Eden-Monaro By-Election 2020: How Loseable Is It?

EDEN-MONARO (NSW, ALP 0.85%)
By-election July 4th
Cause of by-election: resignation (citing health reasons) of Mike Kelly (ALP)
Outlook: It's a weird one, and so anything could happen.  For what it's worth, historical patterns slightly favour Labor.

Welcome to my pre-analysis page for the Eden-Monaro by-election.  I expect to have a live page on election night, but starting late (say 8 pm) because of a clash with something else.

There are two main narratives about this by-election as the parties compete for the role of underdog and try to manage expectations in advance.  The first is that the loss of an opposition seat to an incumbent government in a federal by-election is literally a once in a century event (it happened for the only time in 1920) and that therefore a government win is unrealistic.  The second is that the seat's marginal nature combined with the high personal vote of outgoing ALP incumbent Mike Kelly makes the seat extremely difficult to defend in the current environment.  I argue here that both these narratives are wrong.   The by-election is much more loseable than the "100 years" history suggests, but all of the arguments as to why it could be lost have at times been overplayed.

If you want a go at picking the outcome yourself, there's a Not-A-Poll in the sidebar, running until polls close.  (As of 4 pm 4 July, the average forecast on this site was 50.89% to Labor, ie zero swing, with one voter predicting a non-major party winner. This site's reader base skews fairly heavily to the left.)