating whose interests they are serving in response to these crises. Truss has <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-1270203">effectively admitted as much</a> herself when she said she was prepared to “be unpopular” to get her way. The reaction to her premiership so far at least indicates success on that front.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191703/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hannah Bunting receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Devine receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)</span></em></p>It’s bad for the party of government – and the closer you look, the worse it gets.Hannah Bunting, Visiting Fellow, TrustGov, University of SouthamptonDaniel Devine, Fellow in Politics, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1891362022-09-01T02:34:04Z2022-09-01T02:34:04ZUS byelections suggest improved prospects for Democrats at midterms, while Liz Cheney suffers huge loss<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482194/original/file-20220901-4982-lypmfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yuri Gripas / POOL/EPA/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The US midterm elections occur in just over two months, on November 8. All 435 House of Representatives seats and 35 of the 100 senators are up for election. At the 2020 elections, Democrats won the house by a 222-213 margin, and held the Senate on a 50-50 tie with Vice President Kamala Harris’ casting vote.</p>
<p>On June 24, the US Supreme Court reversed its 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, denying a constitutional right to an abortion. This <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/yes-special-elections-really-are-signaling-a-better-than-expected-midterm-for-democrats/">FiveThirtyEight</a>
article says that, relative to a district’s partisan lean, the average federal byelection had given Republicans a two-point gain before this decision. Republicans performed very strongly in two early June byelections.</p>
<p>In four byelections since June 24, Democrats have performed an average of nine points better than the district’s partisan lean. This analysis was published on August 24, and did not include the byelection for Alaska’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%27s_at-large_congressional_district">at-large district</a>, where preferential voting was used.</p>
<p>Relative to expectations, the best result for Democrats was their August 23 hold in New York’s 19th. Two <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_New_York%27s_19th_congressional_district_special_election">polls in August</a> had given the Republican leads by three and eight points, but the Democrat won by 51.1-48.7.</p>
<p>In Alaska’s at-large district, the top four candidates from a large field <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congressional_district_special_election">qualified in June</a> for an August 16 preferential vote, but a left-leaning independent withdrew. After <a href="https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22SSPG/RcvDetailedReport.pdf">preferences were distributed</a> Wednesday, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Republican Sarah Palin by 51.5-48.5, a gain for the Democrats. Final primary votes were 40.2% Peltola, 31.3% Palin and 28.5% for Nick Begich, another Republican.</p>
<p>Palin’s weakness with other Republican voters explains why she lost. Begich voters split 50% Palin, 29% Peltola and 21% exhaust. At the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Alaska">2020 presidential</a> election, Alaska voted for Donald Trump by a 52.8-42.8 margin over Joe Biden, so Peltola’s three-point win is a 13-point shift towards Democrats.</p>
<h2>Current forecasts and polling for the midterms</h2>
<p>In my last US politics article three weeks ago, I wrote that Democrats were benefiting from the Supreme Court’s decision that nullified Roe v Wade.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/us-democrats-gain-ground-before-midterm-elections-as-kansas-voters-reject-attempt-to-ban-abortion-187994">US Democrats gain ground before midterm elections as Kansas voters reject attempt to ban abortion</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/">FiveThirtyEight forecasts</a> now give Democrats a 67% chance to hold the Senate, up from 60% three weeks ago. Republicans are still considered a 76% chance to gain control of the House, but that’s down from 80% three weeks ago. The <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/">national polling</a> of the House now gives Democrats a 0.8% lead, up from 0.1% three weeks ago.</p>
<p>The 35 Senate seats up for election at this year’s midterms are 21 Republicans and 14 Democrats. As Republicans are defending more Senate seats, the FiveThirtyEight forecasts give Democrats a far greater chance to hold the Senate than the House.</p>
<p>The biggest improvement for Democrats is in President Joe Biden’s ratings. In late July, Biden’s net approval in the <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/">FiveThirtyEight tracker</a> was close to -20. His ratings are now 53.1% disapprove, 42.4% approve (net -10.7). These ratings are still poor, but the improvement should make it easier for Democrats in close contests.</p>
<p>On August 16, Biden signed the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act_of_2022">Inflation Reduction Act</a> into law after it had passed the Senate on August 7 and the House of Representatives on August 12. This act prioritised health and climate change spending. I discussed Senate passage in my previous US politics article.</p>
<p>On August 24, Biden <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1118879917/student-loan-forgiveness-biden">announced that the government</a> would forgive up to US$10,000 per person in student debt, and up to US$20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.</p>
<p>I believe the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, a sense that Democrats are “getting things done” by legislation or executive action and better economic data on inflation, as discussed previously, are all assisting Democrats and Biden. </p>
<p>But there are still over two months before the midterms, and the non-presidential party has convincingly won every House midterm election since 2006.</p>
<h2>Liz Cheney’s huge loss in Wyoming Republican primary</h2>
<p>Since the January 6 2021 riots at the certification of Biden’s November 2020 election victory, Liz Cheney has been the Republican who has <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/16/politics/liz-cheney-wyoming-alaska-primaries/index.html">most condemned Trump</a>, over both the riots and the Big Lie that the election was stolen.</p>
<p>On August 16, Cheney was crushed by a 66-29 margin in a <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/election/2022/results/wyoming/primaries">Republican primary</a> for Wyoming’s at-large district by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman. US primaries are party preselection contests that are open to a far larger number of voters than in Australia; they are administered by state election authorities.</p>
<p>Cheney’s loss means she will leave Congress when her term expires in January 2023. Trump won <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Wyoming">Wyoming by 43 points</a> in 2020, so Hageman is certain to win the November general election and replace Cheney.</p>
<p>CNN <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/17/politics/liz-cheney-worst-defeat-house-incumbent/index.html">analyst Harry Enten</a> said Cheney’s loss was the second worst in a primary by a House incumbent in the past 60 years. Her 37.4 point loss is just worse than the 37.2 point loss for a Democratic incumbent in 2000, but better than a Republican incumbent’s loss by 41 points in 2010.</p>
<p>Four of six House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 riots and stood for re-election have been defeated in primaries; this includes Cheney. Only 2% of other House Republican incumbents running for re-election have been defeated.</p>
<p>None of the six who impeached Trump won a majority of the Republican vote in their primaries. Since 1956, House incumbents have averaged over 90% of their party’s primary vote. Trump’s grip on the Republican party remains powerful.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189136/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With two months to go until the US mid-terms, President Joe Biden has seen a significant lift in his approval ratings.Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist), The ConversationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1889152022-08-17T14:54:08Z2022-08-17T14:54:08ZAngola’s 2022 election: an unfair contest the ruling MPLA is sure to win<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479601/original/file-20220817-18-54dr38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protests demanding better living in Angola have become common since 2011. This one was in November 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Luso</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Angolans go to the polls on 24 August to vote <a href="https://www.eisa.org/calendar.php">in parliamentary elections</a>. The leader of the party with the most seats in parliament automatically becomes the president, so this is also in effect a presidential election. </p>
<p>This will be the fourth election since the end of the Angolan civil war in 2002. The three previous post-war polls were marked by a steady decline in the number of people voting for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Popular-Movement-for-the-Liberation-of-Angola">MPLA</a>). In the last election, five years ago, the party’s share of the vote <a href="https://www.academia.edu/en/35640101/Angola_s_Elections_and_the_Politics_of_Presidential_Succession">was down to 61%</a> nationally, in contrast to 70% in the previous election according to the official tally. </p>
<p>Most worryingly for the ruling party, it came in with less than 50% of the vote in the capital, Luanda, a city that it <a href="https://www.academia.edu/en/35640101/Angola_s_Elections_and_the_Politics_of_Presidential_Succession">historically regarded as a heartland</a>.</p>
<p>The four main opposition parties issued a joint statement citing irregularities in the vote counting process and <a href="https://www.makaangola.org/2017/09/angolan-opposition-unites-to-challenge-illegal-election-results/">rejecting the election results</a>. Days later, they decided instead to take up their seats and continue to participate in parliament. The sudden change earned criticism from civil society organisations that had also been angered by the irregularities in the vote tallying procedure.</p>
<p>The biggest concern, once again, is that the election will lack credibility.</p>
<p>A local polling service, <a href="https://www.angobarometro.com/">AngoBarómetro</a>, has <a href="https://www.africa-confidential.com/article/id/13916/Alarm_grows_over_vote-rigging_plans">predicted</a> that in a fair competition, there would be an outright win for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/UNITA">Unita</a>), the former armed movement that fought the MPLA in a 27-year war that ended <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/angolan-civil-war-1975-2002-brief-history">in 2002</a>. </p>
<p>Voter polling is a relatively new phenomenon in Angola so one cannot vouch for the reliability of the poll. However, it fits with the general downward trend in the MPLA’s electoral performance since 2008.</p>
<h2>Uneasy situation</h2>
<p>The 2017 election marked the resignation of President José Eduardo dos Santos, who had been in office <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20180908-dos-santos-leader-angola-president-joao-lourenco-ruling-party">since 1979</a>. His lengthy tenure had become a focus of popular protest that had gathered pace in Angola since 2011, along with other issues such as <a href="https://democracyinafrica.org/the-struggle-for-democracy-in-angola/">unemployment, the high cost of living</a> and growing inequality amid an oil boom. The boom had produced, at least on paper, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/30/opinion/opinion-angola-development-elections/index.html">dizzying growth figures</a> between 2004 and 2014.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/angolas-eduardo-dos-santos-an-unlikely-leader-known-for-his-judicious-use-of-violence-188083">Angola's Eduardo dos Santos: an unlikely leader known for his 'judicious' use of violence</a>
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<p>President João Lourenço took office amid the post-boom recession. His first move was to distance himself from Dos Santos. He lost no time in prosecuting some high-profile beneficiaries of the Dos Santos regime and <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/angola-the-fall-of-the-dos-santos-clan/a-45646757">nationalising their assets</a>.</p>
<p>The goodwill generated by such measures, however, could not last long. Dos Santos’s electoral strategy had rested on associating himself with the arrival of peace in 2002, and blaming the country’s problems on the legacy of the war and more specifically on Unita. The MPLA’s <a href="https://www.academia.edu/en/35640101/Angola_s_Elections_and_the_Politics_of_Presidential_Succession">declining share of the vote from 2008</a> onwards showed how that strategy was becoming ever less effective as the war receded into the past.</p>
<p>What is more, in previous elections the MPLA could count on the support of an emerging middle class that got used to a consumer lifestyle during the boom. Lourenço took office in the midst of a deep economic crisis, which has only got worse since he was elected. </p>
<p>Poverty is once again visible on the streets of Luanda, the capital, in the form of people scrounging for food in rubbish containers. Abandoned construction sites are a visible reminder of the bubble that burst. Even the middle class, whose expectations were raised during the oil boom, now struggle to buy basic necessities. </p>
<p>The 2022 election is the first in which citizens born after the war are old enough to vote. To this generation, the old slurs against Unita are meaningless. Even in traditional MPLA strongholds such as Malanje in north-central Angola, the party has <a href="https://www.makaangola.org/2022/08/angolan-elections-2022-indifferent-reception-for-president-lourenco-in-malanje/">battled to mobilise support at campaign rallies</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-luandas-residents-are-asking-where-did-all-the-oil-riches-go-49772">Why Luanda's residents are asking: where did all the oil riches go?</a>
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<p>Lourenço has been more tolerant of criticism than his predecessor was, but the current regime still resorts to force when it feels challenged. In November 2020, a march in Luanda calling for the creation of jobs and the holding of long-delayed municipal elections was <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/11/12/angola-police-fire-peaceful-protesters">met by police with live ammunition</a>.</p>
<p>In 2021 police also used force against protesters <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/angola-unlawful-killings-arbitrary-arrests-and-hunger-set-election-tone/">in Cabinda and Lunda Norte provinces</a>.</p>
<p>The authorities have <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/05/angola-authorities-repress-civil-society-organizations-ahead-of-election/">prevented civil society organisations</a> from holding meetings in the run-up to the elections.</p>
<h2>Marshalling the opposition</h2>
<p>As the MPLA’s political capital has diminished, so the opposition has begun to look more credible. Unita, the main opposition party, began to broaden its social base during the 2010s, finding common cause with civil society and a growing protest movement particularly in Luanda – a city where for previous generations, voting for Unita would have been anathema.</p>
<p>The election to the party leadership of <a href="https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2019-11-16---angola--adalberto-costa-junior--new-leader-of-unita---rfi-.H1xiNIKasS.html">Adalberto Costa Júnior</a>, 60, in 2019 marked a change of generation and image, and an effort to build the party’s support beyond its traditional bases in the interior.</p>
<p>In an attempt to gather together divided opposition votes, Unita is including on its electoral list <a href="https://eco.sapo.pt/2022/07/23/unita-apresenta-manifesto-eleitoral-e-promete-governo-de-competentes-e-nao-de-partidarios/">candidates from outside the party</a>. They include Abel Chivukuvuku, a former Unita official who enjoys a strong personal following and whose new PRA-JA party was denied registration, and Justino Pinto de Andrade, a well-known academic and liberation struggle veteran from a prominent MPLA family.</p>
<p>The MPLA, which still has a strong hold over the civil service and judiciary, has done its best to make life difficult for the opposition. Last year the constitutional court annulled the election of Costa Júnior as Unita leader, on the grounds that at the time of the party congress, he held dual Angolan-Portuguese nationality, even though he subsequently <a href="https://www.novojornal.co.ao/politica/interior/tc-anula-xiii-congresso-da-unita---acordao-7002021-da-provimento-aos-requerentes-por-violacao-da-constituicao-da-lei-e-dos-estatutos-de-2015-em-actualizacao-104785.html">renounced the Portuguese citizenship</a> that he had inherited from his father. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/angolas-peculiar-electoral-system-needs-reforms-how-it-could-be-done-163528">Angola's peculiar electoral system needs reforms. How it could be done</a>
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<p>The composition of the electoral commission is dominated by government and MPLA appointees. As in previous years, state media during the campaign period have been giving disproportionate coverage to MPLA events and government projects associated with the MPLA. Unita has filed criminal complaints over <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/202208080237.html">breaches of the electoral law</a>, of which the outcome remains uncertain.</p>
<h2>Discontentment</h2>
<p>Lourenço faces new challenges as he heads into his second term. The economy remains oil dependent and the country still depends heavily on imported food. So a recovery in global energy prices has been offset by an increase in food prices <a href="http://hub.ccouc.cuhk.edu.hk/news-and-info/angola-implications-ukraine-crisis-food-fuel-fertilisers-and-freight-prices-southern">brought about by the war in Ukraine</a>. </p>
<p>Discontentment over the ongoing issues of inequality and unemployment is likely to be sharpened in the wake of an election result that lacks legitimacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188915/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justin Pearce has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust. </span></em></p>Angola’s 2022 election is the first in which citizens born after the war are old enough to vote.Justin Pearce, Senior lecturer, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.