MaltaToday surveys spot-on in their electoral predictions
MaltaToday’s surveys not only foresaw Labour poised for an absolute majority, but also made accurate predictions on the first count results gained by the candidates of the two major parties.
The surveys predicted the poor first-count results of Labour incumbents John Attard Montalto and Glenn Bedingfield, while it correctly identified Labour’s top five and the PN’s top three frontrunners.
The surveys also foresaw that Alternattiva Demokratika candidate Arnold Cassola’s result would be a far cry from his result in 2004, even if it predicted a higher percentage for the Greens and a lower percentage for Norman Lowell.
This also reveals that, owing to the margin of error, the surveys are automatically less accurate when dealing with candidates who get less than 7% of the vote.
Frontrunners MaltaToday’s latest survey, published on the Thursday before the election, made very accurate predictions on the first count vote of each candidate. While the survey showed 21% of declared Labour voters opting for Louis Grech, the actual result showed Grech scoring 20.4% of the Labour vote. The survey also got the correct placing for the top five PL elected MEPs and the top three PN MEPs and runner-up.
The survey also foresaw Busuttil’s mammoth vote with incumbent David Casa and Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas as the other PN frontrunners.
While MaltaToday’s predictions were confirmed, a survey conducted by EMCS for the Sunday Times published a week before the election totally went off the mark by showing John Attard Montalto as the Labour Party’s frontrunner.
MaltaToday rightly predicted that John Attard Montalto would come fifth among Labour’s candidates and that Glenn Bedingfield would not even feature in the race.
Spot-on predictions The last two MaltaToday surveys, which had a margin of error of 3.7%, showed Labour poised for an absolute majority of 51-52% with the PN getting 42% of votes.
In the actual election Labour fared even better, getting 54.7% against the PN’s 40.5%. This result matches the results of MaltaToday surveys published in April and May, which had shown Labour’s result at between 53% and 54% and the PN trailing at 40%.
While in these two surveys, the respondents who said they had voted Labour and the PN back in 2008 were equal in proportion as to the actual 2008 vote counts, the MT surveys held closer to the election had more respondents who said they had voted PN in 2008. In the last survey held a few days before the election, 42% claimed they had voted PN in 2008 while only 37% claimed to have voted PL.
A reason for this could be that a number of Labour voters tend to be less responsive towards surveys as elections approach – a phenomenon registered during MaltaToday’s pre-March 2008 electoral surveys. This discrepancy – which was mentioned in the survey report – could account for Labour’s lower score in the month before the elections.
If weighed by previous political intentions, the last MaltaToday survey would have given the Labour Party 54% and the PN 40%. Since 13.3% did not reveal how they had voted in 2008, it was considered too risky to make this sort of prediction.
The Cassola fluke and the Lowell factor The MaltaToday survey was correct in predicting a lower result for Arnold Cassola in these elections, but it did not foresee the scale of AD’s decline.
MaltaToday’s latest survey put AD’s vote at 5.5% and Arnold Cassola’s personal vote at 3.7% - a far cry from his 9% score in 2004 but still a respectable result.
Still, AD’s inflated figure was mainly the result of extrapolating the result when removing the respondents who said they didn’t know who to vote for.
In fact among respondents who stated their voting intention, AD’s result hovered between 1.9% in March to 3.6% in June. Actually, AD only managed to get 2.34% in last week’s election.
But unlike the PN and PL, AD does not manage to take its share of undecided or uncommitted voters.
Even before the last general elections, MaltaToday’s surveys showed AD getting a slightly higher percentage of 2.4% when in actual fact it only got 1.3%.
Since its vote is small, AD’s result is also prone to variations when the results are weighed to reflect the age and sex balance of the Maltese population. In the last survey the weighing process somewhat inflated AD’s figures due to a prevalence of AD voters in the 18-34 age category, which is the least represented in MaltaToday’s surveys. This could be an indication that AD has a solid core vote of respondents who have no inhibitions on revealing their intentions in MaltaToday’s surveys.
While the last MaltaToday survey showed Arnold Cassola in sixth place, in the actual election he only came in tenth place. This could be attributed to the fact that while most AD voters had already decided to vote for Cassola, a large number of respondents who had made their mind to vote PN or MLP were still undecided on which candidate they were voting for.
Despite its disappointing result, AD fared eight times better than the 0.3% it registered in a Sunday Times survey published a week before the election.
On the other hand a survey commissioned by TV programme Xarabank also gave AD 3.5% of the total number of respondents – practically the same figure attributed to AD in MaltaToday’s final two polls.
MaltaToday’s last survey correctly predicted AN’s result at 1% of the vote but failed to register Norman Lowell’s 1.5% result. The latest MaltaToday showed “others” at 0.6% – Lowell was the only “other” candidate to be mentioned in MaltaToday’s surveys.
Apart from the margin of error and voters who made up their mind following Lowell’s balloon stunt on the last day of the campaign, this could be attributed to a European wide phenomenon which shows far-right voters less inclined to reveal their voting intentions in opinion polls than other categories of voters.
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