What should we make of the Voice referendum polling?

Whilst the mortgage belt burns Albo worries about The Voice instead

What an insightful article. The master tacticians of the Yes campaign have got this. Just wait out those awful no voting oiks.
By sharing their wisdom and virtue, our elites will lead them to the light.
Then they will smite the unbelievers with the date of the referendum.

“The No campaign is peaking now.”

Of course it is, because the mortgage reset awaiting many households, along with increasingly terrifying bills for big items like home insurance and electricity, all to be dealt with by real incomes which continue to fall (as illustrated by today’s ABS release) and with no assistance from the now abolished Low and Middle Income Tax Offset, will fill the hearts of voters with sweetness and light and they will be warmly receptive to the tidal wave of pro-Voice b/s which is coming their way.

As to what the private polling is saying, if the government’s private polling on the Voice is more favourable than the public polls, including the latest from Resolve (obviously another part of the vast right wing conspiracy……) –

https://theconversation.com/labor-albanese-and-the-voice-slide-in-resolve-poll-fadden-byelection-preference-flows-211206

I would not want to see how strident and desperate Albanese and other leading lights of the yes case would become if the private polling was less favourable.

This “YES vote yet to peak” line sounds like imagination to me. The YES vote peaked when there was very little known about the referendum question and little public discussion. Its backers, beginning with the PM, were big on emotion and comparisons with the 1967 vote that removed Indigenous Australians from the Constitution.

There has now been significant public discussion, the YES case is still running on emotion, the NO case is picking apart the idea, and Indigenous Australians are divided.

Sound a bit like the Republic?

In 1999 there was near total media support for a YES vote. It went down when the people got a say.

In 1999 there was also a question aimed at reinserting Indigenous Australians into the Constitution. That fared even worse, with no State or Territory in support and a 39% YES vote.

The reasons why this vote will also fail are that whether Albo releases the details or not, the NO team is going to run a scare campaign and that’s a vote-winner. Secondly, Australians have consistently shown that they want everyone treated as equals, not singled out for special treatment on the basis of race or ethnicity.

This wouldn’t have been written if the polls had shown Yes leading

With polls always ask what is the sample size and how representative of the general population is the polled sample. If the poll is of few people, who don’t represent the general population, then the poll is unreliable if not useless in determining the views of the general population.
Major polls are no longer conducted on the street. Random sampling of the population by phone is problematic for various reasons – fewer land lines, difficulty accessing representative groups by location, age, gender, ethnicity etc, public suspicion of phone scams….
Now this may surprise you, but many opinion polls are based on answers provided by people who applied to be polled. People join these poll panels to answer questions on various topice for rewards and prizes. Immediately there is a bias in the sample through self-selection. The polling companies weigh answers to reflect general population characteristics, so there is also a manipulation of data.
The media breathlessly report these opinion poll results, despite their dubious accuracy, small sample size and questionable participant selection.
When was the last time you were polled? Me, never.

What do I make of the polls? That there really is such a thing as a Canberra bubble. Canberran’s aren’t representative or the rest of the country and regardless of the vote’s outcome, we need to come to terms with that.