Beautiful Losers: Australia's Leading Anti-Bellwether Seats

After the 2018 FIDE (chess) elections, a member of the English delegation told me that his nation had kept alive their proud tradition of always supporting the losing side.  Having voted for various opponents of the long-term FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, England had switched to Ilyumzhinov's replacement Georgios Makropoulos just in time for the incumbent regime to be booted.  Perhaps this comment was distantly in my mind a couple of weeks ago when someone tweeted a comment referring to Bass as a bellwether seat.  Bass, I thought, is not a bellwether seat at all; it's more like a seat that hits the incumbent over the head with a bell no matter what is going on nationwide.  Then I thought, how about anti-bellwether seats?  Seats that have a history of nearly always voting for the party that loses?  I hope to have the time and energy for more central things in the coming week but for now I present some findings on this little amusement.

Bellwether or litmus seats (where there is a long history of whoever wins always or nearly always forming government) are much discussed, the idea being that since they have a history of being predictive they might contain some special insight into where a campaign is going.  Past champions have included Macarthur (voted for the winning party 23 times in a row 1949-2004) and Eden-Monaro (15 in a row 1972-2013).  The current leader is Robertson (14 in a row, 1983-present).   In theory, a bellwether is a perennial marginal seat that is a good microcosm of the nation, though in practice bellwether streaks involve a great amount of luck.   It might be possible to find a better predictive measure of 'as goes seat X, so goes the nation' than winning streak - some combination of average 2PP lean and correlation with the national swing, for example.