One Nation is up. One Nation is down. What the weekly polling movements are actually telling us and what they are not.
In a single week, three separate polls, Resolve, Newspoll, and YouGov, told three separate stories about the state of Australian politics.
And yet, reading some of the commentary that followed, you would be forgiven for thinking Pauline Hanson’s movement had suddenly stalled, collapsed, or surging to new heights, depending on which headline you clicked on first. The dominant framing, as ever, was that something had shifted. Something was moving. Labor had “surged back.” The Coalition was “stable.” The insurgency was fading, or perhaps accelerating, or perhaps both, simultaneously, in different households, reading different mastheads.
Most of this is the reflexive reporting of survey-to-survey movement as if each wave were a referendum in miniature and it reflects a profound misunderstanding of what is actually happening to the Australian electorate.
We are not in a normal political period. We are in the middle of a structural realignment, and the tools built for normal periods, including the habit of reading each poll as a discrete verdict on the state of political play, are not fit for purpose. If you want to understand what One Nation’s vote is doing, you have to stop staring at the weekly numbers and start looking at the shape of the thing beneath them.
What the surveys are actually measuring
Start with a simple observation that very few columnists seem willing to make: when the electorate is in flux, different sampling methodologies, different weighting schemes, and different question orders produce larger gaps than they do in stable periods. This is not a flaw in the polls. It is a feature of the moment. The country is in transition.
In a settled two-party system, where the overwhelming majority of voters are either rusted-on or weakly attached to one of two brands, polling is a relatively straightforward exercise. You sample, you weight against known preference flows and demographic benchmarks, and you produce a number that will be close to what every other reputable pollster produces, give or take a couple of points. That was Australia from the 1950s through to 2022. That was the environment in which most of our political journalism was professionally formed.
That Australia no longer exists.
In the current environment, a single respondent’s answer depends on a cascade of variables that have only become decisive in the last five or six years. Whether they are prompted with One Nation as a named option. Whether they are asked about the leader or the party. Whether the survey is conducted online or by phone. Whether the sample is drawn from a panel that over-represents politically engaged Australians or one that catches the soft, transactional voters who now decide elections. Whether the fieldwork was done during a news cycle dominated by fuel prices, or migration, or a terror attack, or another Trump post on social media.
In a settled period, all of these methodological choices produce small divergences. In a realignment period, they produce the two-to-five point gaps you are seeing between polls. The polls are not contradicting each other in any meaningful sense. They are each capturing a different cross-section of an electorate that is genuinely, ideologically, psychologically in motion, in a transition from a two party to multi party system.
This is not a novel observation. It is one of the most robust findings in comparative political science.
What the academics have been saying for forty years
Peter Mair, in Ruling the Void, documented the long decline of party attachment across western democracies and warned that the erosion of stable partisan identities would produce electorates that were harder to read, harder to poll, and harder to govern. He was right. The Dassonneville and Hooghe work in the European Journal of Political Research, on electoral volatility and dealignment shows that as voter-party linkages weaken, electoral behaviour becomes more volatile and more unpredictable, not as a temporary aberration, but as the new equilibrium. Dalton and Wattenberg’s Parties Without Partisans, made the same argument for the advanced industrial democracies as a whole.
The measurement literature tells the same story. The Pedersen index, developed in the late 1970s, was the first rigorous attempt to quantify net electoral volatility between elections, the share of the vote that moves from one party to another.
In stable Western European democracies, the Pedersen index historically ran somewhere between five and ten. In the period since the Global Financial Crisis, it has exceeded 20 in a number of cases and in the countries that have experienced the most dramatic realignments, it has pushed higher still. Recent European work has disaggregated this further: volatility is concentrated in the “left-behind” regions, in outer-metropolitan and regional electorates where the gap between lived experience and elite discourse is widest. Rodríguez-Pose’s work on the “places that don’t matter” is the best single summary of what is happening across the developed world. It is also a near-perfect description of the electoral geography fuelling One Nation.
When scholars of Western European democracy talk about dealignment and realignment, they are describing two overlapping processes that look, in the short-term, like one phenomenon. Dealignment is the loosening of traditional party attachments, voters becoming harder to pin to a brand, more willing to switch, more responsive to short-term cues. Realignment is the slower process by which new cleavages emerge and new party coalitions form around them. In a realignment period, you see both at once: dealigned voters bouncing around in the short term, while deeper structural shifts are quietly reshaping who ends up where when the music stops.
This is why polls diverge. This is why weekly movements can look dramatic but mean relatively little. This is also why the long-run trend is the only thing worth watching.
What the long run says about One Nation
The long-run trend is now unmistakable, and it is worth stating clearly, because it has been buried under months of spot-coverage.
Roughly 80 per cent of One Nation’s growth since the 2025 federal election has come from the Coalition. The remainder has come, in smaller amounts, from Labor and from the other minor parties of the right. That is the structural story. Everything else is statistical noise around that central fact.
This is the same pattern we have watched unfold in every comparable democracy in the last decade.
In the United Kingdom, Reform UK has drawn a large chunk of its vote directly from the Conservatives, as nearly 80 per cent of 2024 Reform voters had previously voted Conservative in 2019. The combined Labour-Conservative vote share in Britain has collapsed from over 80 per cent in 2017 to the mid-thirties today. The Electoral Reform Society now describes Britain as a genuine multi-party system, with five parties clustered within fifteen points of each other. The party system that produced Thatcher and Blair is no longer the party system that governs Britain.
In Sweden, the 2022 election saw the Sweden Democrats become the second-largest party in parliament, drawing predominantly from the Moderates. In Italy, the old Christian Democratic/Communist duopoly has been replaced entirely. In France, the post-war structure has been shattered. In each of these cases, political scientists have documented the same sequence: a long period of dealignment, a triggering event (or series of events), a sudden acceleration in vote volatility, and then, eventually, the settling of a new structure.
In each of these cases, too, the polling through the transition was noisy. Individual surveys moved dramatically. Commentators regularly pronounced the insurgent party had “peaked.” Each time, the noise was misread as signal. And each time, the structural shift continued regardless.
The Australian specifics
Australia has two features that make its realignment both more predictable and more consequential than the European examples.
The first is preferential voting, which means that the bloc behaviour emerging in primary vote numbers is mechanically translated into two-party-preferred outcomes with minimal leakage. The second is compulsory voting, which means that the disengaged and economically stressed voters who would simply not turn out in the United States or the United Kingdom are obliged to participate and, critically, obliged to express their dissatisfaction through a vote rather than through abstention. One Nation is not just absorbing angry right-wing voters. It is absorbing voters who, in a voluntary system, would not be voting at all.
This is one of the reasons our realignment is expressing itself more sharply and more quickly than the equivalent processes in the US or the UK. It is also one of the reasons the polling is so volatile. The voters now driving the One Nation surge, outer-suburban, culturally conservative, economically stressed, low-information, are the voters pollsters have historically had the most trouble reaching, weighting, and capturing accurately. Their opinions are less fixed. Their turn out behaviour is not in question, but their partisan behaviour is genuinely in flux. When you sample them at different times, with different wording, through different local and global events, you will get different answers.
One Nation will continue to move between the low 20s and mid to high 20s, in successive polls over the coming months. Sometimes it will look like a surge. Sometimes it will look like a retreat. The honest answer is that neither is happening in any meaningful sense. What is happening is that the Coalition’s historic base is being reshaped, the two-party system that dominated Australian politics for the better part of a century is being slowly pulled apart, and a new structure is emerging underneath.
If you want to understand it, put down the weekly polls. Look at the arc.
Republished from Redbridge Intel, 21 April 2026.
Kos Samaras
Kos Samaras is a director at RedBridge Group, a research and strategy firm specialising in public opinion, social trends, and behavioural insights. He works across industry, government, and media to help organisations understand community attitudes and navigate complex social and political environments.