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Saturday, April 9, 2022

Polls before the election is called

My guess is that the next Federal election will be called this weekend, next weekend or possibly the weekend after, with the House dissolved on the following Monday and the election on a Saturday 33 days after that. This would see the election on either 7, 14 or 21 May 2022. For context, the 2019 Federal election was on Saturday 18 May.

All of the published opinion polls in 2022 have the Coalition well behind Labor. They all point to a sizeable Labor majority following the election. 










 

The critical question after the polling failure in 2019: can we have confidence in the polls in 2022? In 2019, the polls were out by two and a half percentage points. At the moment, the polls would need to be out by around five percentage points, for the Coalition to have an even chance at winning.

Nonetheless, I expect the polls will tighten a little during an election campaign. Even so, the Coalition would need to see something like a two and half percentage point tightening and a repeated two and half point polling error just to have an even chance of winning the next election. I think this is fairly unlikely, but not impossible.

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