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With the referendum now locked in for 14 October, it’s going to be a huge month for the nation. As always, TDA will be working to give you all the facts to inform your vote.

Today, I’m casting my eye forward to referendum day: what can we expect to happen? I take a look at the results of TDA’s recent audience poll, as well as other opinion polls.

As the referendum on an Indigenous Voice approaches, it’s natural to be curious – not just about your own vote but about the votes of others. What will happen?

The obvious answer is to consult opinion polls. Polls can have a bad reputation – they famously failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and Scott Morrison’s victory in 2019. But they have a reasonably good track record in the last few Australian state elections and in last year’s federal election.

And in theory, the simple yes/no choice in a referendum should make it fairly easy to use polling to predict an outcome – unlike at an election, voters are not choosing between a wide array of candidates.

So what does current polling tell us about how Australians might vote on the Voice?

Professional polling companies (such as Newspoll, RoyMorgan and YouGov) ask the same set of questions to a large group of people sourced online at regular intervals.

They aim to make sure the people they survey are ‘representative’ of the Australian population. That means they will try to get an accurate balance of responses by gender, age, location and education level. If they can’t do this, they have techniques for adjusting their results. If your sample doesn’t have enough young women, for example, you might give more weight to the response of every young woman you do have. It’s not an exact science, but one which has improved over time.

The story for the Voice in nationwide polls like this has been very stark: the number of Australians expected to vote ‘yes’ started high but has been falling all year. The graph below is a collection of polls assembled by Simon Jackman, an academic from the University of Sydney.

The black line is the average. It started at about 64% a year ago, but has fallen to 44% now.

For the referendum to succeed, a majority of voters nationwide need to vote ‘yes’, and a 50% ‘yes’ vote is also needed in four out of six states.

Victoria and Tasmania are the only states to have polled above 50% for ‘yes’ at any point in the last three months.

Last week, TDA polled our own audience on their voting intention. The results, based on over 5,000 responses, were starkly different: 83% say they plan to vote ‘yes’.

Why is this result so different? The answer is straightforward. Unlike national opinion polls, which work to represent the entire country’s view, TDA’s poll reflects the views of our audience, an audience we know is mostly made up of young people.

But there is still plenty we can learn from TDA’s results. The poll showed some interesting state-by-state variation. For example, the ‘yes’ result was stronger in Victoria (88%), Tasmania (88%) and South Australia (85%), but weaker in NSW (80%), WA (78%) and Qld (76%).

Perhaps most interesting was the answer to another question we asked: Do you feel you have enough information to cast an informed vote? ‘Yes’ supporters overwhelmingly said that they did, but ‘no’ supporters were split almost 50-50.

That is, those who plan to vote ‘no’ are much more likely to say they do not feel they have enough information.

Should this be taken as a sign of hope for the yes campaign, or a sign of success from the no campaign, whose official pamphlet says “if you don’t know, vote no”? The answer may be a combination of both.

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