Pundits say the Voice could even fail in progressive Victoria, NSW
If the Yes vote succeeds in any state, it’s most likely to be Victoria, but even that is far from certain, according to Melbourne-based political experts.
Pollsters and political pundits are agreed that Victoria and NSW are likely to come closest to supporting an Indigenous voice to parliament, but that even in those states the Yes case may fail.
Political experts The Weekend Australian spoke with on Friday said support for a voice remained strong in half a dozen inner-city seats in Melbourne and Sydney, but rapidly fell away in the suburbs and regions.
“We’re going to see obviously a difference between the Yes vote in the inner city of Melbourne versus the outer suburbs,” said Kos Samaras, a former Victorian Labor Party assistant secretary who now runs polling company Redbridge.
“Support for Yes will be higher in the wealthier, more educated electorates, where I would say that the Yes campaign has targeted a perfectly crafted message. But that’s the problem. This campaign is perfectly crafted for Smith St, Collingwood, and not Smith St, Melton.”
Mr Samaras said he expected to see a similar pattern in NSW.
“There’ll be a big Yes vote in the inner city, the inner west, North Sydney, but it’ll be a different story in Penrith,” he said. “The traits for Yes are a uni degree and youth.”
Mr Samaras said that contrary to the view that low voter turnout could cost the No case, he believed it was more likely to be soft Yes voters who would fail to cast a vote.
“We know if turnout’s an issue it’s usually younger voters who do not turn up. Knowing that they’re one of the few cohorts supporting Yes, I actually think it’ll hurt Yes more,” he said.
“NSW and Victoria will come closest to 50 per cent (voting Yes) of all the states, but how close, we don’t know,” Mr Samaras said.
Fellow Redbridge pollster and veteran Liberal staffer Tony Barry said economic headwinds were also likely to cost the Yes case.
“In one of our recent polls, 85 per cent of voters didn’t have the voice in their top five issues,” he said.
“When you’re struggling with rent and power bills, constitutional change doesn’t rate as a key concern.”
Mr Barry also said the emergence of Indigenous figures such as Jacinta Price, Warren Mundine and Lidia Thorpe as prominent No campaigners had played a key role in making the Yes case less viable.
“They have given soft Yeses permission to vote No. Their impact has been immense,” he said.
“But the Yes campaign has been run terribly in other ways. When one of their best lines is ‘nothing else has worked so we’ll give this a crack’, it’s not very compelling. The lack of detail was also a key mistake.”
Head of research at Essential polling, Gavin White, said despite Essential being “more optimistic than most of the other polls”, Victoria and NSW were “the only states where it’s even competitive”.
Mr White said the strong correlation between demography and voting trend was feeding into “poll denialism”.
“Because it’s so demographic specific and region specific, Yes voters are looking around and saying, ‘but all the people around me are voting Yes’ and struggling to believe that the polls are right,” he said.
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