The turnout is pretty good actually
The Sydney Morning Herald published an article this afternoon claiming that the recent federal election had “one of the lowest voter turnouts” in the last century.
Articles from The Tally Room
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Swings without Turnbull – cumulative swings since 2013
With all of the conversation about large swings in particular parts of the country at the recent election, a few people have been discussing how much this election’s trends are simply a reaction to the 2016 election, with Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison appealing to very different demographics at the head of the same party.
The great divide in Macquarie and the big swing in Lindsay
I’m writing this post on Tuesday evening. Earlier today Labor MP Susan Templeman narrowly pulled ahead in the seat of Macquarie by just 27 votes. Who knows who will be leading when this post goes up on Thursday morning.
I’ve always found Macquarie to be a fascinating electorate, because it has long been marginal despite the constituent parts of the electorate not being particularly marginal in themselves.
Mallee moves apart
It looks like the Nationals have retained the seat of Mallee in north-western Victoria, but the race was remarkably wide open, with no candidate polling over 30% and six different candidates topping the poll in at least one booth.
Nationals candidate Anne Webster polled 28.7%, with the Liberal Party’s Serge Petrovich second on 18.4%. Labor’s Carole Hart is on 15.5%, with two independents (Jason Modica and Ray Kingston) polling just over 9%.
Mapping Warringah
The federal election generally went well for the government, but they suffered a big defeat in the northern Sydney seat of Warringah, where former prime minister Tony Abbott lost his seat after 25 years.
Abbott held his seat by an 11.6% margin against the Greens or 11.1% against Labor as of the 2016 election. Once most of the dust had settled, independent candidate Zali Steggall ended up with 57% of the two-candidate-preferred vote.
One Nation’s big vote in the Hunter
One of the big surprises in the recent federal election was the performance of One Nation in the NSW electorate of Hunter. This seat covers the more rural parts of the Hunter Valley, stretching from the western shore of Lake Macquarie up to Cessnock, Muswellbrook and Scone. It’s held by Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, who held it by a 12.5% margin prior to the election.
Senate count update – one seat left in play
The Senate count has been progressing for a week now and I thought it was about time to give an update (my previous post on the Senate is here). What is remarkable is how clear the count is. There appears to only be one state where seats are in serious doubt: the last three seats in Queensland are being contested by four parties.
Federal 2019 – update on the close races
It’s now a week since the election and there are only a handful of seats that are still in play. In this post I’ll run through the counts in each of them.
Less marginal seats: the new shape of the electoral battleground
Last Saturday’s election was not a landslide: far from it. While it appears the Liberal/National coalition has gained a small swing nationally, there are lots of areas which swung in the opposite direction.
So I was interested in zooming out to get a sense of how many seats had swung in each direction, and how they fit into the respective “marginal”, “reasonably safe” and “safe” categories.
I’ve defined these categories as follows:
Trends in minor party voting in the Senate
On Sunday I published a post focusing on the chances for each party in the Senate. Unsurprisingly we are expecting a shrinking of the Senate crossbench due to the half-Senate election and the concentration of low-polling Senate crossbenchers, but it is interesting to examine the trends in how people voted.