pollster Kos Samaras on how voters are leaving the major parties behind

Written by: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

As we enter the final days of campaigning, Labor leads with its nose in front on most polls, but the devil is in the detail of particular seats.

To help get a read on what the voters are feeling at this late stage, we’re joined by RedBridge director Kos Samaras.

RedBridge ^[1] – a political research company, whose directors ^[2] include both former Labor strategists like Samaras and former Liberal strategist Tony Barry – has been conducting focus groups and polling throughout the campaign.

On Labor’s polling lead, Samaras says

At the moment we’re looking at a situation where Labor will end up possibly forming minority government, with an outside chance of majority.

On the large number of soft voters, Samaras says soft voters are more likely to represent people shifting from the majors to the minor parties, rather then from Liberal to Labor.

The best way we can describe soft voters is it’s a permanent state of mind, and again we go back to talking about younger voters here, or those under the age of 45 in particular, who have very low levels of values connection to party politics in this country.

Very low numbers of people switch from the majors these days. So I think a lot of political strategists, particularly on the Coalition side, still think they are living in the world of 20 years ago where a large soft vote means people will just transfer their entire support over to the other major party. That no longer is the case.

By Saturday April 27, more than 2.3 million Australians (more than 13%) had already voted with a week to go to election day, according to analyst Antony Green ^[3]. More than half a million votes were cast on the first day alone – a new record ^[4].

On that early voting trend, Samaras says while it’s “standard practice now” that people vote early, both major parties have been too slow to adapt to this change.

I would say, we haven’t seen any real evidence of the major parties really understanding the importance of starting early, although I would say Labor did start very early in the beginning of March. But you saw that the Coalition was very late to the game.

I think there’s a way to go before the majors fully wrap their heads around that Australians are now voting very differently, and they need to actually alter their campaign to suit those practices.

After a lacklustre campaign, voters are seeing Albanese as “the least worst option”:

The best way we can capture it is they view Anthony Albanese as the least worst option and we can see that in our quantitative analysis as well. Both major parties and both leaders are still in the negative territory but Labor and Albanese have improved their position dramatically, whilst at the same time the Coalition and Peter Dutton’s ratings have actually dropped.

And on political candidates lying in elections, Samaras says Australians think

They all lie. That’s fundamentally what most Australians will tell you. They all lie and they don’t live the lives we live. That’s the sort of saying we hear all the time.