Recently I had this question on the website formerly known as Twitter.
I thought this was a very interesting question because while whether a seat comes down to the final two or not doesn't have much to do with how close the seat is, it's something we don't think about much in federal elections. Every vote is thrown by the AEC to the final two candidates, but in some cases it doesn't reach the final two until after the seat has already been decided because a candidate has crossed 50%. Indeed, in a rapidly reducing number of seats the contest is decided on primary votes and the preference throw is entirely academic to the result.
Contests don't get thought about in these terms so much because every vote is present in a notional final two soon after it is counted via the notional two-candidate preferred. This gives a single indication of the margin of victory. It obscures the nuance that a candidate who finishes on 54% of the final two-candidate preferred might have even crossed 50% before the last exclusion then done badly on the last lot of preferences, while another candidate might have needed a trickle of preferences to get over the line yet got so many preferences that they finish up with a 2CP of 68%.
There's something that I think this matters to. A by-product of throwing all seats to the final two (which is a very important practice for information purposes) is that some voters who don't like the major parties become fatalists about voting. Unless they live in a non-classic seat (of which there were a record 27 in 2022, but that's still less than one in five) they can put the major parties last and second last but their preference will still end up helping the major they put second-last. This then plays into the emotive nonsense about the system forcing the caster of a formal vote to "vote for" a major party, when it actually only forces the voter to rank them - putting someone second-last is not in any sane language "voting for" them, even if it ends up having the same effect.
But in the many seats that don't make it to a final throw before being decided, such votes are only reaching a major party after one of the major party candidates has already won the seat. Yes, the vote did reach one of the majors in the preference distribution, but only because preferences are thrown all the way for information purposes. Without that practice the vote would have stayed where it was and not reached either major party. The voter can't really sook about being forced to help one of the major parties win - while in theory their vote could have had that effect, by the time their vote reached a major party the matter was decided.
Anyway, the answer: In 2022, 99 of 151 seats came down to the final two (ie no candidate had reached 50% at the three-candidate stage). Of these 80 seats were Labor vs Coalition and 19 were non-classic seats where somebody else reached the final pairing. This means that as well as the 27 seats where a voter who put the majors last would see their vote reach the 2CP count credited to someone else, there were another 44 where their vote would only reach a major party after the contest was decided.
If 99 seats sounds like a lot, it is. In 2019 only 65 seats came down to the final two. In 2016 , 71 did. It's not that long ago that most seats in federal elections were decided on first primaries - as noted here, only 61 seats made it to preferences at all in 2004, and only 40 of these were still alive at the final-two stage.
Thinking about all this I got curious about seats with long streaks of making or not making the final two as a mathematically live contest in the distribution. For this article, I exclude by-elections, and I include renamed seats. The following is provisional only; it is possible I've missed some.
Longest Active Streaks: Making The Final Two
What properties make it likely for a seat to regularly make it to the final two before the winner is decided? A trap for beginners is to think it is the same as bellwether status and to therefore nominate present and past bellwethers like Robertson and Eden-Monaro, or ejector seats like Bass. But in fact although Robertson has been marginal at almost every election in the last 40 years, a seat can be a 2PP marginal and still have a Coalition 3CP majority. This happened in 2019 when Lucy Wicks won the 3CP 51.72-36.69-11.59 but with the Green vote modest and flowing mostly to Labor, the 2PP was only 54.34. Robertson wasn't unusual in this regard - six of the 10 seats Labor won from the Coalition in 2022 had been 3CP majorities for the Coalition in 2019; two of them had even been wins on primaries that year.
Overall it's better for an active streak of making the final two if a seat is slightly Labor-leaning and has a reasonably high minor party vote (especially Greens). Anything that is Coalition-leaning is likely to be a Coalition 3CP majority in good years for the Coalition, and anything that is too Labor-leaning will be in good years for Labor.
Because the 2004 election had so few seats that made the final two I thought it would be a good year for initially cutting down the 99 seats. Throw in the exclusive club of seats that did make the final two in 2004 but didn't in 2022 (Banks, Braddon, Brand, Greenway, Kingston and Sydney) and also a number of seats having been abolished since, and I found 27 that had made the final two in both years. Checking 2019 culled another nine and checking the years between 2007 and 2016 culled the list down to eleven. Then it was a matter of going back through elections prior to 2004 to see when these dropped out. (Of the seats that didn't make the final two in 2004, five (Forde, Longman, McEwen, Moreton and Solomon) have done so every election since, as has Flynn created in 2007).
2004-present: 2001 breaks the streaks of Perth and Fremantle, both long-term Labor seats with relatively high Green votes, but in 2001 the Green votes weren't that high and Labor won both seats easily and thereby won a 3CP majority. Also falling by the wayside for the same reason is Lyons, which Labor had usually won with one close loss in 2013. (Labor had polled a 48.91% primary vote in 2010 without getting a 3CP majority because there were only four candidates, one of whom polled very little.) The fourth is a surprise entrant in the list of seats with a long run without a 3CP majority; it's Kennedy, where Bob Katter hasn't had one since his last win as a National in 2001.
2001-present: 1998 breaks the streak of two other Labor seats with habitually high Green votes, Jagajaga and Franklin. In both of these Labor had polled primaries very close to 50 at times but with so little vote below third place (Greens) they hadn't reached 50 at the 3CP stage since the days of lower left minor/centre party votes in 1998.
1998-present: 1996 breaks just one streak, Hindmarsh (won by Liberal Chris Gallus that year on primaries). Since then while Hindmarsh has been won a few times by the Liberals, all those were very narrow, and the Labor victories were modest enough for a modest Green vote not to matter.
1996-present: 1993 breaks two streaks. One of the contenders that people would readily guess is Melbourne Ports/Macnamara, a Labor seat which has long had a very high Green vote and which was virtually a three-way 3CP tie in 2022. We have to go back to 1993 when there were no Greens and the Democrats had a terrible election to find Clyde Holding saluting the judge with a 50.7% 3CP. Also going back that far is Chisholm, a mostly Labor seat with a pretty high Greens vote that has only narrowly been won by the Liberals when they have won it. Michael Wooldridge won the seat outright in 1993 but an adverse redistribution and a Dems resurgence took him to the final two in 1996, then he decamped to Casey.
1990-present: Co-winners with their last 3CP majorities back in 1987 are ... Adelaide and Bendigo! Adelaide was Liberal-won in 1993-2001 but the Liberals never won it by much in this time and it has always had a high enough Democrat or Green vote to keep the seat winner from getting a 3CP majority - though only just in 1996 (Liberal 49.0% 3CP) and 2007 (Labor 49.5). Bendigo was won by the Liberals in 1990-1996 but very marginally each time, and the story since is the ideal one for this streak: fairly close Labor wins with mostly high Green votes. Bendigo also had a near miss in 2007 (Labor 49.0). Unusually in Bendigo's case the streak-breaker going backwards is John Brumby winning a 3CP against the Liberals and Nationals outright, but it appears clear he would have also done this had it been against the Liberals and Greens.
None of these streaks look much like breaking this year. Maybe Kennedy (where Katter got 48.07% 3CP in 2022) and Hindmarsh (Labor riding high at state level in SA) are chances.
Longest Active Streaks: Not Making The Final Two
I expected that the streaks here would be longer, and they are, but there are not as many extremely long ones as I thought. The obvious candidates here are very safe seats for either side, but there are some factors prone to stop candidates from winning the 3CP outright even in such seats. These include indie runs in rural seats, high One Nation votes in Queensland seats in 1998, and three-cornered contests, so in some ways Labor seats are more durable. However a lot of the safest Labor seats don't have a long enough history to get right back. I found 19 seats that had not made it to the final two any time from 2004 to 2022. With a brief summary of the reasons why the streak breaks going backwards here they are:
Blaxland (since 1958): 1955 only two candidates
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