The Coalition two-party preferred vote is now above the long-term average for a party to win a majority of seats and thereby form a majority government, according to Guardian Australia’s poll of polls.
With a week to go, the model shows – with more than 95% confidence – that the Coalition’s two-party preferred vote on 14 June passed above 49.1% and has improved since. This is the first time the model has clearly suggested the Coalition is likely to form a majority government if an election were held today.
Projecting forward to the election on Saturday, the result will be in the vicinity of a Coalition two-party preferred vote of 50.71% (±2.31%). This means there is a 95% chance that the election result would be between 48.34% and 53.02%.
It is too uncertain to call the result based on the polling data available, but with the current trend a Coalition win looks the most likely. This greater uncertainty simply reflects that without the final week of polling data it’s harder to accurately predict what public opinion will be in a week’s time.
A caveat to these estimates is that the two-party preferred vote that the pollsters are publishing may be significantly off. The information used to distribute preferences by the pollsters may not account well for the large number of voters who have abandoned the Coalition, not for the Labor party or the Greens, but instead for other parties and independents. It is unknown how these voters may distribute their preferences, which is crucial to the national result.
Coalition primary vote, September 2015 onwards
As with all elections, each seat being contested will be different and the swing is never uniform. Analysis of the betting markets on individual seats finds a Coalition victory likely. The two-party preferred vote is a good predictor of seat share nevertheless. What remains to be seen is how the distribution of preferences fall on election day.
