Did the polls get this election wrong?
American polling guru Nate Silver calls it the first rule of interpreting survey results: almost all polling errors occur in the opposite direction to commentators' predictions.
Silver explained this rule in 2017, when many observers expected French far-right leader Marine Le Pen to do better than polls suggested in her country's presidential election. Instead, it was the centrist Emmanuel Macron who outperformed the polls.
This phenomenon struck again in Saturday's federal election. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton repeatedly told reporters that the Coalition's internal research was rosier than public polls as he forecast Coalition victories in seats that weren't on anyone's radar.
Some believed him, perhaps persuaded by the Coalition's surprise victory in 2019 and Donald Trump's repeated ability to outperform his poll results. Trump's success has popularised the notion there are 'shy' conservative voters who are not willing to share their political opinions with pollsters.
In fact, the Australian polls published were off, but not the way Dutton hoped. They underestimated the scale of Labor's victory.
'Every poll underestimated Labor on two-party preferred and primary votes, and overestimated the Coalition,' says pollster Jim Reed, who runs the Resolve Political Monitor published by this masthead. 'Some polls got it really wrong and others slightly wrong.'
Having analysed the performance of all the major pollsters, Reed is satisfied with how Resolve did. The two most accurate polls in two-party-preferred terms, he says, were Resolve and Redbridge, whose results were published in the News Corp tabloids.
The final Resolve and Redbridge polls, published last week, showed Labor recording 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote and the Coalition 47 per cent.
The current count has Labor on 55 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, with the Coalition on 45 per cent, putting both Resolve and Redbridge within their margin of error.
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