The Amazing 2026 South Australian Election: Final Lower House Results And Poll Performance

SA 2026 ALP 34 (+5) Lib 5 (-9) ON 4 (+4) IND 4 (-)
(Changes from pre-election/notional; Labor gained two seats from Liberal during 2022-6 term)

Estimated 2PP ALP 57.89 vs Liberal (+3.3)

Estimated "Shadow 2PP" ALP 58.19 vs One Nation

The 2026 South Australian lower house was remarkable in so many ways.  It makes Queensland 1998 seem almost boring by comparison, except that Queensland 1998 was there first.  Maybe all elections are going to be like this now and this soon will not seem so unusual but if that's so my colleagues and I are going to have a very busy time in the future!

All manner of curious things happened here.  Finally, someone (Lou Nicholson in Finniss) won a state or federal seat from fourth on primaries; hooray we have lived to see it.  Both majors missed the 2CP in Stuart and Mount Gambier in the first such cases since Nicklin 2001.  The Liberal Opposition missed more 2CPs (29) than they made (18) and were outpolled by One Nation (unprecedented) but are still the Opposition.  Worse than that they missed nine 3CPs as well and even managed to finish fifth in Port Adelaide and Black - Black being a seat they won at the previous election!  And so on.  It was obvious this was going to be a very messy election - a little while out I thought how on earth will we ever make a pendulum from THIS - but aspects of it were even more unique than I saw coming.

South Australia 2022: Can Even COVID Save The Marshall Government?

We're just three weeks away from the 2022 South Australian election and the first Newspoll of the campaign has just given a reminder of how challenging the Marshall Liberal Government's task is.  The poll has the Coalition trailing 47-53 off primaries of Coalition 37 Labor 39 Greens 10 Others 14.  Strikingly, Marshall trails Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas 39-46 as Better Premier (an indicator on which opposition leaders rarely lead unless governments are in big trouble).  Marshall's own rating is a shadow of its former COVID-boosted self at a still reasonable net +1 (48-47) but Peter Malinauskas is doing much better at +20 (51-31).

Perhaps the latter offers some hope for the Liberals since they may be able to dent the Opposition Leader's image, but that the Marshall Government appears struggling to avoid a first-term defeat at this stage is not historically surprising.  Firstly, the government was elected with a small majority and is federally dragged, so it would be expected to more likely than not lose some seats.  Secondly federal drag also predicts how state governments will go compared to their leadup polling, which for the SA Liberals wasn't crash hot anyway.  Thirdly the government has lost a majority it started with, and this is often associated with defeat (though I am a little more cautious about this at present given that voter contempt for hung-parliament games has seemed in recent years to be rising, both in Australia and the UK.)  At some time analysts were wary of predicting state governments would lose after a single term, but first-term losses in Victoria 2014 and, far more spectacularly, Queensland 2015, reminded us that it does happen.