Veteran conservative pollster says voters are now acting strategically to ‘tickle up’ parties in published polls in the UK and the trend may be shifting to Australia

Pollster Mark Textor says one of the factors that caused the wild inaccuracy of UK opinion polls before the May election may also be shifting Australian poll results – a trend for respondents to “game” them.

Like UK polls, he says, Australian polls “may very well rightly predict the wrong choice” because “the fame of Newspoll and Ipsos and other published polls may well be working against them”.

“Knowing the results will be published leads many respondents to give the most dramatic choice that sends the message of the day … they are using their answers to ‘tickle up’ one party or another, answers which may be quite different to the choice of government they want in 12 months’ time,” says Textor, who along with business partner Lynton Crosby advised Cameron’s campaign. The pair are speaking at the British Australia Chamber of Commerce in Sydney on Thursday about the lessons from the Conservatives’ shock victory in May.

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“This is the catch-22 for published polls because more and more people are aware there is a very public weekly reaction to the polls so respondents are gaming those same polls,” he tells Guardian Australia.

Textor is reluctant to talk too much about the factors behind the Abbott government’s poor polling – the government is behind by an average 48 to 52 per cent in two party preferred terms – but draws parallels between Cameron’s economic message and the message the Abbott government finally developed for its second budget.

While Cameron focused on his own economic record and the alleged threat Labor posed to the economy, Textor says voters weren’t promised “economic security”, but rather “economic empowerment”.

“Voters are not so naive to think anyone can make them more secure, be it a union, a government or a business ... they look to see whether this new idea or initiative allows them more power over their own circumstance.”

Mark Textor. Photograph: ABC TV

“In Australia we have a unique set of circumstances. We have been on an economic pedestal for 25 years or more, we now have a kind of economic performance anxiety, where we wonder how to maintain that growth.”

He says voters think: “I know the pedestal is not as secure as it was, that just means I am looking for ... strategies and outcomes and budgets that help me take control of my own life and not have my future decided by others all the time.

“The economic and political paradigm are connected there, you voted for Kevin Rudd in 2007 and got Julia Gillard, you voted for Julia Gillard in 2010 and got Kevin Rudd, you didn’t vote for a carbon tax, you didn’t have any control of Holden and Toyota and Ford making their big decisions about removing manufacturing, you have no control over what China does with its metal prices, you aren’t really part of the economic debate any more, there is no Bob Hawke to bring you into a summit ... and so the big reforms of the future are going to be co-empowered, where voters can say I feel part of this ... and people who make unilateral decisions about people’s futures without reference to their hopes and aspirations won’t go very far.”

Asked how “co-empowerment” fitted with the numerous policies unveiled without warning and contrary to election promises in the Abbott government’s first budget, Textor concedes that even given what he describes as an “implicit understanding with conservative governments ... that they come in and clean up finances” the government’s first budget lacked “purity of purpose”.

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“I think the budget narrative now, that we are helping people who want to get ahead ... is a much better message. People don’t want to be paternalistically just protected, they don’t believe that economic security will ever exist ... they want assistance to get ahead and control their own lives.”

The veteran Australian pollster says the reasons his internal polling predicted Cameron’s victory when published polls had the result on a knife-edge also helped the success of Crosby’s campaign strategy – an understanding of the “mercenary” modern voter.

“As people like you [political journalists] make voters more aware of the political process, they are adjusting to that knowledge by being more mercenary themselves and tactical in their own voting behaviour ... they know they can’t change the whole political system, but they understand the power of their vote,” Textor tells Guardian Australia

“The big lesson from the UK poll was the rise of tactical voting, voters making choices not just on policy or personality ... but on understanding and gaming what might happen with a certain poll outcome,” he says.

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In the lead-up to the May poll British voters were bombarded with advice about how to use their vote in the first-past-the-post system to block the party they least wanted to win, but Textor – who worked with former senior Obama adviser Jim Messina – says part of the winning strategy was to work with that trend and persuade voters to set aside their usual allegiances by persuading them of the immediate self interest of voting conservative – with the Conservatives’ “stable majority government” argument and the constant warnings about the “threat” of a Labor government dominated by the Scottish National Party.

He claims the public pollsters made three big mistakes; they didn’t ask enough questions to measure “tactical” voters – people who were persuaded to “game” the election result or the result of the opinion poll itself, they didn’t do enough to measure voters’ expectations and hopes about the outcome – which may have shed light on tactical intentions – and they didn’t measure the “local candidate” factor in close constituencies with intense local campaigns.

All of that, he says, is “far more fundamental than not stuffing up your sample, because you can have a perfect sample ... and still cock it up.”