2018 South Australia Election Wrapup And Postcount

SEATS APPARENTLY WON LIB 25 ALP 19 IND 3
(Mawson was in doubt but retained by Labor) 
Expected Legislative Council result 4 Liberal, 4 Labor, 2 SA-BEST, 1 Green

This thread will provide some general comments on the South Australian election and will also follow the post-counting in the few seats in doubt.  The post-counting comments will not be updated all that regularly as I took three days off work to follow the Tasmanian post-count and should probably get back to earning some money.  I'll try to check every day or so to see if there's anything worth noting.

The Liberal Opposition led by Steven Marshall has won the election, and is more or less certain to have an outright majority.  If it did fall short in a seat somewhere because of some freakish postcount result, Troy Bell could be counted on for support.

This is only the seventh case since 1969 of an Opposition winning an election while the same party is in power federally; for the previous six see here.  On the other hand, it confirms two other historic patterns: that governments no longer seem to go on forever (it is now 32 years since any state or federal government older than 16 years was returned) and that unpopular state premiers don't get re-elected.



At least on the figures for the classic (Labor vs Liberal) seats, the Weatherill government appears to have received a small swing back to it from its somehow winning 2014 2PP of 47%.  On raw figures the swing back is 1.7% but after declaration votes I expect it to drop back to around 1.2% (I may attempt a 2PP estimate at that time). However, much of the swing to the government was wasted in safe seats such as Croydon, Elizabeth, Kaurna, Playford and Reynell.  As a result the swing back does not seem to have delivered any net seat gain at all.

Much will be said about the failure of the SA-BEST party, which started off polling incredibly well but continued to tank through the campaign and has won at most one seat.  Following a similar failure by One Nation in Queensland the issue will be whether minor party uprisings are failing because of mistakes by the parties in campaigning, or whether the two-party system is so stacked against them when it comes to single-seat contests that they have no chance.

Poll Accuracy

This was a rather bad election for opinion polling.  The final Newspoll had the Liberals on 34% but the Liberals are currently on 37.4% and likely to finish close to 38% should postcount patterns from 2014 hold.  While the continual sliding in the SA-BEST vote meant that SA-BEST was probably still shedding votes even after the final poll was taken, the Newspoll overestimated third parties generally, also having the combined Greens and Others vote around three points too high.

Whether the final ReachTEL was any better is hard to say.  Perhaps it was, but the innumerate presentation of the poll by clueless Sky News presenters lumped the ReachTEL "undecided" vote (in reality voters with a soft preference for a party who should be allocated to that party) in with Others.  Had they not done this, it's possible the poll would have shown a more accurate picture of the total major party vote, though it is unlikely it would have had the major party gap any more accurate.  Once upon a time ReachTEL used to promptly publish full details of its media polling on its site and it's a pity this is generally no longer done.

As for seat polling, the YouGov-Galaxy series during the campaign did correctly predict the winner in nine out of eleven polls taken.  (I count a 50-50 2PP as correct if the margin lands within two points either way.)  However some of these were easy targets and the average error on the winner's 2PP is currently running at just over four points.  These errors aren't confined to the non-classic contests affected by the SA-BEST nosedive, with 5-point errors also in Lee and Morphett.    The less said about the pre-campaign seatpolls, the better.

As for statewide 2PP polling, I can't comment on it because there wasn't any.  One would have thought this was a fine opportunity for someone to test whether respondent preferencing could obtain an accurate outcome; apparently not.

Postcount 

ECSA is expediting postcounting in Adelaide, Mawson, Newland and Heysen, so we should get progress on them on Monday; for the rest things won't get serious until Tuesday.  The most important thing to know here is that post-counting in SA typically favours the Liberals.  In 2014 their 2PP rose by an average of 0.5 points per seat.  There were only six classic seats where it fell at all, and in four of these the drop was trivial (Light with 0.5% was the largest Liberal fall).  There were some seats where the Liberals gained greatly on the 2014 postcount, such as Giles where they gained three points.

In a few seats - but fewer than I feared - the ECSA has the wrong pair of candidates for the two-party count and will have to realign the two-party count (when this will happen I don't know).  This is the case in Gibson and Morialta, and possibly in Hartley where Nick Xenophon could be overtaken by Labor on Greens preferences.  Looking at the 2016 federal election, I've found that Labor candidates gained on Xenophon candidates using Green preferences in most but not all cases, with the maximum gain rate being about 0.4 votes/preference.  In some cases, Xenophon candidates gained (Greens voters aren't big card-followers), so Xenophon isn't certain to be overtaken.  In Heysen it's unlikely on that basis that Labor would get into second.

Seats that I - at some stage -  consider to be in any significant level of doubt (or just interest) will be listed individually with comments below.  Because of the large size of the postcount and the potential for the redistribution to interfere with post-count patterns it is possible new seats will be added to this list.

Adelaide

This seat was barely mentioned all night but finished with Rachel Sanderson (Lib) leading Jo Chapley (ALP) by just 67 votes (50.22% 2PP).  In 2014 the Liberals gained by 0.77 points in the postcount so if anything like that happens again they will win easily.

Sunday 4:45: Antony Green has tweeted that Labor are now 125 ahead, following corrections during checking including a significantly incorrect figure at one booth. That lead would be unlikely to survive the postcount based on past patterns.

Monday night: Sanderson has gone to a 539 vote lead (51.5%) and while that doesn't include absents yet so while there is some room for recovery that is pretty much the end of that one.

Mawson

This is a greatly redistributed seat where Leon Bignell (Labor) is trying to hang on despite it having a notional Liberal margin of 4.2%.  As widely expected he's given it a very good shake and at the end of election night leads by 387 votes (51.19% 2PP).  That might sound enough but the difficulty for Bignell is that his seat includes redistributed parts of the seat of Finniss, where there was a 1.4% shift in post-counting in the Liberals' favour in 2014.  I suspect that one particular ex-Finniss component that is now in Mawson, Kangaroo Island, might have had a lot to do with that.  This one is worth keeping an eye on to see what the postcount shift is in 2018 with the possibility of it being enough to turn around Bignell's lead.

It is easy to project this as an easy win to the Liberals' Andy Gilfillan if one assumes that a larger post-count means a larger swing to the Liberals, especially given the areas now included in the electorate, but generally in my experience this assumption is unsound.  Postals are the main cause of Liberals gaining in post-counting, but it is actually prepolls that continue to increase.

Monday night: The gap closed to 189 votes (50.5%) for Bignell on postals and prepolls that have been counted - that should be the worst of it but doesn't necessarily mean that he is safe yet.

Tuesday: Bignell lead cut to 90 votes today.

Wednesday: Counting of absents improved Bignell's lead to 198 (50.5% again) which may well be enough as there shouldn't be that much left to throw.  However I don't know how many votes are left.  Informed poster Wakefield on Poll Bludger suggests there could be 1750 or so to throw, which would require about a 56-44 split to Gilfillan.

Thursday: We're up to 89% counted now and with Bignell's lead now at 184 he looks safe.  Earlier today it was reported there are about 600 votes to go.

Saturday: 92% counted (I expect that's the end or very nearly so) and Bignell's lead shrank to 114 but enough to hold on.

Newland

This is another redistributed seat where religious conservative Labor MP Tom Kenyon has had his seat turned into a notional Liberal marginal.  At the end of election night Kenyon trails Richard Harvey (Lib) by 298 votes (50.93% to Liberal) and the ABC coverage reported he had conceded.  However, conceding doesn't affect the count.  In 2014 the Liberals made a 0.3% gain on the 2PP during the postcount; one expects something similar this time as well and that the Liberals will win the seat easily, but just in terms of the reasonably close margin I'll keep an eye on it in case Labor makes any progress.

Update Sunday evening: addition of "ticket votes" (these are votes that would otherwise have been informal but are saved by the savings provisions) has boosted Harvey's lead by 90 votes, eliminating any remaining chances here.

Heysen

There was briefly a glitch in the ECSA computer display that had SA-BEST flipping from 52-48 behind to 52-48 ahead on Saturday but it has now been reverted.

Legislative Council

Figures in the Legislative Council race currently stand at: Liberal 3.779 quotas Labor 3.562 SA-BEST 2.268 Green 0.720 Conservatives 0.423 Lib Dems 0.291 Animal Justice 0.256 Dignity 0.239 (etc).  Eight of the eleven seats will be decided by full quotas.  Then the remainder will be decided by partial quotas unless somebody can catch somebody else on preferences.  But there's no reason to believe the Conservatives could catch up to Labor on preferences on the current numbers.

The current lead for Labor's fourth seat over the Conservatives is 1.16%.  While this is likely to come down on post-counting it is highly unlikely to be reduced to zero.  On that basis it is very likely the result will be 4-4-2-1, with the Conservatives losing the seat they won under the name Family First.

Saturday 24th: With 88% counted Labor's lead has dropped back to .06 of a quota (0.5%).  They should still win but one would want to have a look at the scale of below-the-line voting to see if there's any potential for leakage issues (the ECSA site doesn't seem to have this information.)

General Update (25 March)

The postcount effect in the Liberals' favour has been stronger this election than in the past and is currently running at about 0.9 points 2PP.  This is one reason behind Labor falling back further in the Legislative Council count than at first expected.  It does suggest that, firstly, the swing back to Labor at the election overall was in fact below a point (the 2PP might now come out around 52.2 for Liberal, though treat this as just an estimate for now), and secondly, that there was not a late swing to the Liberals (if anything the opposite) so the polls do not have that excuse.