In recent decades, the headline figure which has summarised the results of most Australian polling has been the Two-Party Preferred between Labor and the Coalition.

The recent surge of One Nation into second place has fractured this historic method of poll analysis. And since we have limited information on how preferences will flow from the Liberals and Nationals towards One Nation in the lower house, distilling polling results to a Labor-One Nation 2PP preferred result is problematic.

Asking poll respondents how they would allocate preferences is no silver bullet – there is decades of evidence showing these to be less reliable than past preference flows. 

Add to this the rupture in the Coalition, which may or may not be permanent and we believe that, in order to provide true insight,  federal polling now needs to move away from the binary model of Two-Party Preferred.

Starting with Today’s release in Capital Brief, DemosAU will be providing overall seat estimates as its headline figure replacing Two-Party Preferred. Seat Projections will provide a fuller picture of the national state of play across all parties. 

DemosAU will be providing its usual MRP (multilevel regression with poststratification) model of federal electoral support every quarter – provided first to Capital Brief. This will provide a first preference and Two-candidate preferred estimate in every seat.  

For the conventional rim weighted polls between MRPs, DemosAU will provide an overall seat projection. This seat projection is based on the following analysis;

• Applying a uniform national swing from the most recent MRP to the current rim-weighted poll.
• Using a Monte Carlo probability analysis to arrive at a seat range for each significant party and others.

As a result the current seat estimate gives the observer a more insightful read on the state of federal electoral trends. If a hypothetical federal election was held last week, Labor would be returned with its large majority mostly intact, while One Nation would have likely formed the Federal Opposition.

Individual seat analysis will be limited to the full MRP each quarter, the seat projections in our monthly polling is designed only to give an overall read on federal electoral support.

Finally, to overcome the limited preference flow data outside of Labor-Coalition two-candidate preferred contests DemosAU has already updated its recent preference assumptions in recent months for today’s poll using an analysis of Senate Preferences. These assumptions will be refined as new information comes to hand. 

As the federal electoral contest evolves, DemosAU will use more sophisticated analysis to deliver the more powerful insight required to give observers the full picture.