Cory Doctorow has reported on Boing Boing that the State of Oregon has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to Web sites such as Justia and Public.Resource.Org which provide mirrors of Oregon state law. Oregon claims copyright over its state laws and says that their own Web site is sufficient for public access; however, as Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org points out, their Web site is filled with HTML errors, does not meet Section 508 accessibility requirements, and has no metadata.

In the lead up to the last election, a period which all seems such a long time ago – there were a number of opinion writers at The Oz whose polling commentary really was in a galaxy far, far away.

The political blogosphere reacted to such arrant nonsense being churned out on a weekly basis by giving the guilty a good clip ‘round the ears and an education in basic statistics. The fallout provided much mirth, not only to the blogospherical participants and readers, but among the journalistic peers of the guilty, lobbyists, parliamentarians, their staff, academics and the broader political insider set generally – the fallout from this little episode culminated in The Oz having a notorious hissyfit in an editorial about how they own Newspoll so the rest of us should just STFU.

It was a memorable, if unedifying spectacle.

This skirmish became known as the Poll Wars, where the first of our contributions here was titled Poll Wars Episode 1:The Phantom Metrics.

A little while ago over in The Oz, our favourite stenographer Dennis Shanahan revived the franchise with a B-grade sequel – a little wet lettuce bitchslap to the bloggers generally, but to this Possum particularly, over Nightwatchman’s single digit preferred PM rating in Newspoll. For those that haven’t yet read it (or have understandably forgotten about it), it’s probably a good idea to go and give it a bit of a squiz. I suggest it works best accompanied with its official soundtrack:

Dennis gets a little frisky over a number of issues in his page 2 column, the first being his opening statement “Where have all the poll pundits and, more particularly, the poll pedants gone?“, suggesting that we just aren’t paying enough attention to him anymore.

While it’s flattering, if a little disturbing, to know that Dennis seeks our eternal attention – I would never dare speak for the other pseph bloggers, but my reasons for not giving three fifths of five eighths of sweet FA’s worth of attention to whatever it is that Dennis is writing these days is pretty simple – the election is over. His type of agenda pollution of the mainstream media coverage of the most prominent and important poll in the country simply no longer has any consequences of any relevance to anyone but Dennis Shanahan.

It was certainly important at the time, but the time for some things eventually passes with history, much like credibility.

After this little piece of introductory attention whoring, the next bit of nonsense worth addressing, and the primary reason why any of it is even on the horizon of this place, is his following quip:

“After The Australian put the story, which I wrote, on the front page, it captured public attention and was reported, commented upon and retold in newspapers, radio, television and blogs.

As Possum Comitatus said on Crikey: “While this latest voting intention is hardly newsworthy, even to the poor poll junkies among us, it is the preferred prime minister figure that really grabs the attention.”

Ol’ Possum went on: “While records are meant to be broken, this one was obviously meant to be smashed. Brendan Nelson has stormed into the worst preferred prime minister result in the history of Newspoll with an astonishing 9 per cent.”

So far so good – but it’s at this point where Dennis Shanahan goes troppo, demonstrating that a very little knowledge is indeed a very dangerous thing. He states:

“Yet there was one key point missing from all the commentary that has previously cropped up in analysis of Newspolls: in Possum’s words, Nelson “stormed” to his rating by 2 percentage points.

Rudd’s record on preferred PM was also reached by a rise of 2 percentage points.

The margin of error for the Newspoll survey on a sample of 1140 is 3 percentage points. The leaders “stormed” to these records with movements of less than the margin of error.“

According to Dennis, what Nelsons Preferred PM rating was in the previous poll is somehow important when comparing the lowest individual scores of Opposition Leaders across a 20 year period. If he believes this to be the case, it really just reinforces why no one seems to pay a great lot of attention to him these days in the blogosphere.

Nelson didn’t “storm” into his dubious distinction of having the lowest ever preferred PM rating in Newspoll history from the last poll, he stormed into this dubious position by simply beating Simon Creans lowest score. He actually did it last month on 11%, but this months 9% just adds another increment to the historical minimum, and single digit figures are really quite a shocker.

This brings us to the most amusing thing about the article – the actual nature of his spiel itself. A well constructed strawman generally requires you to misrepresent the actual nature of an opponents argument into something slightly different, so that you can then proceed to not only burn it down with the fires of rhetoric, but where you can kick the seven shades of shit out of the smouldering embers with a barrage of well organised facts.

While Dennis might do misrepresentation well, his follow up left a bit to be desired.

You might notice in his article that Dennis waves around his “Margin of Error” like a drunken pirate with an acute middle ear infection might wave around a particularly large and cumbersome sabre.

The margin of error as reported from our largest pollsters is predicated on there being an approximate 50/50 split in the poll as the true value. This derives from the way the Standard Error of the poll is calculated via the formula:

Standard Error =

Where p is the population proportion we are trying to measure (like the proportion of the population that will vote for the Coalition, or the proportion of the population that prefer Nightwatchman as preferred PM) and n is the number of survey respondents.

In practical terms this means that when polling companies state that their Margin of Error is 3% for polls that measure the Two Party Preferred vote – it’s pretty close to being true as the TPP is usually between 50/50 and 60/40 thereabouts. Hence the value of p (the proportion of people that say they would vote for a given party) for the two party preferred vote is roughly 0.5, or 50%

But when a poll produces results that are way outside of that 50/50 split – like the 9% rating for Brendan Nelson, the statistical value of the margin of error actually reduces the farther away the reported result is from that 50/50 split, and reduces substantially.

By how much?

Well for Nelsons preferred PM result of 9%, we can be generous and say that p = 0.1 (the proportion of the population that prefer Nelson as PM vs. the 0.9 proportion that in some way do not), substitute that value into the equation along with the number of survey respondents in that particular Newspoll (n= 1140), and end up with a Standard Error of 0.889

To change a standard error into a Margin of Error for this poll, we need to build a thing called a 95% confidence interval – the 95% value being what all the pollsters use (which basically says that we can be 95% sure that the true result is within our margin of error). To do this is very easy – we simply multiply the Standard Error of 0.889 by the critical value 1.96 (which is the critical value associated with 95% confidence intervals for these things), multiply the whole thing by 100 to turn it into a percentage and Ta Da!

We have a Margin of Error on the Preferred PM poll of not 3% as Dennis states (because he’s just a goose mindlessly quoting Newspoll figures that he doesn’t actually understand), but a Margin of Error of 1.742%

We could be generously conservative to both Brendan and Dennis here and round it up to a nice 1.8%.

So when Dennis takes the flamethrower to that strawman of his where he invents me talking about Nelson storming from 11% to 9% and says “The leaders “stormed” to these records with movements of less than the margin of error.“, he cant even get the basics right.

If I were saying such a thing, which I’m not and I certainly wasn’t in that article he’s quoting from, in an episode of extreme irony it would still be correct because the exact opposite actually occurred – it was the MoE on that poll result which was actually LESS than the movement that occurred.

Not content with just getting the basics wrong in his piece of self-serving piffle, Dennis also found the need to pontificate about those of us in the blogosphere that actually do have an understanding of the polling statistics that so often confuse Mr Shanahan :

“Statistical bloggers forever complain about reports of movements of less than 3per cent and essentially want polls to be banished from newspapers and public debate except during an election.”

“Essentially want polls to be banished” eh?

Put it back in your pants Dennis.

I’ve heard some pretty idiotic things in my life, many from the columns of Mr Shanahan himself – but this one is a cracker.

No Dennis, we don’t want polls banished from public debate – far from it, we just want polling to be reported accurately, a feat which the overwhelming majority of the political journos in this country manage easily and with a high level of professionalism. Some, it would seem, just need excuses instead.

Over at The Oz, Christopher Pearson rewrites some history and says:

“Months ago I argued that the Coalition government could win with 49 per cent of the two-party vote and was violently attacked for my pains in left-wing blogs. By the end of the campaign the conventional wisdom had put the bar lower, at 48 per cent or a touch under. In the event, at week’s end The Australian reported the outgoing government as having won 47 per cent of the vote.”

I don’t know if he was violently attacked by left wing blogs, I don’t know if one can actually be violently attacked by a blog at all; it’s got a bit of a whiff of the drama queens about it.

But this blog certainly nicked him for his gross misunderstanding of the very basics of electoral reality. It had nothing to do with his claim of the government being able to win with 49% of the vote, that’s an argument that far smarter people than Christopher Pearson have made, and an argument with which I totally concurred.

No, the reason he was nicked, violently or otherwise, was simply because he was talking out of his arse.

Apart from the problem of Pearson not knowing what a swing is, and his strange fantasies about State based TPP majorities, the key reason he was clobbered was for this nonsense where he wrote:

“If the Coalition were to wage a dogged campaign concentrating on holding its marginal seats, it could win by maintaining its present primary vote if it also managed to cut Labor’s two-party preferred margin to about two points, as in 1998 when Labor led with 51 points to the Coalition’s 49 and still lost.“

At the time the Coalition primary vote was 39 and the ALP 48.5. If the results ended up as Pearson speculated, with a Coalition primary on 39 and the ALP getting a primary of 46.5, the end result would have been a 100+ seat ALP parliament with a TPP of over 55%! [bit of a misread there] If the TPP results ended up as Pearson speculated, that reduction in the   ALP TPP vote would have had to have moved to the minor parties, with the combined minors vote preferencing the Coalition to the value of about 10 points. Just where that was going to come from was never mentioned – it would never have been the Greens, Family First received next to nothing and the rest of the minors put together didnt amount to a hill of beans.

There were a large number of reasons why his so called analysis was complete twaddle, the main one being that the result of the 1998 election was built upon a large minor party vote coming from the right (One Nation) and delivering preferences back to the Coalition. It was One Nation that allowed the Coalition primary vote to be low and still win an election. With no strong minor party vote from the right, there is no strong preference flow back to the Coalition to make up for that low primary in TPP terms – that’s why the 1998 experience could not be repeated in 2007, and why the Coalition needed a higher primary vote than the ALP to even think about winning.

The beauty of the intertubes is that this type of thing can be easily and instantly recalled (and in Pearsons case, dismissed). Pearson’s original article can be found HERE and the demolition of it can be found HERE. That demolition contains a fairly large amount of info including how many seats One Nation preferences delivered and why Pearson was, and still appears to be, a complete dill.

This bloke seems like he will be a very busy boy over the next few years; trying to rewrite the history of the Howard governments defeat would be a fairly time consuming endeavor in itself, but trying to rewrite the history of his own journalistic output to boot…… well, there’s only 24 hours in a day Christopher.

The Washington Post recently ran a story on users of YouTube and other user-generated websites who have decided to challenge, rather than comply with, mass take down notices by large corporate copyright holders. 

Copyright allows for some uses that are “transformative” in nature.  Generally, comment or parody are considered transformative.  However, these types of works are susceptible to accusations of copyright violations which are actually surreptitious attempts to squash criticism.

Michelle Malkin, a popular blogger, said this was the case when her video criticizing rapper Akon for misogyny was removed from YouTube after a complaint from Universal Music Group.

“It was entirely obvious that trying to wipe off criticism from YouTube is what their claim was all about,” Malkin said. She sent YouTube a counternotice; Universal Music backed down, and the video went back up.

A new day, a new Newspoll and a new take on the old hyperbole.

Todays Exhibit A comes from good old Dennis over at the The Oz:

“The Coalition has stretched its commanding lead over Labor on the key vote-changing issues of the economy and national security.”The problem with these types of claims is that they can actually be statistically tested.

Either fortunately or unfortunately for Dennis (I have a suspicion which), we can’t test the national security issue for there aren’t enough observations to get a decent statistical grip. But we can test for how economic management changes the vote.

Newspoll runs two polling series on this economic management question, the first is “which party do you think would be best to handle the economy?”, but there are only 11 observations for that series, which also happens to be the question asked today.

The other polling series asks “Which leader do you think is more capable of handling Australia’s economy?” The difference between the results in these two series is nothing for the ALP, with both series returning the same results for similar dates, within the margin of error of each poll.

For the Coalition, the former question produces slightly lower results than the latter question. However, the first series also has a far larger amount of undecideds. So the second series, the “which leader is best able to handle…” series should have more sensitive voters in it, and that is reflected in the larger variation in the second series than the first. This is actually really good news. Variation increases testability.

If we head over here to Newspoll, and press “Display results” on the question of “Which leader do you think is more capable of handling Australia’s economy”, a lovely little table pops up containing 47 usable observations of data that can be tested against the relevant monthly Newspoll aggregate of primary votes for those dates.

First we’ll run a simple regression using the primary vote of the ALP as the dependent variable, and the “Which leader is more capable of handling the economy” results for the ALP as the independent variable .What we’ll essentially be measuring is how much does the primary vote of the ALP change for every one point increase in the number of people that believe that the ALP leader is better at managing the economy. What we expect to see is a positive relationship that is also statistically significant.

So running the regression we get:

What this tells us is that yes indeed, the ALP leader having a higher result in the “more capable” question does in fact walk hand in hand with a higher Labor primary vote. With a coefficient of 0.196, we can say that this result suggests that a 5 point increase in the “more capable” question leads to a 1 point increase in the primary vote. We can also say that this is highly statistically significant at less than the 1% level (with a p-value = 0.0014) and that the “More capable” results explain roughly 20% of the variation in the ALP primary vote figures.

Dennis, mate…..it’s alright you can breathe easy.

For the moment

If we do exactly the same thing with the Coalition results we get:

The first thing you might notice is that the coefficient on the “More Capable” variable is the wrong sign. This suggests that an increase in the “more capable” results for the Coalition actually leads to a decrease in the primary vote, the exact opposite of what was expected. However, the results are completely and utterly statistically insignificant (with the p-value= 0.86). Similarly, results of the “more capable” question don’t even explain 1%, or even 1/10^th of a percent of the variation in the Coalition primary vote.

So what does all this mean?

Well, it means that the ALP vote can rise or fall with big movements in the “more capable” answers. But since the ALP results didn’t move from last time in todays Newspoll question (stuck at 29), and since the answers for the ALP are historically the same in both polling series, we can say that todays poll is completely irrelevant as far as the ALP is concerned.

As for the Coalition, their results increased today from the last poll result (increasing from 51 to 53), a movement within the margin of error and hence not worth talking about to begin with. But if one felt compelled to talk about the results, the statistical evidence tells us that the Newspoll measures of the economy ARE NOT key vote changing issues for the Coalition, the answers to these questions DO NOT have any relationship with the primary vote of the Coalition, and that, if one were to stretch the absolute limits of credibility to infer something from the data, the best that could be said is “Better economic management more likely hurts the Coalitions primary vote than helps it”.

More stable minds would simply say “there is no relationship – period”, which is about the same that can be said of The Oz’s polling interpretation and reality at times.

I’ve been a bit slack on the comments over the last 2 days – sorry about that folks, been flat out.

The really dismal thing about elections, apart from being inundated with images of some of the most truly unphotogenic people in the country, would have to be the absolute fucktardery over polling that masquerades around as fact in opinion columns.

The latest cab off the rank is that savant psephologist, Christopher Pearson. On September 22, he wrote (if by wrote you mean ‘scrawled a random stream of consciousness from a parallel universe’) an article in The Australian with the humble title “To win the unwinnable poll”.

“Interesting”, I thought….. “Maybe a polemic on what the government needs to do”, I mused.

But alas, as one read through the piece it quickly became apparent that the article had much to be humble about.

The first line was a corker and really set the scene: “The Government is getting near the level of support it needs in the seats where it matters most.”

….which was just the first in a rather long line of WTF? moments that ensued.

We only have to look at the swings in the marginals identified in the quarterly Newspoll breakdown to clearly demonstrate this to be nothing more than an exercise in make believe.

The seats where the government needs support is in the marginals. The ALP have, according to the latest quarterly Newspoll breakdown, 50% of the primary vote in those marginals. That is a 9.2% primary vote swing to the ALP and an 8.3% two party preferred swing in those seats that are supposedly the ones that “matter most”, seats held by less than a 6% margin.

The ALP has an average of 2.3% more vote than it needs to take every single one of the least marginal of those marginal seats, let alone those seats with a margin well under 6%. For the government to be getting “near the level of support it needs in the seats where it matters most” , that swing to the ALP in the marginals needs to be halved – let alone the swing against the safe government seats likewise halving as well, simply to stop the government held seats on 6% – 7% buffers from falling.

After a bit of self indulgent navel gazing and chastising of other commentators for their apparent inability to understand reality, this electoral Man of Letters declared:

“It’s often forgotten that his victory in 1998 was achieved with a primary vote in the House of Representatives election of only 39.5 per cent and that Labor won in 1990 with a primary vote of 39.4 per cent. If the Coalition were to wage a dogged campaign concentrating on holding its marginal seats, it could win by maintaining its present primary vote if it also managed to cut Labor’s two-party preferred margin to about two points, as in 1998 when Labor led with 51 points to the Coalition’s 49 and still lost.”

What Christopher Pearson seems to have forgotten is that little thing called One Nation – just how one could forget One Nation is beyond me, but memory loss and delusion do seem to walk hand in hand in the political psychopathology stakes.

In 2007, a primary vote in the low forties will deliver the Coalition exactly nothing but the opposition benches, simply as a consequence of the minor party make up and vote share. The 1990 election quoted was memorable for the high 17.1% minor party primary vote – mostly the Democrats and the Greens, which forced 91 seats to be decided on preferences. Of those 91 seats, the Coalition gained 33, the ALP 57 and Others 1. That was simply a result of the ALP benefiting from a high preference flow from those minor parties – parties generally from the centre left, in an election where the environment was a dominant issue.

In the 1998 election, One Nation was the dominant minor party and being a party from the conservative side of politics, sent a majority of preferences back to the Coalition helping to push Howard over the line in a large number of seats. We can see the One Nation effect on the primary vote of the Coalition by simply graphing the primary vote swing of the monthly Newspoll aggregates (which is simply the difference between the Newspoll primary vote estimate and the primary vote obtained at the previous election).

The One Nation effect is marked and represents the period from the month when the One Nation party formed through to the 1998 election. The blue numbers at the top are the primary vote swing achieved at each election. If we do the same for the ALP primary vote swing we get:

There was little to no One Nation effect on the ALP primary vote. However, the ALP vote seemed to grow at the end of 1997, possibly as a reaction to the Coalitions handling of the One Nation saga. From the primary vote swings we can clearly see that the Coalition primary vote dropped substantially (-7.75%) compared to the small ALP rise (+1.34%). In 1998, the Coalition could win government with a small primary vote simply because the preference flows from One Nation were benefiting the Coalition compared to the ALP – leading to the Coalition winning 62 seats on preferences vs. the 35 seats the ALP won on preferences.We’ve modeled the One Nation effect many times before, and to readers here it is nothing new.

Unfortunately for Pearsons fantasies, preferences are currently flowing between 65-75% to the ALP if we look at the ACNielson and Morgan preference allocation distributions.

So no Christopher – the Coalition cannot win with a primary vote in the low forties in 2007 simply because of the lack of minor party support from the right. The ALP can win with a low primary because of the high minor party preference flow to them that is a function of the political composition of the minor party vote, but the Coalition simply cannot – so let us have no more of that horseshit eh?

The next piece of ignorance to emanate from the pages was this gem:

“In Western Australia, the two-party vote has moved from a 50-50 split to 51-49 in the Coalition’s favour, which would help deliver the Government Labor’s two marginal seats in Perth. In Queensland the two-party split moved from 54-46 in Labor’s favour to 52-48.“

If we use WA as an example to show why this is nothing but buffoonery of the most inane kind, in WA during the period from Quarter 2 to Quarter 3 2007, the governments primary vote swing has gone from -5.8% to -4.8%, the ALP primary vote swing has stayed the same at +5.3% and the ALP TPP swing has reduced from +5.4% to +4.4%.This would deliver the ALP the two Coalition marginals of Stirling and Hasluck on buffers of 2.4% and 2.6% respectively according to Antony Greens spiffy election calculator. For the government to gain the two ALP marginals, they need a swing TO them, not a swing AWAY from them. On current standing, the Coalition needs a 4.5% swing to them in WA between now and the election to pick up Swan, and a 5.2% swing to them between now and the election to pick up Cowan.

You see Christopher, it’s not about the 50/50 split on TPP that makes the difference, it’s the SWING that matters. In Qld, to give another example to beat the stupidity out of you with, a 52-48 split would represent a 9.1% TPP swing to the ALP. If this was uniform, the ALP would pick up 10 seats in Qld.

Yes, 10. From smallest to largest winning margin they would be Bowman, Dickson, Hinkler, Flynn, Petrie, Longman, Herbert, Blair, Moreton and Bonner.

So please, let us put this type of gross misunderstanding of polling results to bed as well.

Pearson continues:

“On these figures, a recapitulation of the Coalition’s victory in 1998 is quite on the cards.“

Only if you’re smoking crack Christopher.

Now remember folks, this article was printed in The Australian, the very newspaper that thundered in a self-indulgent hissyfit that “we understand Newspoll because we own it“. They declared that “THE measure of good journalism is objectivity and a fearless regard for truth“, before stating that “Not properly understanding how polls work gives our critics licence to project their own bias onto analysis of our reporting.”

Allowing columnists such as Christopher Pearson to produce articles like “To win the unwinnable poll”, makes a complete mockery of the standards of “objectivity and a fearless regard for truth” that the paper declares is so important to the measure of good journalism. Publishing such articles that, by any objective measure, fall victim to “Not properly understanding how polls work” undermines The Australians self declared superiority of polling analysis to the point of it verging sharply toward hypocrisy.

One doesn’t need to own Newspoll to understand the Yooniverse, but one certainly needs to have a modicum of understanding for the very basics of statistics and electoral history, to produce polling analysis that can be said to have even a mediocre relationship with observable reality. On this point, Christopher Pearson and consequently The Australian, fail.

If The Australian wishes for its political analysis to be seen as national best practice, then it needs to uphold a higher quality of journalistic standard and vigorously enforce stronger quality control over its published content. For as long as articles like Christopher Pearson’s “To win the unwinnable poll” are published by The Australian, the self-declaration on the superior quality of The Australians polling analysis will ring hollow.

The really dismal thing about elections, apart from being inundated with images of some of the most truly unphotogenic people in the country, would have to be the absolute fucktardery over polling that masquerades around as fact in opinion columns.

The latest cab off the rank is that savant psephologist, Christopher Pearson. On September 22, he wrote (if by wrote you mean ‘scrawled a random stream of consciousness from a parallel universe’) an article in The Australian with the humble title “To win the unwinnable poll”.

“Interesting”, I thought….. “Maybe a polemic on what the government needs to do”, I mused.

But alas, as one read through the piece it quickly became apparent that the article had much to be humble about.

The first line was a corker and really set the scene: “The Government is getting near the level of support it needs in the seats where it matters most.”

….which was just the first in a rather long line of WTF? moments that ensued.

We only have to look at the swings in the marginals identified in the quarterly Newspoll breakdown to clearly demonstrate this to be nothing more than an exercise in make believe.

The seats where the government needs support is in the marginals. The ALP have, according to the latest quarterly Newspoll breakdown, 50% of the primary vote in those marginals. That is a 9.2% primary vote swing to the ALP and an 8.3% two party preferred swing in those seats that are supposedly the ones that “matter most”, seats held by less than a 6% margin.

The ALP has an average of 2.3% more vote than it needs to take every single one of the least marginal of those marginal seats, let alone those seats with a margin well under 6%. For the government to be getting “near the level of support it needs in the seats where it matters most” , that swing to the ALP in the marginals needs to be halved – let alone the swing against the safe government seats likewise halving as well, simply to stop the government held seats on 6% – 7% buffers from falling.

After a bit of self indulgent navel gazing and chastising of other commentators for their apparent inability to understand reality, this electoral Man of Letters declared:

“It’s often forgotten that his victory in 1998 was achieved with a primary vote in the House of Representatives election of only 39.5 per cent and that Labor won in 1990 with a primary vote of 39.4 per cent. If the Coalition were to wage a dogged campaign concentrating on holding its marginal seats, it could win by maintaining its present primary vote if it also managed to cut Labor’s two-party preferred margin to about two points, as in 1998 when Labor led with 51 points to the Coalition’s 49 and still lost.”

What Christopher Pearson seems to have forgotten is that little thing called One Nation – just how one could forget One Nation is beyond me, but memory loss and delusion do seem to walk hand in hand in the political psychopathology stakes.

In 2007, a primary vote in the low forties will deliver the Coalition exactly nothing but the opposition benches, simply as a consequence of the minor party make up and vote share. The 1990 election quoted was memorable for the high 17.1% minor party primary vote – mostly the Democrats and the Greens, which forced 91 seats to be decided on preferences. Of those 91 seats, the Coalition gained 33, the ALP 57 and Others 1. That was simply a result of the ALP benefiting from a high preference flow from those minor parties – parties generally from the centre left, in an election where the environment was a dominant issue.

In the 1998 election, One Nation was the dominant minor party and being a party from the conservative side of politics, sent a majority of preferences back to the Coalition helping to push Howard over the line in a large number of seats. We can see the One Nation effect on the primary vote of the Coalition by simply graphing the primary vote swing of the monthly Newspoll aggregates (which is simply the difference between the Newspoll primary vote estimate and the primary vote obtained at the previous election).

The One Nation effect is marked and represents the period from the month when the One Nation party formed through to the 1998 election. The blue numbers at the top are the primary vote swing achieved at each election. If we do the same for the ALP primary vote swing we get:

There was little to no One Nation effect on the ALP primary vote. However, the ALP vote seemed to grow at the end of 1997, possibly as a reaction to the Coalitions handling of the One Nation saga. From the primary vote swings we can clearly see that the Coalition primary vote dropped substantially (-7.75%) compared to the small ALP rise (+1.34%). In 1998, the Coalition could win government with a small primary vote simply because the preference flows from One Nation were benefiting the Coalition compared to the ALP – leading to the Coalition winning 62 seats on preferences vs. the 35 seats the ALP won on preferences.We’ve modeled the One Nation effect many times before, and to readers here it is nothing new.

Unfortunately for Pearsons fantasies, preferences are currently flowing between 65-75% to the ALP if we look at the ACNielson and Morgan preference allocation distributions.

So no Christopher – the Coalition cannot win with a primary vote in the low forties in 2007 simply because of the lack of minor party support from the right. The ALP can win with a low primary because of the high minor party preference flow to them that is a function of the political composition of the minor party vote, but the Coalition simply cannot – so let us have no more of that horseshit eh?

The next piece of ignorance to emanate from the pages was this gem:

“In Western Australia, the two-party vote has moved from a 50-50 split to 51-49 in the Coalition’s favour, which would help deliver the Government Labor’s two marginal seats in Perth. In Queensland the two-party split moved from 54-46 in Labor’s favour to 52-48.“

If we use WA as an example to show why this is nothing but buffoonery of the most inane kind, in WA during the period from Quarter 2 to Quarter 3 2007, the governments primary vote swing has gone from -5.8% to -4.8%, the ALP primary vote swing has stayed the same at +5.3% and the ALP TPP swing has reduced from +5.4% to +4.4%.This would deliver the ALP the two Coalition marginals of Stirling and Hasluck on buffers of 2.4% and 2.6% respectively according to Antony Greens spiffy election calculator. For the government to gain the two ALP marginals, they need a swing TO them, not a swing AWAY from them. On current standing, the Coalition needs a 4.5% swing to them in WA between now and the election to pick up Swan, and a 5.2% swing to them between now and the election to pick up Cowan.

You see Christopher, it’s not about the 50/50 split on TPP that makes the difference, it’s the SWING that matters. In Qld, to give another example to beat the stupidity out of you with, a 52-48 split would represent a 9.1% TPP swing to the ALP. If this was uniform, the ALP would pick up 10 seats in Qld.

Yes, 10. From smallest to largest winning margin they would be Bowman, Dickson, Hinkler, Flynn, Petrie, Longman, Herbert, Blair, Moreton and Bonner.

So please, let us put this type of gross misunderstanding of polling results to bed as well.

Pearson continues:

“On these figures, a recapitulation of the Coalition’s victory in 1998 is quite on the cards.“

Only if you’re smoking crack Christopher.

Now remember folks, this article was printed in The Australian, the very newspaper that thundered in a self-indulgent hissyfit that “we understand Newspoll because we own it“. They declared that “THE measure of good journalism is objectivity and a fearless regard for truth“, before stating that “Not properly understanding how polls work gives our critics licence to project their own bias onto analysis of our reporting.”

Allowing columnists such as Christopher Pearson to produce articles like “To win the unwinnable poll”, makes a complete mockery of the standards of “objectivity and a fearless regard for truth” that the paper declares is so important to the measure of good journalism. Publishing such articles that, by any objective measure, fall victim to “Not properly understanding how polls work” undermines The Australians self declared superiority of polling analysis to the point of it verging sharply toward hypocrisy.

One doesn’t need to own Newspoll to understand the Yooniverse, but one certainly needs to have a modicum of understanding for the very basics of statistics and electoral history, to produce polling analysis that can be said to have even a mediocre relationship with observable reality. On this point, Christopher Pearson and consequently The Australian, fail.

If The Australian wishes for its political analysis to be seen as national best practice, then it needs to uphold a higher quality of journalistic standard and vigorously enforce stronger quality control over its published content. For as long as articles like Christopher Pearson’s “To win the unwinnable poll” are published by The Australian, the self-declaration on the superior quality of The Australians polling analysis will ring hollow.