Comment on Why are the Populist Right Surging in Australia?
eureka@aussie.zone 1 week agoBut the right/left vote is not shifting that much.
I haven’t looked deep into it, but the polling for two-party preferred vote (which should approximate left-right) has been shifting. The Wikipedia summary chart of ALP:LNP has pretty consistently shifted from around 58 : 42 last June, to around 53 : 47 - a large shift. If we naively extrapolate the trend, the two-party preferred vote would be tied in around three or four months.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Yeah, maybe. But there are a few issues. One is that some regression to the mean is just expected. The last election was an exceedingly good result for Labor.
Another is that there are issues with the data because of the irrationality of One Nation voters. Rationally, we would expect nearly every One Nation vote to flow back to the LNP, but evidence suggests it is actually much more evenly mixed.
There’s also the fact that One Nation’s vote is not nearly as evenly spread as the Coalition and Labor’s votes are. Total percentage may be high, but it’s very unlikely to translate into an equivalent number of seats.