Federal election 2025 results: Polling underestimated Labor’s support

Polling Inaccuracies in the 2025 Australian Federal Election

The 2025 Australian federal election saw significant discrepancies between pre-election polling and the actual results. Most polls underestimated Labor's primary vote, with Resolve underestimating by at least 3 percent. Conversely, the Greens' primary vote was overestimated.

Performance of Individual Pollsters

Redbridge pollster Kos Samaras noted that they were close to the final primary vote result. YouGov's final seat-by-seat poll performed relatively well, but missed some key individual races. Newspoll came close to Labor's primary vote. Ipsos and Freshwater were less accurate. Importantly, the Coalition itself used Freshwater for internal polling, which significantly overestimated their support.

Reasons for Inaccuracies

Several factors contributed to the inaccuracies:

• A late swing to Labor in the final days of the campaign that was not captured by polls.
• All polls overestimated One Nation's support, artificially inflating the two-party-preferred result for the Coalition.
• Ipsos and Freshwater used different weighting methods from the previous election.
• Freshwater incorporated the Voice referendum responses in weighting, while Ipsos used previous election results.

Implications

The inaccurate polling has prompted soul-searching within the polling community. The significant discrepancies highlight the difficulties in accurately predicting election outcomes, especially when late shifts in voter preferences occur. The analysis revealed that polls conducted a week prior to the election were more accurate than those published closer to election day.