Another national election where polls favored the left-wing party but the right-wing party won, this time in Australia.
No-one predicted it, but the Liberal-National Coalition has won. PM Scott Morrison calls it “a miracle”.
We don’t yet know if they have the 76 seats required for a majority, but they will certainly be in government.
Labor’s Bill Shorten has conceded and said he will step down as leader.
The coalition has swept through Queensland, a state full of marginal seats.
Former PM Tony Abbott has lost his seat.
How badly were the polls off? “The polls – 56 consecutive weeks of them – pointed to a win for Labor and Bill Shorten.”
“Labor’s failure to pick up any marginal seats in Queensland has sealed its likely fate in opposition for the next three years, as the party reels from Saturday’s election result.”
"Queensland" is Australian for "Wisconsin"https://t.co/LYFvGa9Z53
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 18, 2019
I did not intimately track every step of the Australian election, but it seems that Labor campaigned in large measure on that holy shibboleth of transnational leftism, climate change. By contrast, in 2017, “Morrison addressed the House of Representatives while holding a lump of coal, stating ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you,’ and accusing those concerned about the environmental impact of the coal industry of having ‘an ideological, pathological fear of coal.'”
Labor’s policies mirror those of the America’s Democrats in another way, in that they’ve made a huge stink about the “rights” of illegal aliens entering Australia. In 2009, with Labor in power and the Liberals out, Morrison became shadow minister for immigration and citizenship, urging a policy of strict immigration enforcement, which he continued to follow as actual minister when the Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party kicked out Labor in 2013, before becoming Prime Minister in 2018 following a “leadership spill” which resulted in Liberal Party Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (who had replaced Abbott in another “spill” in 2015) stepping down. So it’s rather like the director of ICE becoming President.
And once again a left-leaning party has lost an “unloseable” election that polls said was in the bag. Why, it’s almost as though modern “scientific” polling has a built in bias against conservative parties!
Keep that in mind (yet again) the next time someone confidently predicts victory for a left-wing party or candidate based on polls…