Poll position
Before, during and after the last Federal Election, psephological bloggers put MSM noses out of joint. They also demonstrated the value of alternative online sources of political information to a lot of people for the first time. Although some blogs like Poll Bludger, Possum’s Pollytics, Simon Jackman and Mumble had actually been around for awhile, an impending, much-anticipated election, and maybe (ironically) the MSM’s very prominent fulminations against them, brought these psephs to the attention of a wider audience.
The audience stayed because these blokes (and they are all blokes) write well, know what they’re talking about, offer comprehensive information archives and/or new and useful interpretations of polling material, and have an infectious enthusiasm for the mechanics of electoral politics and polling. In the last little while, I’ve interviewed both Possum and William Bowe from Poll Bludger. These interviews will be appearing soon in published forms, but what came through strongly in my conversations with both of them was that their main motivations were pretty altruistic. They were driven mostly by a desire to share information and knowledge, t to talk to others with similar interests and (especially in Possum’s case) to correct the grave calumnies in the MSM’s “interpretations” of polling. Of course, they also get kudos, job offers (Possum now writes regularly for Crikey), lots of readers and the pleasure of the odd smackdown, but fundamentally they’re working to educate their audience in a pretty specialised branch of knowledge. (That’s how the blogosphere “gift economy” works, as Margaret Simons book argues far more eloquently than I could.) As a result, many readers, including myself, now have the words “margin of error” forever embazoned on their minds, will never read the Australian’s Newspoll wrap in the same way again, and wonder daily whether their $1.30 is really money well spent.
This is all by way of saying that the psephos are continuing to improve their coverage of the numbers game. Yesterday, Possum unveiled the “Pollytrack“, a new blog feature which he explains in his post:
Now having three pollsters to play with - Newspoll, Morgan Phone Poll (I chose to exclude Morgan face to face polls as they behave quite differently to the phone polls of the three pollsters) and now Nielsen, we can construct a rolling average of the three pollsters weighted by sample size to give us what should be the most accurate estimate of Australian federal voting intention.
The great advantage Possum has over the MSM is that he is able to play with three polls. He has no proprietary interest in touting the accuracy of one over another, and he can therefore aggregate them to get the best read available on how the Australian voting public are thinking. This will be a constant display item on the blog, and in the comments on the post he’s suggesting he’ll play with it further for more interesting outcomes.
Meanwhile, if you want some non-MSM polling with more qualitative insights, check out the second batch of qual from Graham Young’s What the People Want budget survey. This time it’s covering those things that people didn’t like about the budget. For Labor voters, the Government hasn’t done enough in the budget to address climate change. Some Liberal voters feel excluded from the “working families” rhetoric. There are a range of complaints about tax cuts (some feel they’re still paying too much; others would like to see it redirected to services), and, as the papers have been telling us, pensioners feel neglected. The alcopops issue isn’t cutting through for Dr. Nelson, though:
“Alcopops” does not appear as a concept or a theme. There is a good reason for this. “Alcopop” only turns up 15 times out of the whole sample. All the time that the Coalition has spent on this issue has been wasted on the basis of this research.
Enjoy reading all this, happy in the knowledge that polling is being registered and debated in a range of fresh and engaging forums. Maybe Landeryou is right about this being a “golden age” of political commentary.
It is becoming clearer by the day that the many, many pronmises made by he electees of our current Federal Government were merely hot air, never, with a very few isolated exceptions, to be honoured.
But the media was so closely involved with the ALP electees that they are currently totally unwilling to admit it, and they continue to provide backing, even when the item involved is obviously being twisted out of sight and/or toally useless.
Because of this, a f=-growing number of people are beginning to very stgrongly suspect that the Polls, showing KRudd/Labor to be so far ahead of the Opposition, are totally faked, with the counts being specially arranged/organised to give totally inaccurate totals.