Minor parties went pop

Saturday, 28 February 2015 21:15 | Written by Graham Young

The success of Labor in wooing smaller party voters is quite marked in a longitudinal analysis of our Queensland election poll results.

While there was no statistically significant movement in voting intention across the entire sample, there was significant movement within the votes of those voting for minor parties or independents.

The LNP was running a “just vote one” strategy, while the ALP was urging voters to “number every square”.

The preferential voting strategy was a success for the ALP. I can’t find official Queensland Electoral Commission results for it, but anecdotally I understand around 80% plus of Greens allocated preferences, almost invariably to the ALP.

While the LNP was ahead on first preferences in 51 seats, when you compare them to the ALP + 80% Greens factor, they were only ahead in 44 seats. Which means (as I’ve been saying all along) that Independents and minor parties were the deciding factor.

Whoever did better with these voters out of the ALP and the LNP would most likely win a close election.

You can call the campaign a draw. In its first poll of the campaign Newspoll got nothing statistically distinguishable from its final poll, or the election result, when you look at first preferences.

Newspoll Before After 15 02 28

But Newspoll doesn’t look at preferences, using the preference distribution from last election to determine the two-party preferred vote.

So while their two-party preference vote didn’t change, if there was a change, they weren’t going to detect it.

But we do ask how people are going to preference, and this is the result we got comparing our first poll with our second.

Minor Party Preferences Before After

The ALP won the argument over "to preference or not to preference". The only voters more likely to “Just vote one” at the end of the election were LNP voters. All other voters were more inclined to “Number every square”.

The LNP might argue that if their appeal had worked they might have won, and if they were ahead of the ALP/Greens alliance in 44 seats, then they may have just been the favourite to form a minority government.

But to argue that they have to claim that they knew more of those minor party voters than the voters appear to have known themselves.

The ALP appeal to put the LNP last and number every square seems to have worked.

And, as we will see in the qualitative analysis to follow, the LNP let the ALP off the hook on the economy.

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