HEYSEN (Lib 2.6%)
Josh Teague (Lib) vs Marisa Bell (Labor) and Genevieve Dawson-Scott (Green)
Teague very narrowly leads Bell, but Bell not sure of making the final two. No direct information on Liberal vs Green flows
The first of my postcount threads focuses on the Adelaide Hills seat of Heysen, which was the Greens' biggest target seat at this election. What do you get if you take Prahran 2014 and throw in a One Nation candidate with 14% of the vote? Well something like whatever this is. Because of the slow count in other threads and the relatively settled picture for the night in Heysen I've started writing this one on the night, and it will run ahead of the tally board thread.
As I start this thread Josh Teague (Liberal) has 33.4%. Marisa Bell (Labor) has 24.4%, Genevieve Dawson-Scott (Green) has 23.0% and Tom Kovac (One Nation) has 14.5%. The remainder is Animal Justice 1.7%, Andrew Granger 1.5%, Family First 1.1%, Australian Family 0.3% and Fair Go 0.2% (some remarkably bad vote totals there). The independent Granger is an agricultural scientist whose online stuff seems somewhat left-vibed, but it's also worth noting here that his total includes any donkey votes, and those will flow to the Greens at the 3CP stage.
Teague will make the final two. The first question is who is his opponent and the second is could either opponent then beat him.
At the time of writing we have all the expected election day primaries in but are lacking 2PPs for Cherry Gardens, Echunga, my new favourite booth name Kangarilla, Lenswood, Stirling and Yundi. As I was writing this article, prepoll appeared on 2PP and Teague trails by two votes (8822-8820).
In the booths not yet counted to primaries, Teague is gaining a net 290 primaries. I expect him to lose back about 184 on preferences based on a regression of preference flows off the Green vote, which would put him on 50.25% 2CP. If that's true and current figures hold up to rechecking, with postals yet to come that would seem to be a reasonable position for a Liberal candidate - but it's close. Through the day I will look up the past patterns on other postcount votes in this seat to see if there is anything here that would suggest Labor can overtake him.
The other complication is who is Teague's opponent. There have been several of these contests (Brisbane 2022 a notable one) where Green candidates have gained on Labor on minor candidate preferences (even One Nation) at the 3CP stage - because the more right wing voters for minor candidates are going to the Liberals, leaving the randoms and up-yours-majors voters to split between Labor and the Greens. However, we've never seen how this dynamic works in a case where the One Nation vote is nearly this high!
In the event that the Greens do knock Labor out of the 2CP I would be sceptical of their chances of getting the same preference flow in reverse. There have been cases where Labor to Greens flows are stronger than Greens to Labor because the Labor voters are more likely to follow how to vote cards. That has been less common recently, and also in this case there is the question of the One Nation flow to Greens against Liberals compared to that to Labor against Liberals, which I would expect to be a little weaker.
1:15 Counting issue in this seat: Currently the figures have Labor ahead 9595 to 9519 but this is in error. The 2PP figures in Stirling booth include the preferences but not the primaries on which Teague leads 394-231. With this fixed Teague would be actually 87 votes ahead.
5:00 This issue also affects the booths of Yundi, Lenswood and Kangarilla. Once the major party primaries for those booths are added I have Teague leading the 2PP approx 10236-10128 (50.27%), in line with previous projections.
8:30 This change has now occurred. As for past patterns, it turns out that in 2022 all postcount votes were lumped simply as "declaration votes" so I am flying blind about how the remaining votes compare to 2022. But from this point with no postals yet counted I would generally expect a Liberal candidate to improve.
Monday 23rd: Rechecking has cut Teague's lead to 80.
Tuesday 24th: And Teague lead now 69. I have seen a very small scrutineering sample based off which it would be plausible that the Greens got enough off Animal Justice and Granger (with donkeys) to at least erase the current gap, though I did not see figures for the ON split.
Wednesday 25th: The Heysen count continues to head towards maximum Prahraniness, with Teague's lead cut to 65 and the Labor-Green primary gap down to 1% (187 votes)
Thursday 26th: Some absents have arrived which narrowed the Labor-Green gap but not by much (5 votes), more importantly the Liberal-Labor gap is now down to 21! We have yet to see any postals which at least one ALP scrutineering source expects to destroy the Greens' prospects. It is not known to me whether ECSA have done any sampling on the 3CP issue in this seat.
6:20: The first postals broke a whopping 911-576 (61.3%!) to Teague giving him a big lead now of 356 votes (50.8-49.2). Later postals won't be that good but that is going to be tough for Labor to recover from. They weren't good for the Greens either who have dropped to 1.5% behind. Teague is not out of danger yet but looks a lot more solid than before these postals. A few hundred absents broke to Labor but pretty weakly (though I don't know where they were from.)
7:30: Absents have undone some of the damage breaking 928-704 to Labor (50.33). Gap is back to 156. I'd be expecting at least another thousand postals and the count is at 81.2%. Labor would need to do well on out of division prepolls. Note that the Greens did poorly on these absents, dropping back to 1.7% behind, which is unusual.
Saturday 28th: One pro-Liberal twitter account has claimed that the flow from One Nation has been sampled at 62-23-15 (Liberal-Greens-Labor) which if true would have made the Greens competitive to jump into second while the gap remained around 1.6 points. However the ABC is showing figures not yet updated on the ECSA site in which the gap jumps to 2.4 points.
Wednesday 1st: All done with the Greens coming from 2.3% behind on primaries to miss the final two by just 99 votes (0.34%); with Teague winning pretty easily there's no reason to doubt he would have won anyway. So the Liberals' 5th seat is confirmed.
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ReplyDeleteYes I understand the correct Fair Go figure was zero.
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