2025 Federal Post-Election Pendulum

As in 2022 I've decided to issue my own post-election pendulum for the 2025 federal election.  I've done this partly because post-election pendulums seem thinner on the ground than usual this year, but mainly for the same reason - pendulums like the Wikipedia version miss the point of what the pendulum is for by putting classic ALP vs Coalition marginal seats on the same axis as contests between the majors and the crossbench.  The seat of Wills is now very marginal on a two-candidate preferred basis between Labor and the Greens, but a swing against Labor in two-party polling (should one occur) will not predict whether that seat might fall. 

Also in doing 2PP pendulums one finds out things - such as that the Coalition is in even bigger trouble for the next election than the scale of the 2PP disaster makes obvious.  The inflated swings to Labor in marginal seats at this election have created a skewed pendulum where Labor could lose the 2PP and still win a majority.  

At this election claims of the demise of 2PP swing as a predictive tool were even harder to get away from than in 2022 ... and even less correct!  The overwhelming story of the election was the 13 classic seats that switched from the Coalition (ignoring defections) to Labor.  The six seats switching from a major party to a non-major candidate or vice versa were a sideshow, especially as for totals purposes two of them cancelled out.  There is a lot of hype about how "no seat is safe any more" but for all of that no safe seat held by a major party fell and the only 2CP-safe seat that fell at all was a Greens seat (Griffith) that was clearly marginal on a three-candidate basis.  And the odd 2CP-safe seat falling is nothing new.

Victoria 2022: New Lower House Distributions And 2PP Pendulum

Last week saw some late excitement for those of us interested in the entrails of the 2022 Victorian election with the release of 39 previously unavailable preference distributions, albeit officially unofficial and "indicative".   These are the full preference distributions for the seats where previously there was either no distribution (because a candidate was elected on primary votes alone) or an incomplete distribution (because the winner crossed 50% against two or more non-excluded rivals).  36 of these were classic two-party preferred contests (mostly lopsided ones), the remainder being Narracan (a supplementary election that Labor didn't contest), Brunswick (Greens vs ALP) and, entertainingly, Mulgrave.

In the original postcount the VEC kept Mulgrave as a Labor vs Liberal seat although independent Ian Cook (of "Slug Gate" fame) held a narrow primary vote lead for second over the Liberals' Michael Piastrino.  This led to complaints from the Cook camp seeking something they thought was called a "recount" (in fact what they wanted was a realignment).  Cook claimed that "according to my scrutineers, it will bring Daniel Andrews down a few per cent to make the seat marginal".

It didn't (though it might have done the "down a few per cent" bit had Cook's primary lead over Piastrino stayed at 4%).  Cook did in fact hold his eventual primary lead of just under 1% over Piastrino all the way to the final exclusion, but Andrews won the 2CP against Cook by a margin of 60.83% vs 39.17%.  This was, in fact, more than Andrews won the 2PP quick throw vs Piastrino by (60.20-39.80).  

New South Wales 2023: Final Results, Poll Accuracy And 2PP Pendulum

It's been a long time coming because of other work but here finally is my wrapup piece for the 2023 New South Wales lower house election.  The twelve-year old Coalition led by its fourth Premier Dominic Perrottet was sent packing by the Labor opposition under its fifth leader Chris Minns, but optional preferencing and some luck in the close seats cushioned the blow and the Coalition managed to retain 36 seats.  Labor after looking almost sure to get a majority on counting night (more of that later) ended up with just 45 but no trouble at all forming government given that the crossbench held three Greens and nine independents.  The result snapped a 15-election streak at state and federal level since the last case of a non-majority outcome.

Vote Share, 2PP and Preference Change

The election saw a further slight fall in the major party primary votes.  The primary votes were 36.97% Labor, 35.37% Coalition, 9.70% Greens, 8.76% independents, with the rest led by 2.23% Sustainable Australia, 1.8% One Nation, 1.56% Shooters Fishers and Farmers and 1.28% Legalise Cannabis.  The 2PP was 54.27% to Labor, a swing of 6.29%.  

There was a slight increase in preferencing at this election with 35.2% of non-major party (or minor Coalition partner in three-cornered seats) preferences reaching Labor on a 2PP basis (+2.2%), 16.1% reaching Coalition (+2.1%) and 48.7% (-4.3%) exhausting.  However these figures include many Independent and Green preferences that were not actually distributed in many seats.  The Greens' share of all non-major votes dropped slightly from 38% to 35%.  

Two-Party Swing Decided This Election (Plus Pendulum)

We're now just over a month out from a remarkable House of Representatives election.  There's been a lot of attention on the seat gains by six teal independents and three Greens, and a lot of claims that the old two-party preferred model for elections is broken.  Not the case.  Labor won this election on classic two-party swing, largely because the Coalition's primary vote crashed and Labor's (modest as it was) didn't.  The teal gains were a major story of the election and are a big headache for the Coalition going forward, but they are not where the election was won and lost.  

There is a fair amount of nonsense from some fringe supporters of the losing side about Labor's low primary vote, with claims that it is wrong that a party not voted for by two-thirds of the country should govern.  The problem is that both sides had very low primary votes (the Coalition's being lower than, for instance, Labor's primary when it lost heavily under Mark Latham in 2004) and somebody has to win.  Labor was the clearly preferred choice between the two major parties, and would have won this election easily under any single-seat system, including optional preferential voting and first past the post, though in the latter case tactical voting would have given it a much higher (but much less sincere) primary vote.  Those complaining about Labor winning a majority off such a low primary vote should embrace proportional representation or shut up.  (I may write a detailed article about this sometime.)  

Poll Roundup: Federal Hung Parliament Club Edition

CROSS-POLL AVERAGE 52.6 TO LABOR (-2.0 in two weeks)

Aggregate of recent polls assuming no overall house effects 53.2 to Labor

Recent Newspoll would not be likely to produce a hung parliament if replicated

Significant chance of hung parliament based not on most current polls, but rather on historic pattern of leads shrinking.  

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Welcome back to another edition of Poll Roundup.  At the time of the last edition the Labor Opposition was a very long way in front but things have since got a lot closer.  I covered some of this at the start of a more recent piece but following today's Newspoll, hung parliament talk has become widespread.  Sectors of the press gallery are embarrassing themselves more than usual, while sectors of the press gallery that always embarrass themselves are doing what they do best.  

"Hung parliament club" is my nickname for a circle of usual suspects in the Tasmanian left and commentariat who continually argue that hung parliaments in Tasmanian state elections are both extremely likely and uncontentiously desirable.  My view is that their constant public hankering after minority situations makes majority government more likely, not less.  Federally, there have been echoes of this in Adam Bandt's constant poll-spinning that uses various unsound arguments to claim a "power-sharing parliament" is highly likely.  However overall the federal variant of hung parliament club makes even weaker claims about the likelihood of a hung parliament than are seen in Tasmania, and then goes on to claim that a hung parliament could lead to crazy chaos and an immediate fresh election.  The main suspects here are innumerate types in the Canberra press gallery, who seem to have listened to each other too much (or perhaps to party hacks or low-grade pollsters) instead of seeking any kind of informed take on how to interpret the numbers. 

The 2022 Pendulum Only Slightly Favours The Coalition

 With redistributions in Victoria and Western Australia complete, the AEC has gazetted new boundaries.  Antony Green has released an estimated pendulum for the next election, now looking most likely to be held in 2022 rather than 2021.  There were some slight differences between Antony's initial estimates and those of William Bowe and Ben Raue, and I expect many of these would still apply to the final version.  Furthermore the AEC will release its own estimates later.  But pending the AEC estimates I thought I would use Antony's estimates as a starting point for a look at the 2022 pendulum and how much it helps or harms each side based on what we know so far about candidates.  This article is fairly mathsy and has been rated 3/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.  

There are three questions I am most interested in here:

1. All else being equal, what national two-party preferred (2PP) vote does the Coalition need for a better than even chance of a majority?

2. All else being equal, what 2PP vote does each side need for a better than even chance of winning more seats than the other?

3. All else being equal, what 2PP vote does Labor need for a better than even chance of a majority?

A Token Post About Modelling The 2019 NSW Lower House Election

NSW (COALITION 52 ALP 34 GREEN 3 IND 3 SF+F 1)
Recent state polling suggests a hung parliament (approx 44 Coalition 41 ALP 3 Green 3-4 Ind 1-2 Shooters) - but there's hardly been any of it!

Update Monday 11/3: Polls over the long weekend (a uComms/ReachTEL at 51-49 to Labor and a Newspoll at 50-50) have been completely consistent with the assessments below.  

Rinse and repeat ... another state election is only weeks away and there's been virtually no public polling.  At this stage in the 2015 election cycle there had been five statewide polls, but so far this year there have been just two.  Perhaps they will come thick and fast in the next two weeks, but I have so little hope of that that I think the best I can do is write an article complaining about the lack of polling in the hope that my article becomes out of date as soon as possible.

Anyway, to briefly poke my head through a gap in what is often a very busy few weeks of the year for me (the dreaded "AGM season"), I thought I'd post some comments about where things might be at if the very limited public polling we've seen this year is anywhere near accurate - which it may not be.