http://blogs.crikey.com.au/electioncentral/2009/03/20/borg-cant-be-sold-to-brisbane-nor-bligh-to-beatties-battlers/comment-page-1/#comment-3273

So, your two assertions:
“Labor has lost 10.3% of its primary vote in Brisbane according to Galaxy. Of that, about 2 or 3% has gone to The Greens.”
Is that the same as your previous
“…a big chunk of the urban base Labor relied on is fleeing at a frightening rate of knots — parked with the Greens”
that I was referring to, or does the latter, somehwat more impressive claim, rely on different intelligence to the modest Galaxy gleanings?

They are, in fact, a minor party, and don’t loom large in most voters’ thinking.

In addition, we know that there’s a lot of volatility and fluidity in the vote from these sources – the “might change mind” questions from last week’s Galaxy poll, the movement Graham Young’s picked up in his polling, and both the internal ALP polling and what can be inferred from their campaign tactics over the last week.

Labor has lost 10.3% of its primary vote in Brisbane according to Galaxy. Of that, about 2 or 3% has gone to The Greens. That bumps their Brisbane vote up to about 11% overall, and if Labor is just ahead or just behind instead of well ahead in a range of seats, and the exhaust rate is higher – as the leaked polling shows and as the ALP was picking up prior to the election being called – then there are really big problems potentially.

The implications for Indooro are almost nil because the LNP will poll first, and Ronan would need somewhere near 35%. If you take The Greens’ vote in Indooro last time as their baseline, it’s the worst in comparable inner city seats @ 16% odd. A personal vote couldn’t be worth more than 2 or 3% under normal circs, and if you’re generous perhaps you could predict 5% – which would leave Lee at just over 20% – below The Greens’ primary in Mt Cootha and South Brisbane.

The ALP could manage 25% running the proverbial yellow dog.

Odds are, therefore, that Lee comes third. I don’t see him picking up any significant numbers of LNP votes with the general swing in their favour.

I wouldn’t discount a bigger swing to the LNP than the 3% ish they need to be in a very good position to win the seat.

With South Brisbane, Anna Bligh quite frankly has more worries than whether she turns up to a forum in her own electorate.

Lest this upset the ALP partisans here, for the same reason I was not too upset to see Howard defeated, and said so prior to that election here and at Tim Blair’s. (Of course, I hope that, if elected, Springborg proves more capable that the utter cretins on Krudd’s team of brainless wastrels, but that’s another issue!)

MarkL
Canberra

why would Indooroopilly be home and hosed for the Greens, just because a small but significant slice of left-Labor voters is prone to swing between the two parties?

… I was extrapolating from Mark’s possibly knowledgable ( remember, he had the scoop on the Green’s preference maneuvre ) assertion :”a big chunk of the urban base Labor relied on is fleeing at a frightening rate of knots “….
Mark is usually parsimonius with hyperbolic rhetoric, so I took (a) his insider status and (b) his fabulously florid use of ‘big’,'fleeing’, and “frightening rate of knots” to mean that, well, the swing is on from labor to green, and in the indooripilly context that parses to: Ronan (green, the flee-ee) should be home and hosed, urban labor voters ( the flee-ers) being the encumbent majority species there, and ‘a big chunk’ of them going his way being exactly what Ronan’s plan has been. If Mark’s semi-quantitaive assertion is accurate, then I don’t see the conclusion I drew (there’s that word again, it always seems to co-locate with ronan) as at all controversial.
As you know I have the greatest respect for your poitical skills and accumen ( well, I think we agree on some things, how much more respectful respect can ya get?) but I’m having difficulty with your ‘small but significant’ as concept: do you mean ‘significant’ in it’s non-numerical connotation, as in influential, or is there a statistical quanta ‘small but significant’, the straw that broke the camels back, the tipping point, as it were? How big is it? 5% of the total electorate?
You’ll know why I’m interested. Think what a “small but significant” cohort like that, say 5%, could do here in south brisbane, based on 06 numbers, if it was evident as a swing greenwards from both the major’s constituencies: Anna would be going to preferences, Greens would be #2, and that great unknown, tory preferences, would be counted for a change. Depending how many spoil, and how many go green ( I think we can discount the Tory1/Labor2 species), that scenario could be very interesting. But it won’t happen, the Borgias assiduously avoided letting anything like that get set up, and the local branch greens were trapped by their head offices’ decision. After all, it might have led to a minority tory gov’t, with greens as BOP. No one wants that, even the greens it seems, otherwise they wouldn’t have cut off any chance of adult talking with the tories about what them strongly directing preferences greenwards could do, run dead as it were. Well that’s not entoirely true, the greens are interested in the BOP, but obviously only if that green is Ronan. Which if Marks apparent quanification is correct and applies to Indooripilly, could happen.

But while the campaign has been boredom incarnated, the electorate is exceptionally unpredictable. The outcome could be anything from a very narrow Labor win through a hung parliament to a small LNP majority.

Oh Mark. Reverting to your bad, old habit of Norman May trilogy race-calling again. Dear me.

The election may be hard to call. But whats moving the electorate is an open book, from this distance. (Admittedly I know very little about QLD apart from what I read in the papers.)

When the polling margin of error exceeds the probably margin of victory then elections will always be “hard to call”. UNdoubtedly such factors as voting systems, preference allocations and seat distributions will significantly effect the political outcome.

But we as social scientists are primarily interested in the change in voter sentiment, not the bureaucracy of power. The former is after all, the point of trying to understand the citizen.

What one should be looking for is the direction, magnitude and volatility of swing a fair way out from any likely election. This is a reliable index of momentum, which leaders and campaigns can do little or nothing to arrest.

In the case of the current QLD election it is obvious to me that psephological momentum favours the LNP on account of the simultaneous recessionary phase of the economic cycle and electoral swing.

UNdoubtedly the reformation of the LNP has helped the Right-wing forces. Party unity goes beyond program policy or politician personality. Disunity smells of death.