The Australian won’t report the simple truth of its own poll so we turn to Via Mark the Ballot:
Newspoll for 9-11 May (one week out from the only poll that matters) predicts the national two-party preferred (TPP) voting intention will be (wait for it) 49 per cent for the Coalition to 51 for Labor. The long streak of 48/49 to 51/52 poll results continues.
This is more fuel for the improbability drive. My current working hypothesis is that the pollsters are doing one or more of the following (and noting that each pollster could be doing something different):
augmenting their statistical model with a data analytics model to produce their TPP result
reporting a rolling average over multiple polls
polling the same online cohort each time
polling something like ten times the sample they are reporting, and/or
copying each other
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
