September 20, 2017

Democracy is coming

By

Unless someone says something really annoyingly wrong about polling in the next few days, I’m going to stop commenting until Saturday night.

Some final thoughts:

  • The election looks closer than NZ opinion polling is able to discriminate. Anyone who thinks they know what the result will be is wrong.
  • The most reliable prediction based on polling data is that the next government will at least need confidence and supply from NZ First. Even that isn’t certain.
  • It’s only because of opinion polling that we know the election is close. It would be really surprising if Labour didn’t do a lot better than the 25% they managed in the 2014 election — but we wouldn’t know that without the opinion polls.

 

 

avatar

Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »