British polling company YouGov published their first MRP report for the 2025 election cycle, becoming the second company to publish an MRP during this election cycle. For this post I wanted to run a comparison of the two most recent MRPs from two different companies. The two polls produced similar top-level figures, both in terms of seats and votes, but at the individual seat level there are some pretty significant differences.
First up: a brief explanation about MRPs. The acronym stands for multi-level regression with post-stratification. Basically they are polls with very large sample sizes which use data science to determine connections between various characteristics that predict how people are voting, and then use this to make predictions about the poll for each electorate, not just the national or state totals.
Since swings are rarely uniform, this sort of analysis is really useful for understanding which parts of the country might be swinging more or less than others, and this can sometimes change how many seats would be expected to change hands, depending on how efficient swings are. If swings are concentrated in safe seats, they can produce fewer changes in results than an election with a similar result where the swings were concentrated in more marginal seats.
Redbridge and Accent Research produced three MRPs throughout 2024. YouGov has now published their first MRP today. YouGov previously produced an MRP right before the last federal election. Shaun Ratcliff, who now runs Accent Research and was the guest on my most recent podcast episode, previously produced YouGov’s MRPs in Australia. YouGov has also produced MRPs in the UK and Spain. In the UK, a number of companies published MRPs in the lead up to the 2024 general election.
I don’t normally spend a lot of effort dwelling on the top-line polls – I recommend William Bowe’s Bludgertrack for national and state polling averages. Both William and Kevin Bonham do more on the polls. But I’m more interested in the seat by seat contest and these MRPs do offer opinions about the local races.
The latest Redbridge/Accent MRP was published in early December and had a sample size of 4,909. The poll gave a range of possible outcomes on a seat count, but it appears that the most likely outcome in each seat adds up to a total of Coalition 69, Labor 64, Others 9, Greens 4 and four ties (all Labor vs Coalition). The poll did not publish a national 2PP estimate, but it seems to be a small Coalition lead on 2PP (say 51%).
The new YouGov MRP was published this morning, and has a sample of over 40,000 interviews. It is based on a national two-party-preferred vote of 51.1% to the Coalition, and also gives a range of seat outcomes. On the website they make a prediction that the most likely outcome is 73 Coalition, 66 Labor, ten others and one Greens. If you drill into the individual seat data, it produces most likely outcomes of 70 Coalition, 66 Labor, ten others, one Greens and three ties.
It’s worth noting that a simple reading of the pendulum suggests fewer Coalition gains. A 2PP of 51.1% would be a swing of 3.2%. There are just seven Labor seats and two Crossbench seats on margins of less than 3.2% against the Coalition. This would take the Coalition from 58 seats to 67, and take Labor from 77 to 70. The recent MRPs suggest the Coalition could gain more like 15 seats, rather than nine.
I should note that from here on in I will describe their models and may use words like “winning” or “will be”, but they simply refer to the model of how things look right now. Neither pollster is predicting this is how things will end up at the time of the election.
Both of these polls produce remarkably similar overall results, both giving the Coalition a slight 2PP lead (consistent with most polls in early 2025 showing a slight Coalition lead). Both would produce a result of the Coalition winning more seats than Labor, falling a few seats short of a majority.
But if you drill down below the national level, they produce quite different outcomes at the seat level, between regions and between some states.
In net terms, the Coalition is leading in one more seat in the YouGov poll, and Labor is leading in two more. The Greens are leading in three less (4 in Accent, 1 in YouGov), the independents are leading in one more, and there is one less tie (three in YouGov, four in Accent).
Yet while those differences could be explained by just four differences, actually there are 19 seats that are flipped between the two polls.
About a third of these seats are explained by ties. Macquarie, McEwen and Shortland are all ties in YouGov, and all have a 51-49 lead in Accent (2 to Labor, one to the Coalition). Likewise Chisholm, Hawke, Reid and Sturt are tied in Accent but have 51-53% leads in YouGov.
But some others have bigger gaps. YouGov expects Dai Le to drop out of the top two and lose Fowler to Labor, and expect the Greens to lose all three of their Brisbane seats. Their model has the LNP falling into third in Griffith, while the Greens fall into third in Brisbane and Ryan, with Labor winning all three. Interestingly YouGov has Labor’s victory margins in Wills and Cooper over the Greens as significantly smaller than Accent.
Labor wins Solomon much more comfortably in Accent than in YouGov, while YouGov expects Lingiari to actually swing towards Labor while Accent expects the Coalition to win.
Interestingly YouGov expects a swing of only 1% to the Coalition in the large rural WA seat of Durack, compared to a 7% swing in Accent.
When I plot the expected swings onto the pendulum, YouGov generally has similar swings to seats on similar margins, while there is a bit more variety in Accent.
There are 124 seats where both polls agree that the final count is Labor vs Coalition, plus a few more where YouGov expects such a count. YouGov published a 2PP swing for all 150 seats, but Accent only did so where the 2PP matched the 2CP. If I compare average two-party-preferred swings amongst those seats, there are some interesting trends.
Both polls agree that swings are expected to be bigger in Labor seats than Coalition seats, but YouGov is expecting the swing to be bigger – 5.6% in Labor seats for YouGov, and 4.1% for Accent.
Amongst Labor seats on margins of 0-5%, Accent is expecting a slightly higher swing – 4.1% vs 3.6% for YouGov. But YouGov is expecting bigger swings in safer seats – 5.8% for seats on margins of 5-10% (compared to 3.6% for Accent) and 6.3% for those over 10% (compared to 4.5% for Accent).
Unsurprisingly, since the two polls seem to produce similar national figures, these bigger swings in Labor seats must be offset in Coalition seats. There is not much difference in the marginal seats. YouGov expects the swing in 5-10% Coalition seats to be a bit less (1.2% rather than 1.6%), but the big difference is amongst the safest Coalition seats, where they are expecting a 1.5% swing towards Labor rather than the 0.3% swing to the Coalition in Accent’s work.
This is very obvious on the pendulum. For the eight safest Coalition seats, held by margins of 13-23%, every seat is expected to suffer a swing of at least 3% to Labor, with Gippsland swinging to Labor by 7%. Accent also expects the Coalition swing to be muted here, but it’s much less dramatic – Gippsland still has a 3% swing to the Coalition and other seats range from 1% Coalition swing to a 2% Labor swing.
I find this a bit hard to swallow, but I haven’t done the analysis myself, so I’m presenting it here.
These swings are consistent with the idea that the Coalition is currently producing a very efficient vote, not wasting votes in seats they already hold, but YouGov’s model also suggests the Coalition is racking up big gains in safer Labor seats.
Finally it’s worth just checking in on four seats I’ve been paying close attention to. These outer suburban seats in New South Wales and Victoria have always been Labor-held but have been trending marginal. None of them are super-marginal but in all four cases both MRPs show them as being very close. Werriwa is within 1% on both models. Shortland is a tossup on YouGov and within 1% on Accent. Hawke is a tossup on Accent and within 1% on YouGov. Holt is a bit safer on YouGov (54% ALP) but remains very much in play.
Overall while there is a fair amount of variation, both polls have a common message. The Coalition is in the lead, they are on track to be the largest party with a chance of winning a majority, and they are gaining swings that produce more seat gains than the pendulum would suggest.