South Australia 2026: What Can The Right Still Win?

Polling for SA election is very lopsided with right very fragmented

Estimate if Newspoll is correct: approx 1 Liberal and 3 One Nation seats

Off YouGov: approx 3-4 Liberal and 1-2 One Nation seats

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I've been hoping for enough material to start substantial coverage of the South Australian election and it's finally arrived with polls by Newspoll and YouGov.  Prior to that there had been a string of extremely lopsided polls last year, and a Fox&Hedgehog poll in a similar vein early last week.  The YouGov poll pretty much replicates Fox&Hedgehog's finding that the conservative side is split in two with the Liberals bleeding greatly to One Nation while Labor enjoys a massive lead.  The Newspoll is even worse for the Liberals and could (if it happened) even wipe them out completely.  My estimate is that on average for the Newspoll voting intentions the Liberals would win one seat and One Nation about three, and for the YouGov poll that the Liberals might manage three or four and One Nation just one or two; it's possible there will be about as many (or more) independents as right-party MPs.  However there is a lot still to unfold with where One Nation support goes during the campaign and whether the Liberals can improve.  

What is suggested by the polls so far really aint supposed to happen.  The Malinauskas government is only at the end of its first term, but it is federally dragged, and not even by a first term federal government at that.  John Bannon in 1985 was the last State Premier to get a seat share swing at all in that circumstance.  But these are incredible times in polling and Peter Malinauskas is very popular (with a +40 Newspoll netsat).  At the same time we have what looks like a severe disruption if not a realignment on the right nationally and the SA Libs are a disaster zone.   One has to roll one's eyes repeatedly at news that "Liberal strategists" are hoping for a sympathy vote they don't deserve and trying to argue that a viable opposition is needed.  That worked so well for the similarly hapless outfit that was reduced to two seats in WA 2021.  

This is what we have at present:

It is important to bear in mind here that One Nation often don't hold their polling to polling day.  In Queensland 2017 they were polling around 17% at the start of the campaign and finished up with 13.7%.  In Queensland 2020 they polled 9-12% during the campaign and only got 7.1%.  So it would not be surprising if they fell short of their current numbers - campaigns tend to expose their candidates to scrutiny (or simply reveal that voters haven't heard of them) and they often don't have the same level of campaign machinery of the majors.  Third party flops are also a more general thing.  Prior to last night's Victorian Morgan SMS poll, SA-Best were the last third party to lead a state poll (a Newspoll in late 2017).  In the 2018 campaign, SA-Best opened with 21% and ended up polling just 14.1% and winning zero seats.

But suppose the current polling played out in full, what would happen?  One Nation only ran in selected lower house seats in 2022 but they did run in the Legislative Council, in which their vote by seat varied from lows of 1.3% in Bragg and 1.4% in Unley to highs of 8.8% in Chaffey and 8.5% in Frome.  If they poll 24% statewide, that's not going to be spread across a narrow uniform swing band from the mid-20s to the low-30s.  In Queensland 1998 when they polled 22.7% of the vote, their vote in particular seats ranged from 8.0% to 43.5% (and that's without contesting eight of the inner city seats where they would have polled at or below the low end of that range).  

To try to model how One Nation's vote shares might compare with the Liberal Party's, I've used the Legislative Council election from 2022 as a rough base and redistributed the combined Liberal and One Nation votes so that One Nation gets a swing that is one-third uniform and two-thirds proportional from their 2022 result and the same comes off the Liberal vote (noting that the combined Liberal and One Nation vote in polling is pretty similar to 2022).  This is to get a rough idea of where the Liberals and One Nation might lie relative to each other only, in the current Liberal-2PP seats.

Based on the margins provided by Antony Green in his helpful 2PP pendulum here (that is code for me saying that mixed pendulums are an abomination) there are twenty seats where the Liberals notionally lead the 2PP based on the 2022 results.  However two of these have since been lost in by-elections, and with a 2PP swing to Labor of any size will be retained by Labor.  Indeed, as both were won by Labor by more than their election margin, I would treat them as notionally Labor seats based on my "disrupted seat" formula.  I have noted the remaining eighteen below with my estimate of which of the Liberals and One Nation would be ahead based on the YouGov poll (with a 2-point lead for One Nation over Liberal) and the Newspoll (with a 10-point lead).  Leads below 5% are shown with a ? and a couple were so tiny I have deemed them to be ties.  Notes of points of interest are added for each seat.  The IND column shows if there is an independent running (inc = incumbent independent, * = controversial)

DISCLAIMER: Please note that neither Newspoll nor YouGov have projected individual seats off their polls and also that the Lib/ON projection column references only a projected contest for survival between these parties, not who would actually win the seat (in several cases Labor or an independent would be more likely to win).

Here I especially want people to note the wall of ON in the Newspoll column for the seats on double-digit 2PP margins.  If One Nation polls 24% statewide then my projection is that they would swamp the Liberal vote in all the Liberals' safest seats, leaving their safest seat as Bragg on 8.2% 2PP.  But the Newspoll is so extreme (I estimate it at a conventional 2PP of around 63-37 to Labor) that if the swing is uniform Bragg would be slightly underwater too (about a 50-50 chance to hold), and the seats lower down the line where the Liberals are holding off One Nation are all likely to fall.  The median outcome for the Liberals would be about one seat. The model expects that One Nation wins Chaffey and Schubert (it thinks they have enough to eliminate the Liberal leader Ashton Hurn) and takes their chances against the indies in Mount Gambier, Narungga, Flinders and Mackillop (and in some of those their chances don't look good).  There is a possibility here that the Liberals and One Nation combined are only good for, say, four seats.

Things are somewhat better for the right parties if the numbers are more like YouGov's.  YouGov projects a 59-41 ALP vs Liberal 2PP.  All else equal on this the Liberals would win Bragg and (with Hurn's personal vote bonuses getting them over One Nation) probably Schubert.  Flinders in theory, but Flinders has at least one significant independent (Megan Petherick), Mackillop would be tight vs One Nation assuming Nick McBride is not returned (is he beyond even SA limits for returning defecting indies in legal trouble?) and they would be about 50-50 in Morphett with some hope in Hartley and Colton.  So maybe three or four seats on average. One Nation would like their chances in Chaffey but might find independents in the way everywhere else and so might not win much.  I may adjust these outlooks after I have time to look at what regional breakdowns are available.

When trying to apply 2PP swings to those seats where the Liberals should be able to stay over One Nation, a problem is that any 2PP swing could be massively non-uniform.  If the swing is being driven by Liberal voters defecting to One Nation and not all returning as preferences then the swing against the Liberals could be weaker in the urban seats.  But my suspicion is that this is just a lazy reading and what's really happening is the Liberals are losing votes both to Labor and One Nation, with Labor's gains being somewhat offset by also losing some support to One Nation. (Whether Labor are up or down on 2022 depends on which poll you look at.)

This is an opening offer for how this sort of polling we are seeing can be interpreted.  I expect I'll be back through the campaign with a look at other aspects, perhaps at some stage including the Legislative Council.