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@Northern (cos I don't want to quote the whole thing
You can do a nationally representative poll with 1,000, ideally 2,000 with a margin of error o 3-5% (you can do 500, but the margin of error because too large for me).
The issues are threefold for me
- Profiling of base - for e.g YouGov constantly hilariously underestimates Labour support , likewise Opinium seems to overstate it.
- How the press then report polls. YG currently have Labour at 15% in the EU elections when the average of all other polls have them at 25%. But then what is the poll that's on the front pages?
- No one seems to think about how the polls relate to the electoral map. In 2015 the polls on the day had Tories 34%, Labour 33%. Tories got 36, Labour 29%. All inside margin of error.
But because it's amalgamated at a national level, it failed to notice that the Lib Dems haemorrhaged support to Conservatives specifically in the South and West and coughed up a load of seats that gave them an unexpected majority. It matters less what the numbers in the poll are, but where they are
This is spot on and applies equally in Australia. Labor got hammered in Queensland and that's a very different demographic to NSW for example. The polls completely missed this.
I don't know a whole lot about Australian politics.
I had to think about it about a few months ago when I heard Tom O'Brien's interview withTad Tietze on the Alpha to Omega podcast about what Tietze sees as the positive side of anti-politics, and there was some discussion about the detachment of politicians from Australian society. In the middle of the second episode Tietze gets into the appeal of Rudd (as a politician who had been able to ride the anti-politics wave).
On Hawke I found this 2017 interview on the Living The Dream podcast with Liz Humphrys who did her PhD on The Accord really interesting:
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