Nelson the Future Eater -Dining on the base vote A La Carte

This was me in Crikey earlier today.

After every change of government, dismal polls become a staple for the political misery that is Opposition. But there are dismal polls – essentially temporary bouts of opprobrium and uncertainty unleashed by the electorate on the recently vanquished, and then there are polls so dismal that one must start to question whether they represent some underlying shift afoot in the size and structure of a party’s base vote.

We’ve seen the latter in action before, particularly at the State level, with leaders like Peter Beattie applying some WD40 to rusted on Coalition voters and forever changing the political landscape as a consequence.

But what is happening to the Coalition and Brendan Nelson is unprecedented.

The problem here of course is trying to estimate what the Coalitions base vote actually is, or rather was. With a number of State Labor governments of late carving out pretty extraordinary majorities, it appears that the proportion of the electorate that that will only ever vote for the Coalition over Labor at any level of government has been shrinking for a while. If we look at State and Federal elections over the last decade and for each State take the lowest primary and two party preferred vote that the Coalition has received in an election – we’ll get a fairly good idea of just how big, in practice, that group of the electorate is that will always vote for the Coalition over Labor under any circumstance.

So for NSW, the lowest primary vote achieved by the Coalition was 33.7% in 1999 – however there was a large One Nation effect running through that election which distorts the picture – so if we look at the 2003 State election, we find the Coalition received a 35% primary vote with a TPP of 43.8%. So we’ll use this as our NSW Coalition base vote figure. If we do the same for all the States and use Federal results for Tasmania (because of their Hare-Clark system) while paying particular attention to avoiding any One Nation distortionary effects around 1998, we end up with the following lowest primary and two party preferred results received by the Coalition recently in major elections.

	NSW	Vic	Qld	WA	SA	Tas
Primary	35	38.2	35.5	34.4	36.1	37
TPP	43.8	42.2	44.5	47.3	43.2	42.7

We can then use state electoral population weights to get a national average of 36% for the Coalition primary vote base and 43.8% for the Coalition two-party preferred vote base - which represents the lowest possible level of Coalition support based on the actual putting of pen to ballot paper by the electorate. Our base vote estimate isn’t meant to compare State and Federal politics; it is simply an estimate of the proportion of the electorate that has never voted Labor over the Coalition in major elections – the truly rusted on Coalition vote.

If we run these two base vote lines against a seven year history of the federal Coalition primary and two party preferred vote estimates (using monthly Newspoll averages to knock out some of the size of the poll to poll noise), something extraordinary happens:

Now remember folks, this base vote is calculated on the sheer thumpings that the Coalition has received in the States of late, so it is probably a little undercooked in real life and would in reality probably be up to a couple of points higher than the red lines given here. Effectively, this is the Coalitions best base vote scenario.

Brendan Nelson is leading a party that is receiving a national vote share lower than all of the State Opposition annihilations of late put together. It makes the polling bleakness of early 2001, and that of March/April 2007 look like a golden age of popularity by comparison.

If that’s not bad enough, if we look at the way those State annihilations of the Opposition played out in practice, a sort of electoral hysteresis was operating. State ALP governments eroded the State Coalition vote to the point where the Coalition base started contracting, leading to an almost natural, lower long-term level of Coalition electoral support as a result - a level of support from which the State Oppositions have found it almost impossible to recover from, consigning themselves to a generation of political failure.

If you lose your base, you lose your political viability.

The Nelson Opposition is losing their base vote in an unprecedented fashion.

UPDATE:

Amber wanted to know what these base lines look like when projected over a longer period of Newspoll - just be aware that the base vote of the Coalition in the past was different to what it is now.

UPDATE:

Further convo over at LP

State of the Polls – Old School

It’s been an awfully long time since we last had a good look at the broad state of the political polling like primary votes, satisfaction ratings and their trends rather than the simple headline TPP and Brendan Nelson’s limbo with preferred PM ratings.

So to start off, some music to listen to as we go through the poll roll - the Halo Friendlies doing “Sellout”… quite apt for the poor old Nightwatchman of late.

Looking first at the primary votes of the two majors, we’ll plot how Newspoll, Morgan Phone Poll, Morgan Face-to-Face and the Phone Poll Average have been going since the election. The time scale at the bottom of all these graphs is “Week in Term” meaning week one was the first week after the election, week 2 the 2^nd week and so on and so forth. To help convert the weeks in term into dates, this little table might come in handy:

Week Ending	Week into term
22 December 2007	4
29 December 2007	5
5 January 2008	6
12 January 2008	7
19 January 2008	8
26 January 2008	9
2 February 2008	10
9 February 2008	11
16 February 2008	12
23 February 2008	13
1 March 2008	14
8 March 2008	15
15 March 2008	16
22 March 2008	17
29 March 2008	18
5 April 2008	19
12 April 2008	20
19 April 2008	21
26 April 2008	22
3 May 2008	23
10 May 2008	24
17 May 2008	25
24 May 2008	26
31 May 2008	27
7 June 2008	28
14 June 2008	29
21 June 2008	30

For the ALP we get:

The Morgan face to face poll went wandering out to the fringes of plausibility here for a bit but has lately started coming back to earth - essentially repeating what it did last year. What’s worth noting here is that the two phone polls have pretty much been moving in sync, with the old pattern of Morgan usually being a few points higher for the ALP than Newspoll coming through just like it did last year. Since the end of February there appears to have been a slight growth in the primary vote for Labor which, as we’ll see a little later on, is consistent with the way the uncommitted voters are splitting over other metrics like satisfaction and preferred PM ratings.

Next up, the Coalition primary vote:

Again, the Morgan Face-to-Face poll is the odd one out, being a fair bit more volatile than the phone polls, but also lately showing the highest primary vote for the Coalition. The minor party vote in Morgan’s face to face seems to be a good chunk less than the phone polls are measuring - one would think it’s a bit of a methodological issue going on there.

Using the phone poll average as the comparison between the two parties we end up with:

We can see some slow, consistent movement to the ALP in primaries over time, but only partially at the expense of the Coalition vote - with the rest coming from a decreasing minors vote.

Moving on to the TPP vote estimates - we’ll again compare the pollsters for the two majors.

Apologies for that dogs breakfast - blame the pollsters!

Worth a giggle is the Morgan face to face poll showing an ALP TPP of 65%. Were an election held where that result came about, the ALP would have 139 of the 150 seats in Parliament

The ALP TPP vote seems to have been slightly growing over the last few months yet without being able to say so with any level of statistical significance.

So now we’ve done the primaries and the TPPs we can have a squiz at the Votegap - which is the difference between the vote levels of each party.

This must be more than just a little bit disturbing for the Coalition. As time goes by, the difference between the vote levels of the ALP and the Coalition in both primary votes and TPP share is increasing. That suggests that ALP support is not only coming from minor parties, but directly from the Coalition as well. The ALP seems to be incrementally grinding away into the Coalition base vote - which is exactly what happened in QLD state politics. If a party starts losing its base they are in deep shit.

One blessing for the Coalition is that there aren’t yet enough observations in the data to be able to say this with any real level of statistical certainty - but if it keeps happening like it is at the moment, by the time we get enough observations it will probably be too late for the Opposition to be able to recover before the next election which will put them in a dire position for the election following that - especially in terms of resources.

We’ll keep an eye on the Votegap measures over the next year and see if that longer term trend to the ALP continues - however slowly. If it does, Australian federal politics will change fundamentally.

Moving on to the more qualitative metrics, we’ll start off having a squiz at Nelsons limbo dance with the preferred PM ratings:

This has just about been done to death in the MSM so we’ll leave it pretty much alone except to say that as the uncommitteds have started to crystalise out and get an opinion, they’ve clearly decided that they don’t much think Nelson is up to the job.

That uncommitted pattern is also something worth looking at in the satisfaction ratings:

As Rudds uncommitteds have been crystallising out, they’ve been roughly breaking even since February, moving in equal proportions to satisfied and dissatisfied with his performance. Nelson on the other hand had a big chunk of uncommitteds move in February straight into the dissatisfied column that has remained at a pretty consistent level since March. Since the end of March, the uncommitteds that are crystallising out have actually been moving to the “satisfied with Nelsons performance” column which is pretty interesting considering the beating he’s been getting of late.

The size of Nelsons uncommitted number is also large at over 1 in 4 voters.

So that’s where we are all currently at in the polling. Anyone have any theories or insights over how the data is playing out with the politics?

Many thanks, some cake and a hidden gem

A great many thanks from not only myself, but from the new Mrs Possum to all the well wishers and givers of magnificent advice over what to do and where to go in Tassie - especially the restaurants and little hidden secrets!

As a token of our appreciation, the best we can do is offer you a bit of virtual wedding cake

It was actually hard bringing ourselves to put a knife through such a wonderful piece of artwork (the brides bra and undies sitting on the side of the spa brought much mirth to all).

If anyone is planning to get married on the mid-north coast of NSW anytime soon and is after something a little different as a wedding cake design, drop me a line and I’ll get you in touch with the lovely lady who made ours. She’s good fun and will make just about anything you can imagine.

Tasmania was simply fantastic, with only a single bad experience had (at a hotel that should know better and in a few days time most certainly will) - but what was really surprising is that the bit of Tassie we found the most breathtaking was also a place that is barely advertised - the small little micro settlement of Strathgordon that sits on the shore of Lake Pedder and is a good 70km of winding mountain road to the nearest piece of civilisation.

There’s a hotel of sorts right on the shore line - but what sets it apart is the unusual nature of it, the wonderful staff and what is directly outside the back door. The Hotel actually serves as the bar and restaurant for the literally handful of Hydro Tasmania workers that are up there servicing the Gordon Dam at any given time, so the whole thing seems to be subsidised by Tasmania Hydro to begin with - including the fuel bowsers out the front which have the cheapest petrol in Tasmania. It’s also the only building of any note in the town at all apart from a dozen or so units used to house the staff of the hotel and the Dam workers themselves.

But what makes it magnificent is when you look out the windows of the bar and dining rooms of the hotel and see this:

It’s incredible the way the weather changes every 5 minutes, from rain to fog to bright sunshine - often all trying to happen at the same time. As a result you end up with some of the most spectacular lighting of some really amazing geography.

Again, all taken from the Hotel.

It’s a 15 minute drive up the road to witness the powerful but mixed feelings of walking across the Gordon Dam, there are walking tracks into the National Park all around the place and apparently the trout fishing is brilliant.

And for the pollyjunkies that are reading - the hotel doesn’t make the mistake that so many others do by confusing “getting away from it all” with “complete and utter isolation from the outside world“, so you still have free access to a blistering satellite net connection in the hotel and Austar with Sky Nooz. So after your day of getting away from it all in the lakes and mountain wilderness of Tassie, you can curl up next to the fire with a pint of Wizard Smith ale, watching Sky News and surfing the net while waiting for your marinated wallaby on a char grilled vegetable stack to arrive from the kitchen.

Of all the places we saw in Tassie - this is the one we’ll go back to regularly.

So again, a big thanks to all for the advice and hints and here’s one back for all those that didn’t know about it.

I’ve got a bit of political catching up to do over the next day or so - but can someone please tell me what that idiot Buswell was doing sniffing that chair?