There have been some mysterious media reports of a Nelson Legislative Council ReachTEL poll. I now have a copy of the full results. This is apparently not the only Nelson poll of which results are now circulating among candidates and others, and there may be as many as three such polls.
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There are also some obvious irregularities in the table such as Wilkinson being supposedly rated highly by Labor voters and poorly by Liberal voters. I believe that what has happened here is that most of the columns have been mistakenly copied and pasted one column to the left of where they should be and that the results that have been reported for Wilkinson’s approval in the media are in fact wrong.
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These figures show Wilkinson with a very respectable net satisfaction rating of +14.5 (including a +38.9 netsat among Liberal voters) and a much lower non-awareness rating than was quoted by the ABC. (Amusingly Wilkinson tried to put a positive spin on the quoted figures on non-awareness, which were wrong. The actual figures are much more satisfactory for him.)
And this is why the common practice of selective media reporting of unpublished polls is terrible practice. If there are errors in the poll then there is no opportunity for analysts to scrutinise and correct them. At least, journalists who do not have the expertise to check an unpublished poll they are reporting on for themselves should run it past someone who does, but ideally, this silly business of people commissioning polls and showing them to journalists without the poll ever being published should end. Let’s not forget this stupid internal-poll-selective-results media/players game has recently been part of the process of removing an elected Prime Minister during his first term of office – it is not as if this is a trivial issue.
See the figures and full analysis from the Nelson poll taken in late February here: http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/nelson-legislative-council-polling.html
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