“Never make predictions, especially about the future,” New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel famously said. In the sport of politics we are in peak prediction mode this week – and Saturday night will reveal what surprises are in store. I’ve been part of many elections where the polls have got it spectacularly wrong – most shockingly in Labor’s 2019 loss and most painfully in Donald Trump’s 2016 win.

Both were a result of the fact that while we obsess about the number of people who report a certain opinion at a given moment in time, we pay much less attention to the strength of that opinion. Large and unpredicted swings between polls and actual results are usually a reflection of the “softness” of the opinions held by those being polled – the likeliness they will change their mind. Too often we report public opinion as if it is chiselled in stone.

We experienced this collectively as a nation in 2023. The prime minister, encouraged by polls that showed up to 75 per cent support for an Indigenous Voice to parliament, ploughed ahead with a referendum to enshrine it even after Peter Dutton’s denial of bipartisanship. As we found out, in the face of a barrage of unprecedented disinformation and a sophisticated MAGA-inspired outrage machine, that support turned out to be very soft.

Over the course of the campaign it evaporated – on polling day the Yes vote garnered less than 40 per cent.