My guess is that the British media will be fully crashing out for the next month because of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s successful Australian tour. They’ve already begun to create an alternate reality where “many Australians weren’t interested” in Harry and Meghan, or that “everyone” is outraged that Meghan is collecting commissions from promoting Aussie designers. The Times of London even devoted a staff editorial to complaining about the “my trauma, my truth, my merch” tour. Well, if you thought these deranged people would just be content to hyperventilate on-air and write huffy op-eds, you would be mistaken. They commissioned an emotional-support poll to show how Harry and Meghan are terribly unpopular in Australia. You guys… don’t believe your lying eyes, only believe the rants coming from deep within the padded cell.
Opinions have varied about the success or otherwise of Prince Harry and Meghan’s Australian tour. The Sussexes’ team say it was a triumph; their critics say it was a flop. But now we have something more than vibes: hard data. And it is brutal.
Roy Morgan, Australia’s oldest and best-known independent polling and market research company (founded in 1941, headquartered in Melbourne, with more than 80 years of continuous operation tracking Australian public opinion on everything from voting intentions to consumer confidence) interviewed a representative cross-section of 1,767 Australians aged 18 and over about Harry and Meghan’s visit.
These are not Twitter impressions or cherry-picked crowd shots. This is the real thing: a properly conducted, nationally representative survey from the country’s most established pollster.
First, the good news for the Sussexes: Australians knew they were there! More than 82 percent of the adult population — some 18.1 million people — were aware of the visit. The tour certainly got attention. What it did not get was approval.
Of those Australians who knew about the visit, a crushing 81 percent said it had not improved their opinion of the couple. Only 19 percent said it had.
Asked whether the trip would help Harry repair his relationship with the King, 87 percent said no. Asked whether the tour had shown them a more positive side of Meghan, 75 percent said no. Asked whether Harry and Meghan had been treated unfairly by the Royal Family, 69 percent said no. These are not marginal numbers.
The Sussex operation has been insisting that the tour was, in fact, a roaring success. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Telegraph’s Victoria Ward, who followed the couple throughout the tour, reported that the Sussexes’ team argues there is a disconnect between “the negative commentary and the reaction on the ground,” and that in person they have been greeted with “open arms.” One can see why they might believe this, from inside a bubble of curated events and hand-picked audiences.
Yes, we should not believe all of the Australian people who went on the record and on camera about how much they loved seeing Harry and Meghan, how much their visit meant to them, how meeting H&M was the highlight of their week and a memory they will cherish. Nevermind about the life-changing “Meghan Effect” felt by Australian designers who immediately saw increased sales and a spike in traffic. Nevermind about the hundreds or thousands of people who followed them around and swarmed the Sussexes on Bondi Beach. LOOK AT THIS POLL!! The poll says Australians don’t believe the tour will help Harry’s relationship with the king!! Why in the world are they polling Australians about that again? And who said that any of those push-poll questions were the goals of the Sussexes’ tour again? Harry never said “I’m going to Australia to repair my relationship with my dad!”
It also strikes me that all of the royalists live an alternate reality about the left-behind Windsors too. The Windsors are the ones who can’t draw a crowd, they’re the ones getting protested and heckled everywhere, they’re the ones too lazy and afraid to undertake royal tours, they’re the ones fighting off tumbleweeds as they walk into events. But the left-behinds magically always have great numbers in their emotional-support polls. These people are such pitiful little propagandists.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
