Bennelong Live: Majority On The Line (Plus Post-Count)

Bennelong: John Alexander (Lib) vs Kristina Keneally (ALP)
2016 margin: Liberal 9.7%

CALLED: Alexander (Lib) retains - government retains its majority

Post-Count

Here's a graph of the 2016 vs 2017 booth swings in Bennelong.

This is quite a strong relationship with 47% of variation explained.  Some booths (see the Tally Room map to see where they were) swung big and some didn't move much at all.  However those that swung big were mostly those that had swung big to Alexander in 2016 and the swing was just returning to sender.  This is suggestive of a sitting member having successfully worked certain communities that Labor either neglected or failed to appeal to in 2016, perhaps because the seat wasn't in play, but targeted more competitively this time.  It would be worth looking at data from other seats to see if the Coalition performed strongly in booths with large Chinese populations in competitive seats in 2016.

New England Washup and Bennelong By-Election Preview

I've decided to combine some post-result comments about New England with an overdue preview of the Bennelong by-election, which will be updated for any further polls that are published.  It's really not possible to talk about Bennelong now without talking about the former and whether anything seen in New England does or does not apply.

New England: Barnaby Bolts Back In

While Barnaby Joyce's re-election was always extremely likely given the lack of serious opposition, the scale of it surprised me.  Currently Joyce has 64.6% of the primary vote, a 12.3% swing to him, and a 73.6% two-party vote against Labor, a 7.2% swing to Joyce.  It seems that Labor are second, although in theory independent Rob Taber might overhaul the 4.4-point gap on the 17.2% of minor-candidate preferences.  Even if he does, his two-candidate result against Joyce won't be much better than Labor's.

My pre-election expectation was that Labor would not get much 2PP swing and that there would probably be a modest 2CP swing away from the result achieved by Tony Windsor in 2016, but that the gaggle of candidates running against Joyce might be able to take him to preferences and delay the result.  Instead Joyce has picked up a primary vote swing compared even to his 2013 result, when Tony Windsor wasn't on the ballot paper.