Swings and misses: party's polling debacle in election 2025

The Australian

23-05-2025

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In the Liberals' war room at Brisbane's swanky W Hotel on May 3 election night, it wasn't long after the vote count started that the catastrophic reality began to dawn.
The party's internal polling had been terribly wrong, and the recriminations began almost immediately.
Tucked away in the small enclave hidden from the party faithful assembled in the main ballroom, Liberal Party president John Olsen challenged Coalition campaign director Andrew Hirst about the accuracy of the Freshwater Strategy polling.
The final of 15 Freshwater tracking polls delivered to senior campaigners on the Wednesday night before the election showed a swing to Peter Dutton's Liberals in some NSW and Victorian marginal seats of about 5 per cent.
At that stage Dutton believed he could still win 10 Labor seats and push Anthony Albanese into minority government.
But on election night, Dutton was upstairs in a hotel suite with his family, closest supporters and staff, as Olsen demanded Hirst explain how Freshwater and the party had got it so wrong.
Olsen denies the head-to-head got heated, and rejects suggestions Hirst asked to take the conversation out of the room. 'We certainly had a conversation on polling, you wouldn't have to be Einstein to work that out,' Olsen tells The Australian. 'But it was not a heated discussion.'
Peter Dutton, and his family, at the W Hotel in Brisbane on election night, as he delivers his concession speech. Picture: Adam Head
Senior party figures, from Dutton down, had been told on Tuesday that Paterson in NSW, held by Labor's Meryl Swanson on a wafer-thin margin of 2.6 per cent, was swinging to the Liberals.
The Freshwater polling – according to people who saw it – showed the Liberals' Laurence Antcliff leading Swanson 55-45 per cent, an eight-point two-party-preferred swing to the opposition.
But the actual result was almost the opposite; Swanson won comfortably, 57 per cent to Antcliff's 43 per cent.
'The polling was a huge problem … it was way out. If we'd have known (the truth), we would have changed course overnight,' one senior Liberal source tells The Australian.
Petrie delivers a shock
Across town, at the Bracken Ridge Tavern in Brisbane's bayside, Liberal National Party MP Luke Howarth was in shock.
Howarth had no inkling he was going to lose his outer-suburban electorate of Petrie until the votes started to roll in. He had been repeatedly reassured by friend and close ally Dutton – emboldened by the flawed Freshwater polling in his own neighbouring seat of Dickson and nationwide – that Howarth would be the last Coalition MP to be defeated.
Petrie is a microcosm of what went wrong across the country for the Liberals; one of 12 seats swept away in the national swing to Labor that delivered Albanese an increased majority, tossed Dutton out of Dickson – and politics – demolished the opposition and, this week, fractured the Coalition agreement.
Ex-LNP MP Luke Howarth this week, photographed in the Brisbane seat of Petrie, which he lost at the May 3 election. Picture: Glenn Hunt
Five of those seats were in Queensland – historically the Liberals' unassailable fortress – including Petrie, which stretches from Brisbane's outer northern suburbs to Redcliffe on Moreton Bay and north to the growth corridor of North Lakes and Burpengary East.
In a frank and revealing interview with The Australian, two weeks after the party's crushing loss, Howarth shares an eight-point list he's written titled 'what went wrong'. The only other person he has sent it to? Dutton.
Errors aplenty
Top of the list of errors was one of Howarth's own; the decision to erect seven joint billboards with Dutton's face next to his on the border of their two seats, and to hand out joint how-to-vote cards.
He didn't realise how unpopular Dutton was, and how effective Labor's personal attack on the leader was proving to be.
'I didn't stop to think how him being leader would impact me. And it impacted me in a bad way,' Howarth says. 'The joint how-to-vote cards and the joint billboards really damaged me.'
A 2025 how to vote card featuring Luke Howarth, Peter Dutton and Terry Young.
But his second campaign gripe is one shared from party president Olsen down through the ranks.
'Polling all wrong and being told that our seats were not in play,' Howarth texted Dutton.
Howarth says Dutton told him Petrie would be safe, and that in the lead-up to the May 3 election, he should help the LNP's long-shot efforts to unseat Labor minister Anika Wells in nearby Lilley.
'To be fair, I think Peter thought it would be an unlikely win but it would make Labor sandbag it and drag resources away from Dickson and Petrie,' Howarth says.
Again, blame is cast at Freshwater. Sources say a Freshwater benchmark poll in Lilley in March – before any Coalition resources were spent in the seat – had Labor in front 53-47 two-party preferred, a swing of 8 per cent to the LNP on 2022 results.
The pollsters are believed to have interpreted that result as 'no chance' of an LNP win.
Liberal Party president John Olsen. 'We certainly had a conversation on polling, you wouldn't have to be Einstein to work that out. But it was not a heated discussion.' Picture: supplied
But Howarth, a prodigious fundraiser, and his local campaign team, including former LNP head of corporate relations Micheal Leighton, took Dutton's request seriously and got to work, amassing a war chest of $1.7m in the months before the election.
The Petrie campaign was so cashed up that after Howarth spent about $634,000 on his own seat, he spread the largesse at the request of campaign headquarters in Parramatta and Brisbane.
Howarth poured $350,000 into Lilley, and shared about another $400,000 between other Coalition seats, including Dan Tehan's Wannon in Victoria, LNP-held Sunshine Coast seats where Climate 200-backed independents were running, the Greens-held Brisbane and Ryan the LNP was trying to win back, and the Nationals' Wide Bay in regional Queensland.
Wells won Lilley with a 4 per cent two-party-preferred swing to her, increasing her margin to 14.52 per cent.
Howarth still has hundreds of thousands of dollars left in his campaign account.
He lost Petrie to Labor's Emma Comer by 2600 votes, suffering a 5.55 per cent swing against him, with the two-party-preferred margin finishing 51-49 per cent.
No one saw it coming.
Not even Labor, which only publicly endorsed Comer days before Albanese announced the election, and invested little in her campaign.
And certainly not Dutton, Howarth says.
'In previous elections, Peter always had a good feel of what people were thinking, got it right, and knew what was going to happen on election day,' he says. 'In 2025, he was blindsided by what his team and polling was telling him.'
Dickson debacle
Freshwater polls during the campaign showed Dutton was ahead in Dickson. The party didn't poll Petrie, and Howarth didn't push for it, partly because he had no opponent to ask voters about until the last minute, but mostly because he was reassured he was not at risk.
Luke Howarth and Peter Dutton. Picture: supplied
A senior campaigner says the tracking polling showed the party was likely to hold Leichhardt, in far north Queensland, and had a chance of winning Ipswich-based Blair from Labor.
If they had known the true state of affairs 'we would have put it all in (Queensland LNP-held marginals) Petrie, Longman and Forde', the campaigner says.
While Howarth says he has no regrets about sharing his campaign cash – 'it's good to help other people and those people were my colleagues, and good people' – he says the Freshwater polling for the party was 'completely inaccurate'.
If he and others had accurate information, they would have changed strategy away from targeting Labor marginals to sandbagging held seats.
'If I go back a few months ago, I said, 'what can I do to help the team?'. And the message was, 'help out Lilley, let's have a go at Lilley',' Howarth says. 'We've got a chance to give him (Dutton) that one back. It might be a long shot, but there's a good shot there.
'But the whole polling was wrong … The messaging from the campaign and the leader's office was 'we're going to win additional seats, there's no way the Labor Party can increase their majority, they will go backwards into minority government and that's the best they can hope for'.
'I don't think the leader or his office had any idea what was coming – clearly – because they didn't think he'd lose his own seat. They didn't think I'd lose my seat.'
Luke Howarth farewells voters on May 15, sharing a photo of his family from 2013 after he was elected, after conceding he'd lost his seat.
Post-mortems
Olsen says the accuracy of the polling will be probed by the party's 'full and transparent' review of the federal election campaign.
Campaign sources have confirmed the results of the voice referendum were factored into the Freshwater polling, as well as voters' housing status – whether they were renting, had a mortgage, or owned their homes outright.
Other senior strategists point out that Freshwater's internal polling for the LNP accurately forecast its October Queensland election win.
Freshwater Strategy declined to comment to The Australian, and pollster and director Mike Turner is legally prevented from talking because he's still under contract with the party.
Coalition and Labor campaigners say both parties' internal research was showing there was a high number of undecided voters until weeks before the election, and those voters ended up backing Labor.
In a piece for the Australian Financial Review published online the afternoon after the election night shock, Turner explained how Freshwater's poll for that publication underestimated Labor's final two-party-preferred vote, pointing to three factors, including the late swing. 'First, polling appears to have overestimated Labor 'defectors' to the Coalition. Particularly, those who voted no at the voice referendum,' Turner wrote.
'Early indications suggest that 'Labor-no' voters just didn't switch over to the Coalition in the big numbers estimated.'
Freshwater did not choose seats to poll, nor which Coalition policies should have been put before focus groups.
Fatal policy
The Australian understands that by the time the Coalition's deeply unpopular ban on Canberra-based public servants working from home was focus group-tested by Freshwater, the damage had been done.
A senior Liberal source says that when opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume announced in a speech to the Menzies Research Centre in early March that a Coalition government would order bureaucrats back to work in the office full-time, she 'got excited'.
Hume had made the announcement on the fly, without it being official policy, the senior Liberal source says.
But Hume expressly denies that suggestion, and her spokeswoman says both the policy and the speech went through 'all the usual policy approval processes', including through Dutton's office.
Regardless of how the idea was born, instead of immediately killing it off and sparking accusations of a party split over policy, Hume's senior colleagues decided it was 'benign'.
'It got away a bit, that issue,' the senior Liberal source concedes.
Opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume during the campaign. Picture: Monique Harmer
By the time it was put before the focus groups, and the feedback was 'negative', it had already had a 'catastrophic' impact on the vote, particularly in the outer-suburban electorates such as Petrie.
It ultimately took a month for Dutton to walk back the work from home announcement.
Missed opportunities
Howarth says it wasn't just the public service policy that was poorly communicated by campaign headquarters and Dutton's office. He says the Coalition's super-for-housing plan and its bold nuclear power strategy were not sold well enough, and the attacks on Albanese were simply not effective.
Howarth says the party did not capitalise on Albanese and Labor's broken promise on stage three tax cuts, and says he advocated running a negative campaign accusing the Prime Minister of being untrustworthy.
'I was vocal to the leader at the time and said 'this is bullshit, we shouldn't be voting for it'.
'(I was told) 'If you don't like it, you can resign as shadow minister',' Howarth recalls.
He says it was particularly galling when just before the election, the opposition decided to oppose the tax cuts in Labor's March budget.
Senior campaigners are also critical of Hirst's Parramatta-based campaign headquarters for failing to deliver strong enough negative ads against the PM, and for not pushing back hard enough against Labor's claims the nuclear policy would cost $600bn.
'We had him on the mat for a period of time, we just didn't finish it off,' the senior Liberal source says. 'The Labor Party are better campaigners and they're just more brazen, to the point of fabrication (in their ads).'
Senior campaign sources acknowledge that while some Coalition MPs may have been misled by the internal polling, others were complacent.
Some 'thought it was in the f. king bag' while others were just 'very lazy', two senior campaign sources say.
They're both careful to separate Howarth from those MPs, saying he worked 'night and day, seven days a week'.
But Howarth himself acknowledges in hindsight that he didn't take Comer seriously enough as an opponent.
'The Petrie Labor candidate was preselected seven weeks ago, was new to the electorate, and had zero $ and little signage,' he wrote in his dot-point analysis to Dutton.
'I myself did NOT take her as a threat. I should have realised despite (the polling) I could still lose a traditional bellwether seat.'
Howarth has not ruled out another tilt at Petrie in three years.
Peter Dutton conceding defeat. Picture: Patrick Hamilton
Back in the Coalition war room on election night in Brisbane, the party's top strategists were still reeling as they watched Dutton on television take the stage in the next room to graciously congratulate Albanese and Dickson winner Ali France on their victories.
Hirst appeared taken aback. He hadn't been warned by Dutton that he was about to concede.
Sarah Elks
Senior Reporter
Sarah Elks is a senior reporter for The Australian in its Brisbane bureau, focusing on investigations into politics, business and industry. Sarah has worked for the paper for 15 years, primarily in Brisbane, but also in Sydney, and in Cairns as north Queensland correspondent. She has covered election campaigns, high-profile murder trials, and natural disasters, and was named Queensland Journalist of the Year in 2016 for a series of exclusive stories exposing the failure of Clive Palmer's Queensland Nickel business. Sarah has been nominated for four Walkley awards. Got a tip? [e-mail]; GPO Box 2145 Brisbane QLD 4001
@sarahelks
Sarah Elks