Bryan
· Saturday 24 March 2007
· 2:05 pm
The Morgan poll for the weekend of 17-18 March 2006 has been released. The headline national two party preferred vote prediction was 58.5 per cent for labor and 41.5 per cent for the Coalition (was 61 to 39 in the previous Morgan poll). The primary vote predictions were 36 per cent for the Coalition (up three), and 48.5 per cent for Labor (down three points).
Oh dear, the usual suspects have sought to paint this result as meaningful.
Good news for the Government! The latest Morgan poll has been released, and it shows that in the space of only a week, the Coalition has improved its position and Labor’s 2pp has slumped to a nominal 58.5%! Adjusting for bias this equates to 51.5%, probably not enough to win government.
Extrapolating, it will only take another 4 weeks before Howard hits the lead on 2pp even without bias! Yet there are probably another 7 months until the election - plenty of time for the tables to be turned!
There are a few observations that are worth making on that assessment of the latest Morgan poll. With a sample size of around 1000 people, this week’s headline prediction of 41.5 per cent for the Coalition is not statistically different from last week’s prediction of 39 per cent. Furthermore, there was no political event that would explain such a move in public voting intentions.
I think there are two more likely explanations for the 2.5 percentage point movement in this week’s Morgan poll. First, this week’s poll could be a rogue poll and the level of support is actually unchanged from the previous three polls at around 61 per cent per cent for Labor. Second, if you consider the Morgan polls since December 2006, you could argue there has been quite a bit of volatility, around what looks like fairly stable 58 per cent level of support for Labor (or 42 per cent for the Coalition).
Neither scenario implies that the Coalition will be back in front in another four weeks (or seven months). The commentator who predicted this is guilty of reading too much into a single poll.
The usual opinion poll graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.
Morgan · Polls ·
Bryan
· 5:58 am
Please accept my apologies for yesterday’s downtime. Hits to my site have been steadily increasing over recent weeks (visible at the bottom of this page). Yesterday it hit the wall with my service provider. To fix the problem, the site has been moved to another server.
Some of you may have experienced the PLESK default page and the following message when trying to access the site last night.
If you see this page it means:
1) hosting for this domain is not configured, or
2) there’s no such domain registered in Plesk.
This occurred because my site was given a new Internet address when it was moved to the new server. However, it takes around 24 hours for the mapping of ‘ozpolitics.info’ to the new address to be propagated across the entire Internet (actually I think the issue is that it takes around 24 hours for old cached name server lookups to expire). The Plesk message came from the old server. You got the Plesk message because your browser was looking for the site where it was on the old server, not where it is now on the new server.
Thank you everyone who emailed me to tell me the site was down.
Geekism ·
Bryan
· Friday 23 March 2007
· 8:14 am
Two polls are in today.
Galaxy poll has predicted 53 to 47 per cent in Labor’s favour. But perhaps the key finding from Galaxy is this election result is not about who you like the most, it is about who you hate the least. Iemma’s disapproval rating is 59 per cent, and Debnam’s is 67 per cent. It is possible that with these disapproval ratings and optional preferential voting, we will see a high vote cast for Greens and independents, with no transfer to the major parties. This might see a closer result with the Galaxy primary vote predictions of 38 per cent for the Coalition and 40 per cent for Labor. The PollBludger notes that Galaxy has a good track record in predicting outcomes.
ACNielsen paints a much more sanguine picture for Labor, with a prediction of 56 to 44 in Labor’s favour. The primary vote predictions from ACNielsen were 41 per cent for Labor and 36 per cent for the Coalition. The disapproval ratings were 33 per cent for Iemma and 51 per cent for Debnam.
In what might be a warning for the Federal election, ACNielsen found that industrial relations was the issue of most concern to voters. “The poll found 18 per cent of those surveyed listed industrial relations as the most important issue. The next most important was health, which was cited by 15 per cent of voters, followed by education with 14 per cent… public transport and roads were listed by 11 per cent of voters. The traditional state election issue of law and order was of least concern; 9 per cent rate it as a priority.” However, this result may simply be a case of brand identification: “Of those inclined to vote Labor tomorrow, one in three cited the industrial relations laws as their priority, compared with only one in 16 Coalition voters”.
On the betting market, the story has been pretty consistent for most of the campaign. Iemma has about 17 chances in 20 of becoming Premier following the election. Debnam has just three chances in 20. (You may need to hit the refresh/reload button on your browser to see the latest chart).
Today is your last chance to place a tip on the the NSW election:
I will close these tipping competitions at 8am 4pm tomorrow.
Update: I will be doing live reporting on the NSW election count.
NSW ·
Bryan
· Thursday 22 March 2007
· 11:59 pm
Just for fun, I thought I would find out which site is the top ranked blog on Australian politics. I decided to use Alex Traffic Rankings and my feeds list (plus assorted others) as the starting point for this experiment. A lower Alexa number is a higher ranking.
Anyway, the results are as follows:
- Tim Blair - 85,011
- Oz Politics Blog - 110,978
- Ambit Gambit - 120,775
- Jennifer Marohasy - 158,201
- The Spin Starts Here - 278,780
- Larvatus Prodeo - 309,436
- John Quiggin - 433,695
- Catallaxy - 474,606
- Andrew Landeryou - 526,127
- ROCKET - 532,656
- Reasons You Will Hate Me - 604,011
- The Road to Surfdom - 666,437
- Club Troppo - 668,647
- Webdiary - 674,500
- Bastards Inc. - 839,600
- The Bartlett Diaries - 869,744
- AnonymousLefty - 881,570
- The Pigs are Flying! - 943,064
- A Western Heart - 1,086,938
- man of lettuce - 1,108,319
- Henry Thornton Blogs - 1,109,565
- Andrew Leigh - 1,339,768
- Antony Loewenstein - 1,594,099
- Your New Reality - 1,651,035
- The Orstrahyun - 1,670,536
- Leftwrites - 1,698,748
- The View From Benambra - 1,720,694
- CoreEcon - 1,814,324
- JF Beck - 1,960,846
- Electron soup - 1,991,134
- Harry Clarke - 2,368,492
- Moment to Moment - 2,373,524
- The Adventures of QueerPenguin - 2,478,327
- The Dead Roo - 2,483,503
- DogfightAtBankstown - 2,538,593
- Bilegrip - 2,538,920
- Machine Gun Keyboard - 2,544,608
- Mumble - 2,752,307
- Ampersand Duck - 2,833,678
- Your Democracy - 3,255,533
- Whacking Day - 3,617,667
- GrodsCorp - 3,791,346
- Event mechanics - 3,965,281
- The Poll Bludger - 4,027,363
- Sachi's hyperbolic space - 4,030,762
- Thoughts on Freedom - 4,178,720
- Stoush - 4,186,105
- Father Bob - 4,409,742
- Sailing Close to the Wind - 4,514,525
- The Killfile - 4,693,214
- Andrew Norton - 4,723,243
- There Aint no Sanity Clause - 4,742,257
- Personal political - 5,017,198
- Hyperidian Bannerman - 5,142,709
- Austrolabe - 5,326,999
- William Burroughs' Baboon - 5,705,161
- LaborFirst Blog - 5,781,319
- Polemica - 5,962,727
- Crazybrave - 6,481,629
- Graeme Bird - 6,557,040
- Politically homeless - 6,705,782
- Modia Minotaur - 6,718,173
- Fair Crack of the Whip - 7,510,140
- Virulent Memes - 7,859,987
- Planet Irf - 8,123,090
- South Sea Republic - 8,217,942
Unfortunately, Alexa did not rank some sites that should have scored highly. Note: some of the following were ranked, but the rank was for multiple blogs from the one primary address.
Second is not too bad! But to be fair, most of the traffic coming here is not for my erudite posts. My visitors come for the politics test. The market place for serious analysis is much smaller than for cheap baubles. There are many better blogs than mine.
Some day I might repeat this exercise using Technorati.
Meaningless · Geekism ·
Bryan
· Wednesday 21 March 2007
· 10:35 pm
The average probability from the five bookies for a Coalition government following the 2007 election is 46.9 per cent. It was 48.1 per cent on Thursday last week.
The usual graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.
Betting market ·
