Australia stays the course in “surprise” election results
I hadn’t been following the poll predictions for today’s Australian election, but I heard something on the news about it yesterday and apparently the prognostications were all for a Labor victory and a resultant change in government. When I heard that I thought: Hmmm, I wonder. And then I realized that in the last couple of years I’ve become not just skeptical of polls but extremely skeptical.
And that has panned out, because—surprise, surprise!— “Morrison celebrates ‘miracle’ win”:
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thanked voters for re-electing his conservative coalition in a shock result at the federal polls.
He told supporters he had “always believed in miracles” as partial results showed the Liberal-National Coalition close to a majority.
Opposition Labor Party leader Bill Shorten has announced he is resigning after accepting defeat.
Exit polls had suggested a narrow Labor win for the first time in six years…
Try finding someone who says they saw this result coming.
For well over two years, the coalition has trailed behind Labor in the opinion polls, and the assumption had been it would be Labor’s turn to govern.
But somehow Scott Morrison managed to turn things around at the 11th hour – and he did it largely on his own.
And this reminded me of Nixon’s “silent majority”:
Thanking his opponent, Mr Morrison paid tribute to “the quiet Australians” who had voted for the Coalition.
I’ve read speculation about why the polls keep being wrong these days, and often in the same direction of underestimating votes on the right. Some say it’s because a significant number of respondents on the right lie to pollsters about their prospective votes. There probably are such people, of course. But I don’t think that’s really what’s going on for the most part. My hunch is that people on the right (and certainly Trump voters of either party in 2016) are less likely to answer pollsters at all, and are more likely to hang up. Pollsters try to correct for low cooperation rates by correcting their samples for party balance, but I think in the current climate that’s especially inadequate. Turnout is very very difficult to predict.
Of course, a great many people would disagree with me, and say that the pollsters are purposely getting it wrong in order to motivate people on the left to go out and vote. For various reasons, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. The first is that it’s not clear whether overestimating or underestimating is the greater motivator, so it’s a big gamble if that’s what they’re doing. The second is that pollsters’ reputations are damaged by faulty polls that fail to accurately predict the outcome. Maybe at the beginning of a campaign they’re fudging the results somewhat for motivational reasons, but as the election draws closer I think they are quite motivated to get it right.
When I am very, very skeptical I spell it sceptical. It drives people crazy, especially the pedants. Oh, and the grammar/spelling Nazis.
In re the polls, this from Pew: “In 2017 and 2018, typical telephone survey response rates fell to 7% and 6%, respectively, according to the Center’s latest data. Response rates had previously held steady around 9% for several years.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/27/response-rates-in-telephone-surveys-have-resumed-their-decline/
Nobody knows why because they won’t talk to you. The contention that polls are in any way “scientific” is to laugh.
I believe the ‘shy Tory’ phenomenon has been documented in Britain and the U.S.
For some anecdata, you might look at our Facebook wall. Our Republican friends use Facebook to post pictures of their grandchildren. The only one who puts up an occasional political post is a spinster. Our Democrat friends will put as many as 10 political posts a day up. You want to meet people with post-baccalaureate degrees who think in slogans and memes? They’re our relatives and quondam co-workers. I think one thing that now differentiates the parties is that their adherents have a whole different understanding of the place of political life in the wider scheme of things. Did you ever wonder why professional association (e.g. the American Academy of Pediatrics) are mouthpieces of the left?
So the Russians have been working overtime in Oz, too….
As I’ve opined here before, by manipulating the poll–who and how many people you poll, what income strata and geographic area the people you poll are from, what questions you ask and in what order, what questions and answers–out of perhaps dozens–you highlight, and what results you ignore and just don’t report on, plus whatever “corrective” mathematical manipulations you might apply to your poll–you have a pretty good chance of rigging a poll to deliver whatever results you want.
Thus, I refuse to answer pollsters.
P.S. I also refuse to answer polls/pollsters because my experience has been that, quite often, such polls take far more time than the pollsters tell you they will take, and they waste my time.
I am perfectly fine with either refusing to answer pollster pests, or with misleading them about who you are going to vote for.
I suspect that that the above is part of what made the polls so wrong in the last Presidential election. Part of it may also have been that pollsters refused to, just could not believe and give credence to, some of the results that they were getting.
As well, perhaps they didn’t venture deeply enough into the heartland to poll the people they really needed to poll.
I’ve seen a couple stories with the old ‘we lost cuz we’re too darn smart for the rubes’ tone from media and Labor party officials.
Some things will never change.
I really can’t comment on the pollsters…I barely understand how Australia runs their “preferential voting” elections…and the plethora of minor single-issue parties. But what I see in living every day here is that Australians do care about bread and butter issues…and most of it locally focussed. The Adani coal mine won Queensland for Morrison. Jobs at the literal coal face given that Labour hasn’t been able to maintain a strong manufacturing economy or strongly undergird a rural-ag economy…Labour (for all its Labour-union history) is a lawyer-leftist-city party now.
What neither party has been able to get a grip on (so that even though the LNP/Coalition is gaining ground & perhaps a majority government the cross bench will still have great deciding power) is the hard reality that wages are not growing as quickly as cost of living. Morrison’s commitment to grow the economy sounded a better solution than Shorten’s tax, spend, regulate, climate change climate change climate change…platform.
We’ll see.
Oh…and if you think Israel Folau’s brand of pentecostal fundamentalist Christianity is wacky, that’s fine, but when the NRL fired him to shut him up…more than a few voters pulled a tad further to the right. Shorten’s embrace of shutting down free speech in the last week probably was one of a few “X-factors” at the wire.
But that’s just this American in Oz’s opinion.
It may well be worth about what you paid for it. 😉
A friend of mine in Dallas sent me a clipping from today’s Dallas Morning News, a Washington Post story about Australia being expected to bow the center-right government away and carry demands for climate change action. The results of the Labor victory, which did not happen, was going to “provide a morale shot for U.S. Democrats and other left-of-center parties around the world,” They really jumped the gun once more because according to polls it appears this was a done deal. Once more a case of “premature exaltation.”
“Morrison celebrates ‘miracle’ win”:
“For well over two years, the coalition has trailed behind Labor in the opinion polls, and the assumption had been it would be Labor’s turn to govern.
But somehow Scott Morrison managed to turn things around at the 11th hour – and he did it largely on his own.” the BBC
It’s a miracle! Miracles… are of course beyond explanation.
An assumption that opinion polls are accurate, especially when they favor the left.
“somehow”… it’s a mystery!
“Morrison managed to turn things around at the 11th hour”
Political ‘jujitsu’ of the highest order!
“he did it largely on his own.”
Morrison single handedly pulled it off. But only super heroes can do that…
Obviously, the BBC is full of caca.
What’s more worrying is that millions of useful idiots will fall for it.
Because most polls are taken by the media, which is Dem / Socialist / Leftist, those answering the poll questions have an incentive to avoid telling them they’ll vote against the Leftist candidate.
So they don’t tell them in the poll, but they vote against the Left.
So far.
This is an example of why Labor never really protected jobs.
In 2016 Rio Tinto mining one of the biggest in Australia reported a net loss of 1.2billion dollars.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-11/rio-tinto-announces-2015-net-loss-of-1.2-billion-dollars/7161158
In 2018 Rio Tinto announces 7 billion dollar dividend return to their shareholders.
https://www.ft.com/content/1534a99c-9555-11e8-b747-fb1e803ee64e
Answer to their massive turnaround autonomous self driving truck.
https://www.ft.com/content/b71db1fa-ed3d-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0
The average Australian mine driver was making 100k plus benefits a year. If you see the chart listed on final link Rio Tinto reduced their workforce from 60K+ to 40K in 4 years.
The worst part is Rio Tinto’s success, is going to push the trend to robots in the mining industry in Australia which could mean over a hundred thousand jobs lost.
I asked my cousins who live in Australia who are labor supporters if labor or the Australian media ever talked about the miners concerns about Robot’s taking over their jobs. The answer was no, in fact when I showed them the articles about Rio Tintos mines and the fact that Australian miners is facing job loss to Robot’s it was the first time they had heard of this.
I guess Australian media is just like the media in America they are too busy pushing a narrative and trying to kiss the butt of progressive policies.
neo wrote, “And this reminded me of Nixon’s ‘silent majority’.”
I fondly remember spotting a bumper sticker at the time of Nixon’s citing of his silent majority: “The majority isn’t silent; the government is deaf.”
The more times change, the more some things stubbornly stay the same.
President Dewey could not be reached for comment.
Good for Australia! Now, on to the British EP election this Thursday, where a devastating Tory loss could cause a change in government and a real Brexit. But that’s if the polls are accurate …
The one thing the pollsters don’t have to predict in Australia is turnout because voting is compulsory ? although there’s nothing stopping a donkey vote once you’re there ?
Richard at The Belmont Club is looking at the background radiation for the polls thusly:
“”The trigger was a genuine social upheaval.” And therein perhaps lies the key to the three failures. Polls, like temperature and pressure sensors, are designed to detect specific things. They are not intended to detect and classify a wideband, perhaps never before seen phenomenon like a social upheaval because it does not correspond to anything in the pollsters’ library of signatures. The polls did not know how to ask the question. These weaknesses were amplified by hate speech and censorship filters which reduces their input set. In each of the three cases, the pollsters heard something coming but they could not recognize what it was. When they looked up it was too late.”
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-australian-labor-partys-surprise-defeat-echoes-hillary-brexit/
OldTexan on May 18, 2019 at 4:34 pm at 4:34 pm said:
A friend of mine in Dallas sent me a clipping from today’s Dallas Morning News, a Washington Post story about Australia being expected to bow the center-right government away and carry demands for climate change action. The results of the Labor victory, which did not happen, was going to “provide a morale shot for U.S. Democrats and other left-of-center parties around the world,” They really jumped the gun once more because according to polls it appears this was a done deal. Once more a case of “premature exaltation.”
* * *
Dewey beat Truman again, huh?
Real paper clipping, or cut-and-paste email link? Just curious.
I find it interesting that some words persist even though what they refer to doesn’t, or is different.
Glasses including plastic tumblers, for instance.
Chang Yee Fong on May 18, 2019 at 6:51 pm at 6:51 pm said:
…
I asked my cousins who live in Australia who are labor supporters if labor or the Australian media ever talked about the miners concerns about Robot’s taking over their jobs. The answer was no, in fact when I showed them the articles about Rio Tintos mines and the fact that Australian miners is facing job loss to Robot’s it was the first time they had heard of this.
* * *
So, there is also Fake News Down Under.
I am so surprised.
As Iowahawk said:”Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
Thanks for the info; first-hand reports aka “anecdata” are one of the high-value-items in the comments. (h/t Art Deco above)
LYNN HARGROVE on May 18, 2019 at 8:15 pm at 8:15 pm said:
President Dewey could not be reached for comment.
* * *
This was an interesting article about that.
Apparently, the iconic photo was quite accidental.
A miracle of historical preservation!
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/behind-the-biggest-upset-in-presidential-history-truman-beats-dewey
Wow, some of that sounds so … familiar.
M J R on May 18, 2019 at 7:45 pm at 7:45 pm said:
neo wrote, “And this reminded me of Nixon’s ‘silent majority’.”
I fondly remember spotting a bumper sticker at the time of Nixon’s citing of his silent majority: “The majority isn’t silent; the government is deaf.”
The more times change, the more some things stubbornly stay the same.
* * *
The government — read, party leadership — is also blinkered and believes its own media propaganda.
“We are all vulnerable to what is out there but we don’t see.” – Fernandez (thanks to GvdL for linking that post).
Or what we don’t WANT to see, because it upsets what we know ought to be true.
Thanks, Aesop! There’s nothing like an appreciative chuckle to put a girl to sleep in a good mood. 😆
That’s the key for the Washington elite. They were so sure that Democrats’ swinging way left was “on the right side of history.”
Arthur Chrenkoff wrote about it well
http://thedailychrenk.com/2019/05/19/autumn-our-minor-discontent/
He also wrote about how much current education is “so depressing”:
http://thedailychrenk.com/2019/05/10/depressing-them-softly/
(Tho in this argument against getting rid of classics to replace them with dystopias, they use the example of Ender’s Game, one of the great SF Hugo winners before the SJ Despots took over Sci-Fi.)
I think lots of tax payers are happier with lower taxes than higher taxes. I’m pretty sure Trump & GOP will be against Dem plans for higher taxes.
On Wretchard’s note (Richard Fernandez), he quotes approvingly (Hillary losing PA):
The trigger was a genuine social upheaval: a mass uprising by the GOP’s “coalition of restoration.”
I don’t think a pro-restoration, anti-change movement is a social upheaval, rather it is a widespread anti-upheaval. Moderate, yet steady opposition to too much of the Leftist, genuine social upheaval.
Recently I saw a new version of the 50% glass:
If you see the glass as half empty,
you should pour it into a smaller glass.
I like that! Christianity, but not atheism, pushes people to be grateful for what you do have, not unhappy for what you don’t have.
So then I was thinking,
if your glass is full,
just pour it into a bigger glass so it’s almost empty.
And now I think that expanding the size of the glass, so as to be almost empty, so as to be angry that it’s almost empty — that’s what Leftist idealists do. Tho also Libertarians (like I was).
There is, for many people, some kind of external comfort about being depressed about “the state of the world”, especially the others who mostly don’t really affect your own daily life. This is part of “moral superiority”, and is related to the glass being half empty on particular issues.
US Democrat insistence on their own “moral superiority” is one of their most disgusting and disturbing traits, especially when they are so immoral in so many ways.
I respectfully disagree with Neo’s assertion of and belief in the desire of pollsters to be objective. There is surely an an alternative explanation to the polled people’s dissembling in their answers, and that is that the pollsters are in fact not objective.
Why do the pollsters get it wrong, in at least two separate continents, North America and Australia? Because the citizens distrust (whom? the pollsters?) and thus dissemble?
I think not.
We have had plenty of evidence that in the USA Democrats are fairly consistently overpolled compared to Republicans on political/electoral matters. And that there are “GOP” and “Democrat” pollsters, as they identify themselves, surely suggests the existence of bias among these alleged objective statisticians. What more evidence is needed?
We know the huge majority of journalists are leftists or left-leaning.
Why should we expect pollsters to be immune to those same seductions, and to be honest to a fault?
Remember there are lies and lies and statistics! It is so easy for the mathematically-challenged to conclude that statistical methods are immune to manipulation.
The Australians are also annoyed with the cost of “green energy” and the continual blackouts.
https://dailycaller.com/2016/11/23/australia-has-serious-problems-with-green-energy-triggering-blackouts/
“Of course, a great many people would disagree with me, and say that the pollsters are purposely getting it wrong in order to motivate people on the left to go out and vote.”
True, I believe. But that’s not really the point. People on the left are quite highly committed because of radicalization and hate inducing campaigns. It is the mushy middle, casually interested, low information voter that is motivated by overestimated support shown in skewed polls.
There is almost a herd instinct, for lack of a better word, causing people who aren’t thinking too hard to go with the winner or the consensus. This is why “climate change” theory is always being trumpeted as the overwhelming consensus.
“… pollsters’ reputations are damaged by faulty polls that fail to accurately predict the outcome.”
If Rasmussen continually gets it wrong, then yes they will damage their rep. because polling is the only thing they do. If an NBC/Wall Street Journal/Gallup poll gets it wrong I don’t think it matters much. NBC will claim Gallup is responsible for a high caliber of methodology, when in fact NBC is probably controlling some of that. Gallup will swear by their methodology, blame NBC’s questions, and/or claim some kind of fluke.
“… as the election draws closer I think they are quite motivated to get it right.”
My recollection is that we are now frequently seeing big swings in the polling in the last 48 hours. It is true that we are seeing an increased use “October surprises” or “11th hour surprises” by campaigns. But I believe that polls are also changing from dishonest methods to more honest methods in the last 48 hours, so that they can claim accuracy in the post game analysis.
It seems to me that pollsters pump up the Democrat numbers not so much to influence the Democrat vote, but to discourage Republicans. Just a different form of voter suppression.
Doesn’t seem to be working, though.
“The Pollsters got it wrong” meme is fun, but not particularly accurate.
Hillary did beat Trump — in the national vote. Which is what they were polling. (And most of the polls were not off by a large margin — they weren’t predicting she would win by a lot by the time voting occurred. They never claim to be accurate to the last percent.)
Most elections, most of the time, are more or less correctly predicted.
This Australian result is actually a wildcard, but you’d be pressed to find many more. If you’re reaching back to Dewey/Truman, then you’ve a shortage of decent recent examples.
Brexit was predicted Remain, but the actual result was inside the margin of error. That’s what a margin of error is — the bounds within which a result might fall.
What there have been recently is not a lot of polls being wrong, but a whole pile of important elections decided on a knife-edge.
You know what else is a surprise? They don’t have direct airplane routes from Australia to South America. They do have flights over/near the Arctic from North America to Eurasia however.
Manju and Yammer:
The quality of trolls is reaching rock bottom, flattening out you might say. “Peak stupid” is approaching, but asymptotic. So they will continue as they have.
@ Tom Grey,
I’m convinced that much of the current framing of moral questions in progressive terms, is a result of taking people who are seriously dysfunctional and mentally troubled as having merely “another perspective”.
In fact it’s not too difficult to find progressive literature which elevates their well-know tendency to express emotional and other psychological problems, to a kind of engine of progress as they see it.
They are crazy and obnoxious sure, but on their biologically malfunctioning and thus distorted view of what it means to be alive.”crazy” and even “nihilistic” are “good”
They don’t need a set of barbells and a jog on the beach, or psychological counseling. “You need to care more, listen more, accommodate more” and enable, and make sure that the environment you operate in, adjusts to them.
If someone has a better explanation for much, not all of, but much of modern progressivism than its being a politicized expression of dysfunctional but motivated and highly social and dependent types, they are free to offer it.
We already tried the tack of strictly deducing progressive values and desiderata from some some indubitable axioms, and saw that that got us nowhere; and that progressives themselves had never – so far as we were able to discover – gotten to be progressives by that method.
So if it’s not logic, what remains but their own axiom that “the personal is the political”?
And if you are a functionally effed up individual, what might we expect your social demands on others to look like.
Re: a university dispute involving a pro-life student group which has been covered a bit on the Internet. A progressive voices its opinion …
https://twitter.com/Aandtheuniverse/status/1120493089590775810
Chester Draws:
I wrote about that here.
And if an election is that close, then pollsters should say so. Instead, they were all predicting a Hillary victory.
One of the many problems is that doing state polls sort of falls by the wayside as the election draws near, and state polls are often the most telling.
Rod reprints a great poem by Les Murray, “who IS Australia”, like Voltaire was France.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/les-murray-is-australia/
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@DNW Many intelligent, capitalist successful liberals want people to make the same good decisions that they made; and want those people to have the good market results no matter what the decisions were.
That’s part of their idea of Freedom — whatever is chosen, you still get middle class American comfort.
On a personal level, they are not so dysfunctional, but their worldview is false in significant ways, crazy ways. And they are both nihilist and arrogant in claiming “moral superiority”, AKA “virtue signaling”.
The superiority part of moral superiority is more key, but signaling is also significant.
These are push polls, more or less. By forcing people to express the socially approved opinion, by hitting right-wingers over the head over and over again with the idea that they are a small and unpopular minority, they are trying to shame right-wing people from voting.
Just watch how they present the poll results if the wrong party or candidate is ahead.
Yeah, I’ll give that some thought.
I am sure that you are right insofar as some significant number of progressive-minded persons in the upper economic echelons have in fact competently maneuvered their way around the mixed economy and made big gains; demonstrating thereby some significant level of competency. And some have even prospered in the free market and in non-financial areas, not just in licensed and regulated monopolies with restricted entree.
And I have read enough progressive literature to know that their mentality [not those snowflake on campus, but the moral theorists on Z-Net] is such that they look upon moral hazard reasoning and cause and effect/consequence moralizing as atavistic … “Karmic” some of the class at times refer to it. After all, if you are judged as “not morally deserving of” your own talents in the first place, how under that scheme of moral assumptions could you deserve the superior outcome you get? On that view, we are all just social effects, and the only common reality that exists across the spectrum of “sentient entities” is held to be the experiences of pain and envy.
So the moral equation on their part is not “effort and just reward” but “suffering and it’s alleviation”: not through the overcoming of it through the building of virtue and strength [fascism] but through the social management and redistribution of organic and emotional satisfactions.