Palmer on 0.3

Seeing Clive on Insiders this morning reminded me that I have not looked at his vote share for some time. So here it is.

From its peak at 6.7 per cent of the national vote share, 0.3 per cent is a substantial decline.

Notes on the Beta model I use for tracking Palmer United can be found at the bottom of this page.

Aggregated polling chart bonanza

The headline for today's Newspoll is unchanged on the previous fortnight: 53 to 47 per cent two-party preferred in the Coalition's favour. The big change today was in the attitudinal polling, with both leaders taking a hit.

Malcolm Turnbull: Satisfied 52 (-8), Dissatisfied 30 (+8)
Bill Shorten: Satisfied 23 (-3), Dissatisfied 61 (+4)

The Bayesian aggregation has flat-lined with this latest data point from Newspoll. We are estimating that the Coalition has 54.5 per cent of the two-party preferred vote. 

Across all of our models, we have similar message of plateauing in the TPP support levels for the Coalition.

In terms of the primary votes, our estimates (assuming that house effects across pollsters sum to zero) are as follows. Both the Coalition and Labor have flat-lined. The Greens are much as they have been since Turnbull's ascension (about 1.5 points down than where they were in the latter Abbott months).

The Other model above includes the Palmer United Party. Given Clive Palmer's recent financial troubles, a quick look at the stand-alone Palmer model follows.The "Beta" in the title of this chart is a reference to the beta-distribution, which the model uses.

At the height of its influence, Palmer was more than half of the Other party vote. Now, at 0.5 per cent of the primary vote share, my guess is that the Palmer United Party would not win a seat in either House at the next Election, should these polling figures persist.

Moving to the aggregated attitudinal polling.

Charting the collapse of the Palmer United Party

There was a time when the Palmer United Party (PUP) looked like a force to be reckoned with. It commanded 6.5 per cent of the primary vote, a seat in the House of Representatives, and Senate seats for Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. But since then, the PUP share of the primary vote has fallen dramatically.

For those who are interested in these things, I aggregated the Palmer primary vote polls using a Beta-walk model. The Beta-walk model follows.

model {

    #### -- observational model
    for(poll in 1:NUMPOLLS) { # for each poll result - rows
        adjusted_poll[poll] <- walk[pollDay[poll]] + houseEffect[house[poll]]
        palmerVotes[poll] ~ dbin(adjusted_poll[poll], n[poll])
    }

    #### -- temporal model (a daily walk where this today is much like yesterday)
    tightness <- 50000 # tightness of fit parameter
    for(day in 2:PERIOD) { # rows
        binomial[day] <- walk[day-1] * tightness
        walk[day] ~ dbeta(binomial[day], tightness - binomial[day])
    }

    ## -- weakly informative priors for first day in the temporal model
    alpha ~ dunif(1, 1500)
    walk[1] ~ dbeta(alpha, 10000-alpha)

    #### -- sum-to-zero constraints on house effects
    for(house in 2:HOUSECOUNT) { # for each house ...
        houseEffect[house] ~ dnorm(0, pow(0.1, -2))
    }
    houseEffect[1] <- -sum(houseEffect[2:HOUSECOUNT])
}

I did not include Palmer United in my primary vote models because Newspoll does not publish a primary vote estimate for Palmer United. Newspoll includes Palmer United in its other parties count.