Effective Vote Spreading: Labor's Hidden Hero At The 2022 Federal Election

This article is about two incorrect narratives about the 2022 election.  I commonly see false claims on social media that Labor only won the 2022 election - not just in majority but at all -because of Green and teal preferences.  These claims are made by certain right-wing posters, mostly of the silly and Trumpy variety, who seek to delegitimise the result because the primary vote winner didn't win the election and the winner's primary vote was unusually low.  But there is another narrative that is more mainstream, which is that while Labor's win was fair enough, the Coalition was hard done by in seat terms because of its seat losses to teal independents.  I show here that that narrative is not really true either, and that the real reason the Coalition's seat share was so bad compared to Labor's was that its vote was poorly distributed in the classic two-party seats.  Most of this article is very numbery so it's been graded Wonk Factor 3/5.

Of course, Greens voter preferences do greatly benefit Labor, and had Green voter preferences split 50-50 Labor would not have won ten seats that it did, and who knows who would have governed in that mess.  But Green preferences favouring Labor is simply part of the scenery, and some other parties' preferences assist the Coalition.  The Coalition only "leads" on primary votes because it is a coalition of two parties that, after decades of fighting each other in some states, choose to mostly work together instead of wasting resources competing everywhere.  Labor and the Greens could sort out their differences and make a similar arrangement if there was any strategic point in doing so, but in their case there currently isn't.  

As concerns teals (whether they won or not), while their 2PP preferences heavily favoured Labor, in most seats where they ran that did not help Labor since Labor failed to make the final two.  This included seven seats that teal independents won, and six where independents who were generally teal-adjacent made the final two but lost.  Yes there were some seats where such candidates were cut out and the contests finished as classic Labor vs Coalition contests, and yes teal preferences helped Labor in those.  But Labor mostly didn't win those anyway (Boothby is one they did win), and there is not a single one where Labor won but would have lost had the teal voters' preferences split 50-50.  In strategic terms the teals were a nuisance to the Coalition, forcing them to fight a second front and making criticisms that may have driven votes to Labor in other seats.  In terms of votes actually polled, however, all they did was take six seats from the Coalition in an election it had already lost outright.  Labor won 72 classic seats where it did not need an edge on their preferences, plus five seats where the Coalition was excluded in lopsided Labor vs Greens contests.