Speculation is rife that the Tasmanian premier, Peter Gutwein, will call an early election as early as today for Saturday, May 1. This is about a year before the election needs to be held, and ten months before the four-year anniversary of the last election in March 2018.
1:16pm – Here are the links to the maps at the AEC:
We’re now six days past the Western Australian state election, and the picture has become clearer in both houses. I thought I’d run through the state of play as of Thursday evening.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I’ve gone through the last two regions.
Labor has won four seats in South Metropolitan (along with one Liberal) and their preferences are pushing the Greens over the top for the fifth seat, but only by a slim margin over the Liberal Democrats.
Ben is joined by William Bowe of the Poll Bludger to discuss Labor’s massive landslide victory in yesterday’s Western Australian state election, including running through each of the six upper house contests.
In this post I run through the current state of the estimated preference distributions for four of the six upper house regions. I’ve run out of time to analyse the last two (South Metropolitan and South West) before my podcast recording timeslot so I will return to those tonight.
The result in the lower house in yesterday’s Western Australian state election was overwhelming and shows how the single-member voting system can produce massive lopsided majorities when a party wins big.
6:58pm – In Kalgoorlie, which the Liberal Party holds by a 6.2% margin, the Labor vote is up by 26.3% off four booths.
6:57pm – In Darling Range, where Labor won in 2017 before losing the 2018 by-election, the Labor primary vote is up by about 9% compared to the 2017 victory, with four booths reporting. Looks like a Labor gain or retain, depending on how you define it.
It’s now 8am in Western Australia, and polls have just opened for election day. We’re expecting a record low proportion of Western Australian voters casting their vote on election day, thanks to record numbers of pre-poll and postal votes.
Election day is tomorrow in Western Australia.
We haven’t had any more proper polling since the Newspoll three weeks ago which gave Labor 68% of the two-party-preferred vote. Overall, we haven’t had much polling for this election. It’s quite likely that 68% poll is an outlier, but we don’t really have much else.