Effective Vote Spreading: Labor's Hidden Hero At The 2022 Federal Election

This article is about two incorrect narratives about the 2022 election.  I commonly see false claims on social media that Labor only won the 2022 election - not just in majority but at all -because of Green and teal preferences.  These claims are made by certain right-wing posters, mostly of the silly and Trumpy variety, who seek to delegitimise the result because the primary vote winner didn't win the election and the winner's primary vote was unusually low.  But there is another narrative that is more mainstream, which is that while Labor's win was fair enough, the Coalition was hard done by in seat terms because of its seat losses to teal independents.  I show here that that narrative is not really true either, and that the real reason the Coalition's seat share was so bad compared to Labor's was that its vote was poorly distributed in the classic two-party seats.  Most of this article is very numbery so it's been graded Wonk Factor 3/5.

Of course, Greens voter preferences do greatly benefit Labor, and had Green voter preferences split 50-50 Labor would not have won ten seats that it did, and who knows who would have governed in that mess.  But Green preferences favouring Labor is simply part of the scenery, and some other parties' preferences assist the Coalition.  The Coalition only "leads" on primary votes because it is a coalition of two parties that, after decades of fighting each other in some states, choose to mostly work together instead of wasting resources competing everywhere.  Labor and the Greens could sort out their differences and make a similar arrangement if there was any strategic point in doing so, but in their case there currently isn't.  

As concerns teals (whether they won or not), while their 2PP preferences heavily favoured Labor, in most seats where they ran that did not help Labor since Labor failed to make the final two.  This included seven seats that teal independents won, and six where independents who were generally teal-adjacent made the final two but lost.  Yes there were some seats where such candidates were cut out and the contests finished as classic Labor vs Coalition contests, and yes teal preferences helped Labor in those.  But Labor mostly didn't win those anyway (Boothby is one they did win), and there is not a single one where Labor won but would have lost had the teal voters' preferences split 50-50.  In strategic terms the teals were a nuisance to the Coalition, forcing them to fight a second front and making criticisms that may have driven votes to Labor in other seats.  In terms of votes actually polled, however, all they did was take six seats from the Coalition in an election it had already lost outright.  Labor won 72 classic seats where it did not need an edge on their preferences, plus five seats where the Coalition was excluded in lopsided Labor vs Greens contests.

What Scientists Do: More On That Penalty Rates Poll

In Monday's Crikey subscriber email, Ben Oquist of The Australia Institute (paywalled) took issue with some comments I made about TAI's recent polling in a piece entitled Polling And Penalty Rates.  While I could have just added my reply as an update to the original article, some of Oquist's comments are too cheeky by half - in a way that typifies the general rottenness of commissioned-poll-spruiking in Australia - and I think that dealing with these issues deserves a fresh article.  Peter Brent has also replied and my reply is quite similar.

Oquist's comments concern objections I raised about the use of forced-answer methods in an issue poll conducted by robopolling rather than allowing a don't-know option.   That said, of the two statements he says that I "confidently state", one (“a ‘don’t know’ option would certainly have changed the numbers considerably’’.) was in fact stated by Brent!

It is true that my initial response (on Twitter) that most voters who went for the "stay the same" option would actually have no opinion was overconfident and probably incorrect, but I'd already said that in my article which Oquist links to, so here Oquist is flogging a horse that has already run away, which must be convenient for him. Oh, except that anyone with enough attention span to read my article that he links to will see that this is so!  The problem remains that some substantial number of respondents would have had no actual view, and that these were forced to give an answer (or hang up) and then claimed (by TAI) as supporters of the existing system.  I add that when questions like this have an available "meh!" option ("stay the same"), it is likely some voters would take it when they really had no clue, even with an undecided option included.