DANIEL:

Kos Samaras spends hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to what voters really think.

In focus groups and in surveys, his company gathers the opinions of every day Australians to paint a picture of the national mood:

What is worrying us? What do we think of the prime minister’s mansion or the opposition leader’s share portfolio? Which politicians can we trust?

But he says this picture gets warped by politicians who live and die by the two party preferred poll numbers and the 24 hour news cycle, and they fail to learn anything much beyond that.

KOS:

I think the political class responds badly to numbers. You know, there's almost like they've got two speeds. One's arrogance, the other one's panic. And it depends what the numbers are doing, whether they actually are suffering from one or the other. But polling is very powerful, it will allow the numbers to do the talking for a long period of time.

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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

Today, director at RedBridge, Kos Samaras on the one group who’ll decide the outcome of the upcoming election, and the things they want that no one is offering.

It’s Saturday, March 22.

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DANIEL:

Kos, thanks for joining us. I want to start with some numbers. How many people do you actually need to gain a proper view on any particular issue?

KOS:

Yeah, focus group's about 9 to 12 people, and it runs for an hour and a half. And usually it's not just one, so you've got to run a number of them because one could be an outlier. If you're doing it statewide, it's minimum 1200, you can go up to 2000.

DANIEL:

People would be surprised by how like the relatively small numbers and that could lead into the view that, well, ‘do we trust polls on such small numbers?’

KOS:

Yeah, that's right. So surveying 1000 people, it's mathematically robust, because it allows you to capture enough people in that sample that is statistically representative of the broader population. So you get to about 2000-3000 samples and your margin of error is like, you know, 1 and 2%. Beyond that, you're probably wasting money. But the art is in the brief, and a good recruitment agency will do the job really well and put the right people in the room for you to interview.

DANIEL:

So what lengths do you go to to make sure that the polling is representative, for instance, reaching young people? How do you get to them, especially young people that are just registering to vote for the first time?

KOS:

Yeah, so this is where online panels work better because people will participate through that forum. It's a lot easier to reach people. They can fill in the survey in their own time. Much better than trying to call them and, you know, with a random number that I recognise, particularly young people who won't pick up the phone if it's a number that's not recognisable. And I would say most of us won’t pick up the phone.

DANIEL:

The polls have been spectacularly wrong on a number of occasions. They didn't get it right for most of the recent US election. But the betting markets did. Why is that?

KOS:

Yeah, so it depends on which country you're looking at in terms of polling, but I would say polling in Australia has been generally pretty accurate. Even in 2019.

DANIEL:

Mm.

KOS:

When you're off by 2%, it ain't a disaster. But if the election result’s tight, which it has been since 2016, you're going to have to allow a bit of wriggle room. So the language we always use, if it's within the margin of error, which is about 3%, depending on your sample size, then it's fine, right? So 51/49 right now, Labor's way, it could be 49, right? Could be 48. We don't know. But what I say about polling is it's a tool, right? It's a temperature gauge.

I think where polling can be quite useful is viewed from a long-term perspective. So, for example if I was to come to a government with some research that tells them that mental health is a brewing problem in the outer suburbs and regions of this country, and it's affecting young people disproportionately, but also young mums, and that will have a political consequence in the years to come, perhaps you should listen to it, but they don't because they don't see an immediate political sugar hit. It won't be my problem. I won't have to wear the consequences of that, I won't be around, right?

That's where polling’s really useful. Where it's not useful in terms of public discussion and, I would say, the way that politics is reported and how the political class respond is that it's, oh look, Labor's primary vote has increased by 1%, therefore something must have happened. No, it's probably data noise. And so polling is a diagnostic tool. It's not a fortune cookie.

DANIEL:

So okay, let's talk about short-termers. What are the top issues affecting voters at this election?

KOS:

Yeah I mean the umbrella’s cost of living, but really what's created that is a whole range of issues, right? Housing being the absolute bomb crater that is impacting so many people in so many ways in this country now. Yes, it's young people, but it's not all young people. We are seeing, for example, a small group of young people who are direct beneficiaries of this absurd housing market, because their parents are really wealthy and have obtained assets and so that intergenerational wealth transfer is occurring right now.

But it's forcing normal working-class people into a debt environment that is completely unsustainable. Although the interest rates can drop and things get easier for them, they're probably not going to be able to pay off these mortgages in their working life. Particularly if you're working with your hands. If you're working with your hands your working life is not into your 60s, it's into your 50s, and then the body starts breaking down.

DANIEL:

So if we're talking about housing being a major issue, how much do voters care about how rich politicians are? So there was a big storm around Albanese's $4 million house or Peter Dutton's portfolio of 26 properties. How much do people care about that?

KOS:

I wouldn't say they care though, I'd say they've made up their minds that they are not part of them. So voters view themselves distinctly different to the political class. Comments that are always repeated to us in groups are, they've probably never checked the price of a life of bread. They wouldn't know where to go and buy X or Y. They live a totally different life to you and I. I mean, that's the sort of commentary we hear quite a lot. And so when stories around, you know, Albanese buying a $4 million mansion or Peter Dutton's share portfolios and so on, people just go, yeah, well, that's what politicians do. They're not part of us.

DANIEL:

So as a result of that partly, the major parties are shedding primary votes. We know that more and more people are voting for minor parties and independents. How do you think this is going to affect the outcome of the upcoming election?

KOS:

At the last election, 5.2 million voted for something other than the majors. I think that trend is going to continue. It will manifest in different ways, right? So in Victoria, you will see a haemorrhaging of the Labor primary and it will spray everywhere, but it won't necessarily go to the Coalition. What fundamentally I think people are missing here is when we're talking about millennials in Gen Z, I mean the oldest millennial is now 44 years of age. These two generations are very different to older Australians. So when we survey them, we say, do you have… can you name a political party that aligns with your values? Over half say ‘no, not one’, not a single political party. You go to boomers and it's almost 80%.

So if you're inner urban and you’ve got a university degree, you're more likely to have a very progressive view about the world. But as you go out to the outer suburbs, it's diverse young families, you know, who've migrated here over the last 10 years, whatever it is, you know, you could find contradictory views within these voters, right, where they could be really, really committed to voting for anyone that is going to tackle climate change, but then be quite right wing on immigration, right? So there's a lot of mixed views in there.

However, the glue that binds them all is this sense of being economically abandoned by the political class. A really good comment recently was made by a young man. He said, “I feel they no longer have a benefit to me at all. I'm just getting by in life from my own means.” That's effectively how you probably sum up the sentiment out there.

DANIEL:

So what’s the consequence of that? That’s after the break.

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DANIEL:

Kos, in the lead up to this election, I'd love to get a sense of which groups within the community are going to decide the results, so can you lay out for me the demographics that we're dealing with and how they've changed since the last election?

KOS:

Yeah, so in 2022 it was what I would define the progressive heart of this country screamed out loud and made itself heard. And it was through the election of the teal independents and Labor winning inner urban electorates like Higgins and Bennelong and so that community expressed itself very loudly. The outer urban areas and the regions were fairly predictable in the way they behaved. There wasn't much movement going on there.

Fast forward to now and we have obviously an inflationary crisis which has hit those communities. They are the ones who are going to basically express themselves this time. There's always some group within Australia that defines an election. You know in 2019 it was those mining communities in Queensland and so on. This time around it will be millennial young families in the outer suburbs and regions, particularly New South Wales and Victoria and particularly in the two big cities. They're effectively the groups that will animate the political landscape, but in a very different way. Victoria and New South Wales, we're probably going to see a lot more volatility, and in Victoria, a lot more volatility than any other place in the country.

DANIEL:

What do you put that down to?

KOS:

A number of factors. Obviously, the state government, but the pandemic. Yeah, I think a lot of political commentators have not paid enough attention to the psychological consequences of what happened to this city. particularly those communities that suffered the most economically and psychologically.

One of the most common things we'll get in Melbourne's outer suburbs from young parents is their absolute fear of what's happened to their kids. Kids are different. My kids are different now than they were before the pandemic. And so there's a lot of anger with that, right? They feel like they got completely abandoned.

And of course, then comes the inflationary crisis and hits them again. So you have these two massive economic events that have swept through these out of suburban areas of Melbourne. And we're going to see it on election night. It's going to scream really loud and if I was on the Labor side of politics I'd be worried.

DANIEL:

Let's talk about the type of campaigning that we're going to see. We've already seen some smear campaigns. Of course, I'm specifically thinking of Advance targeting the Teals and the Greens. How much of people listening to that style of campaigning?

KOS:

I would say that the communities within the electorates which the Teals and Greens occupy are probably the ones that are most likely to reject this type of campaigning. We've done some research recently in this space and I find it very, very hard to believe that these types of, I would say, antiquated approaches are going to work with, probably, what are the most politically connected constituencies in the country.

DANIEL:

What do you mean by antiquated?

KOS:

Well, antiquated because even in the outer suburbs, people are sick to death of this stuff, right? So if you can't feed your kids and you're having problems keeping a roof over your head, or you've got young children or you've got adult children who you know won't be able to buy a home one day, and you're facing significant economic problems in your life, you're probably sick to death of hearing the political class play stu-pole.

We did close to 400 focus groups last year. I can't recall anyone saying to me, you know what, I really hope one day some politicians come up with a policy where dual citizens are treated differently in this country or where, you know, we should just sack more public servants or actually those flags really bug me. No, I don't, I don't hear any of that for, you know, like hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews, never heard anyone get really worked up about a flag.

DANIEL:

I have a personal curiosity around all this. We spend millions of dollars on spin merchants, on social media strategies, on traditional media strategies, on pollsters. Do you have a sense, despite all of that, how many people actually make up their mind on election day in the polling booth, which way to vote?

KOS:

Yeah I've always had a view and this is even with my old job on working for the Labor side of politics that people form political views over a long period of time over many years. So trying to change political opinion. I used to use this analogy quite regularly with young campaigners. Don't try to wait for the last few weeks because it's too late. You've got years to change people's views. It is like trying to turn an old tanker on its axis in the bay, it takes a long time.

And so governments lose support over a long period of time through a death of a thousand cuts. And in today's modern environment, that doesn't necessarily mean they jump over to the other side of politics, they spray everywhere. And we saw that in Western Australia, the correction came, but didn't help the Liberal Party.

DANIEL:

And the question you've been waiting for, Kos, if the election was today, who would win?

KOS:

Labor minority government. I think that you know Labor's running a better campaign, they are staying away from the culture wars, they're not taking the bait and they are not running out there, running policies around how many people they're going to sack, right?

Now if Dutton turns around and starts talking about the economy and starts putting up some very significant policies that are going to reform our economy and reposition his political party as the party that represents working people in outer suburbs and regions, we could be having a very different conversation in three or four weeks' time because that's how fragile the situation is.

DANIEL:

Kos, thanks so much for coming on the show.

KOS:

Thank you.

DANIEL:

Kos Samaras has previously conducted work for the Labor party, but hasn’t since 2019.

He no longer accepts work from registered political parties.

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7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s made by Atticus Bastow, Cheyne Anderson, Chris Dengate, Erik Jensen, Ruby Jones, Sarah McVeigh, Travis Evans, Zoltan Fecso, and me, Daniel James.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

You've been listening to 7am. See you next week.

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