The slippery polls

Congratulations are due to Bill Shorten and Labor on the wins in this weekend's by-elections, when most pundits (and, I think, polling - but more on that next) had seemed to prepare us all for the historically rare  scenario of an Opposition losing in at least one of the seats up for grabs.  Instead, Bill got what could be called "a beautiful set of numbers", and with Longman's result in particular, he must be feeling very happy:

Re the polls:  I saw on Twitter just on Friday some 2PP figures from Newspoll which looked better for Labor and made me think they may well be OK in Braddon and Longman after all.   So congratulations to Newspoll for at least predicting the winner accurately, again.  (Actually, they polled both seats as 2PP 51/49 to Labor, so they underestimated the Labor result.) 

The downside for Shorten is that on a national level, recent Newspolls have also shown a narrowing of the 2PP down to 49% to 51% for Liberal/Labor.  Given that I normally would allow the incumbent government to pick up a bit during a full election campaign, I think it's still going to be quite a close Federal election.   But Turnbull now has no incentive to call it early (I bet he would have if he won a seat off Labor this weekend) so a lot in change in the next 6 months.

As for the nutty Right's reaction:   I couldn't be bothered reading the Catallaxy thread about it in any detail - as you would expect, it was all about Turnbull not being right wing enough, with many longing for the destruction of the Liberals under him so that from the ashes a truly conservative force in politics will arise to slash taxes, spending & immigration, sell the ABC to Gina Rinehart, etc.   Yes, they think the rise of Trump tells us something about where politics is heading: because they are his people - white, dumb (or at least, wilfully misinformed) and old. 

Sinclair Davidson, on the other hand, despite being pro-migration and relatively pro-Turnbull, will presumably continue to do his own bit to hurt Liberals if he keeps going on about privatising the ABC.

Seems to me that it doesn't matter whether they are of conservative or libertarian bent over there - they are all clueless about policies that actually are electorally popular.   Good.