Liberals hope for historic poll error to avoid complete disaster on election night

Bill Shorten lost, Brexit happened, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

Any time any politician wants to question the results of a poll, they have plenty of fodder to do so.

Three famous failures, in relatively quick succession, undermined public confidence in polling and made many question what they thought they knew about politics.

But, while those results were seen as enormous shocks, the polling errors were not statistically huge.

Mr Trump performed about 2 per cent better than the national polls suggested he would in 2016 — relatively small, statistically, but enough to swing an election.

The discrepancy between the polls and actual results in the 2019 federal…