Can political prediction models pick the election winner better than the polls, the weather or Washington’s football team?
Better opinions polls are more expensive because pollsters need to spend more effort getting a representative and honest sample of voters.
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You could compare election opinion polls to penalty shoot-outs at a World Cup final: there’s huge pressure to get it right and we remember the big misses most of all.
Malcolm Turnbull’s days were numbered as the Newspoll losses continued to mount.
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Policymaking is no longer based solely on what a party stands for. Now, it also matters how a decision is going to play in the opinion polls – and that’s a problem for our political system.
We are often presented with surveys that claim to show how we all think on a certain subject. But how many people do you need to ask for that finding to have have any convincing meaning?
Former South African President Jacob Zuma sings at the ANC National Conference in December.
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Australians will be asked to complete a voluntary, non-binding postal vote on marriage reform. Wouldn’t it be easier - and cheaper - to do a sample survey instead?
Professor, Future Fellow and Head of Statistics at UNSW, and a Deputy Director of the Australian Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS), UNSW Sydney