South Australia 2022: Classic Postcounts and Legislative Council

EXPECTED FINAL RESULT LABOR 27 LIBERAL 16 IND 4

On this page:

Expected Labor gain vs Liberal: Gibson (included in tally above)

Expected Liberal retains: Heysen, Dunstan, Unley, Morialta

On other page: Waite, Finniss, Hammond, Flinders.

This page follows classic (Liberal vs Labor 2PP) seat post-counts and also follows the count for half of the Legislative Council.  The Council count does not currently look all that close, but that might change.

Three seats (Hartley, Morialta and Unley) dropped back into the in doubt category on the ABC site overnight.  These are sites where the Liberals were projecting to win before the projection was switched off and still hold healthy leads; I expect these leads will increase and the Liberals won't be troubled holding these seats.  

(Update Monday: the leads in Unley and Morialta came down with further counting to 50.32-49.68 and 50.50-49.50.  It is most likely the Liberals will pull ahead or at worst break even on prepolls and postals so I am still treating those as expected Liberal holds for now, but may add sections below should this not happen as the count goes up or if there are changes to figures.)

(Update Tuesday: The Liberals have surged to the mid-51s in Unley and Morialta putting those beyond doubt.) 

South Australia 2022: Final Newspoll And Other Comments

Time for a short post ahead of tonight's South Australian state election, which I will be covering live on here from the close of polling and, as time permits, through the postcount over coming weeks. 

This has been another state election to have seen remarkably little polling.  The only statewide public polls have been two Newspolls by YouGov and one self-branded YouGov poll (the two versions employing different weightings).  The first Newspoll had a 53-47 Labor 2PP lead, the final Newspoll had 54-46 (41 Labor 38 Liberal 9 Green 12 Other), and the YouGov in between had 56-44.  There is very little sign of life for the Marshall government in all this, but it's still within the reach of polling error that it might lose the 2PP more narrowly (or if it's a big error, get around 50-50) and then, perhaps, get lucky enough with the distribution of votes to hang on in a hung parliament.

Using the 54-46 Newspoll as an input, my conditional probability model (see previous article) suggests that Labor would win the 2PP in around 26 seats to 20 for the Liberals (Mount Gambier is excluded from the model).  However, there is a widespread expectation (including some remarkably short betting odds) that the ex-Liberal independents will all be re-elected despite the clouds hanging over all of them except Dan Cregan.  That would end up with a 26-17-4 parliament.  The seat model can't reliably predict which of the seats on 6-10% margins would fall, other than that on a 6% swing enough of them would be close enough to going that Labor should pick up a couple just by luck.  A similar outlook is seen in betting odds, which continue to have Labor favourites in the low-hanging fruit of Adelaide, Newland, Elder and King, but not in any other Liberal seats.