Tasmanian House of Representatives Seats Guide (2022)

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Donations welcome!

If you find my coverage useful please consider donating to support the large amount of time I spend working on this site.  Donations can be made by the Paypal button in the sidebar or email me via the address in my profile for my account details.  Please only donate if you are sure you can afford to do so.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article gives a fairly detailed discussion of the five Tasmanian House of Representatives seats, which will be updated and edited as needed up til election day.

Two seats (Clark and Franklin) are not considered to be in play at this election.  Two (Bass and Braddon) are Liberal marginals with a long history of going back and forth and are in play more or less irrespective of the outcome.  One (Lyons) is fairly comfortable for Labor on paper but Labor's baseline margin is exaggerated so it may be in play if the election is fairly close overall.

National polling as I start this article has been suggesting the sort of swing to Labor that would see Labor easily recover Bass and probably Braddon as well.  However Tasmania has become somewhat detached from national patterns in recent years with national swing only predicting Tasmania's two-party seat result perfectly once in the last 30 years.   Tasmanian federal swings still have some relationship with the national swing but it is a loose one.

Tasmanian House Of Representatives Seats Guide (2019)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Donations welcome!

If you find my coverage useful please consider donating to support the large amount of time I spend working on this site.  Donations can be made by the Paypal button in the sidebar or email me via the address in my profile for my account details.  Please only donate if you are sure you can afford to do so.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article gives a fairly detailed discussion of the five Tasmanian House of Representatives seats, which will be updated and edited as needed up til election day.

Two seats (Clark and Franklin) are generally not considered to be in play at this election.  Three (Bass, Braddon and Lyons) are Labor marginals that the Liberals won from Labor in 2013 and Labor won back in 2016.  These could change back again if the Liberals can pick up swings of 1.5 to 5.3%.  Current national polling as I start this article (12 April) points to about a 3% swing to Labor.  If it stays like that, then it is likely few if any Labor seats will fall to the Coalition nationwide.  But should the campaign close up, then Tasmanian seats may come into play.  On the other hand, in 2010 there was a large 2PP swing to Labor in Tasmania even against the backdrop of a national swing against the party.

ReachTEL Says Lyons Going, North In Doubt

Note: National poll updates are continuing in the rolling poll roundup below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ReachTEL: Bass and Braddon 50-50, Lyons 55-45 to Labor, Franklin 59-41 to Labor, Denison 65-35 Wilkie vs Labor
Interpretation: Bass 51-49 Liberal, Braddon 51-49 Labor, Lyons 54-46 Labor, Franklin 58-42, Denison see below
(Poll taken before Brexit and Launceston university funding announcement)

The Mercury has released ReachTEL polling of the five Tasmanian federal electorates.  For my general background to them see The Five Tasmanian House Of Representatives Seats and for a previous ReachTEL from mid-May see ReachTEL Points To Tasmanian Status Quo.  It isn't pointing that way any longer.  There is also some Senate-related polling coming that I will cover in an update to this piece.

The previous Mercury poll had all three Liberal incumbents (Andrew Nikolic in Bass, Brett Whiteley in Braddon and Eric Hutchinson in Lyons) in fairly comfortable positions.  Although their two-party preferred votes were only 51% in two cases and 53% in the third, these were based on a strong flow of respondent-allocated preferences and in reality the leads were greater.

The Five Tasmanian House of Representatives Seats

This article gives a detailed discussion of the five Tasmanian House of Representatives seats, which will be updated as needed up til election day.  Two seats (Denison and Franklin) are generally not considered to be in play at this election.  Three (Bass, Braddon and Lyons) are Coalition marginals that could change hands with swings of 1.2 to 4%.  Current national polling points to a close federal election, although this may still change during the final week.  If it does not change, then these three seats could be very important to the outcome of the election, or to whether the winner has a majority or not.  As of 25 June, with the national swing estimated at 2.7% , my projections favoured one or two Liberal losses, with a possibility of all three seats falling. However, there is really not a lot of quality public polling data for the state.  A late swing to the Coalition could make all these seats safe, while a late swing to Labor might see all of them lost.

To explain why these seats are tricky, it is worth looking at the strange results in the state from the 2013 election.  Labor won 51.2% of the state's two-party-preferred vote, but only won one of five seats.  The swing against Labor was the largest of any state by far (9.4%) but the uneven nature of it meant that Lyons, held with a 12.2% buffer, fell with a 13.5% swing.  However Franklin, on a 10.8% margin, was easily retained.  Causes of the massive swing included a downturn in the forestry industry, anger at the state's then ALP-Green coalition government over its "forests peace deal", and a correction from 2010 in which year the Liberals had campaigned very badly in the state. Both at the 2013 federal and 2014 state elections, Tasmania may as well have been two different states, with the anti-Labor mood extremely strong in the north.