6:57 – Bunbury is the kind of seat that would fall if the conservative parties were close to taking power, but the swing is falling a long way short. The first booth has a 17.7% swing away from Labor and 8.4% to the Liberals – the ABC thinks that’s a 2PP swing of 12.4%, which is far short of what they’d need to win.
There has been a common story all over Australian politics of the major parties losing ground.
Ben is joined by John Carey to discuss how you design an electoral system for a new democracy – what factors are most important to producing a healthy and sustainable democracy, and how might those requirements change over time?
The scale of Labor’s victory in 2021 makes it hard to know what seats are likely to be the most interesting seats at the 2025 Western Australian election, or the shape of the likely result.
Recent polling points to a Labor two-party-preferred vote of 55-56% – five polls conducted between July 2024 and February 2025 all gave a result in that range.
Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson and Andre Brett to discuss which seats might fall when the Labor vote in the WA state election recedes from the high levels reached in 2021, and how the minor parties might perform under the new Legislative Council electoral system.
The upcoming Western Australian state election will feature quite a change to WA elections, with the upper house being elected at large as a single 37-seat election.
This has prompted a lot of uncertainty about what might play out. But actually there is quite a lot we can know about what is likely to happen. In particular, how well the various parts of the state will be represented in the new upper house.
Ben is joined by Martin Drum from the University of Notre Dame to discuss the new electoral system for the Western Australian Legislative Council and to look back at the last four years of WA state politics in the lead up to next month’s state election.
Today I’m announcing some work that was mostly finished at the end of last year but was put on hold until the new year, but is now finished.
I have now added a number of new datasets to my data repository covering elections held in the second half of 2024. These are:
British polling company YouGov published their first MRP report for the 2025 election cycle, becoming the second company to publish an MRP during this election cycle. For this post I wanted to run a comparison of the two most recent MRPs from two different companies. The two polls produced similar top-level figures, both in terms of seats and votes, but at the individual seat level there are some pretty significant differences.
Nominations closed on Thursday for the WA state election. The nomination information was published late on Thursday and on Friday night I finished publishing final candidate lists on my election guide.