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.
Conveniently, that is pretty much exactly the Labor 2PP achieved at the 2017 state election. Labor polled 55.5% that year, and then gained a swing of 14.1% for a result of 69.6% in 2021.
If these polls are correct, and Labor again polls a 2PP similar to the 2017 result, you couldn’t necessarily assume that each seat will swing back by the same degree they swung in 2021. Indeed some seats swung harder than others in 2021, and it would also not be reasonable to expect that the relative position of each seat will stay the same. I expect some of the seats that had bigger swings will have bigger swings back to the Liberal or National parties, while others may remain more strongly pro-Labor than they were prior to 2021.
So for today’s post I’m going to explore some various scenarios for how the state might shake out for a result in that range.
For this blog post I am looking at four different scenarios:
- The actual 2017 results
- The 2017 results adjusted for the 2021 electoral boundaries
- The 2021 results, with the Labor 2PP reduced by 14.1% in every seat.
- The 2021 results adjusted for the 2025 electoral boundaries, with the Labor 2PP reduced by 14.1% in every seat.
Western Australia’s elections still remain very dominated by classic seats, with the vast majority of contests in 2017 and 2021 being races between Labor and either Liberal or Nationals. The only exceptions were Moore and Roe in 2017, which were Liberal vs Nationals races; Baldivis in 2017, which was Labor vs independent; and Fremantle in 2021, which was Labor vs Greens. I’ve excluded these races from the charts, but they are included in the maps.
I also haven’t tried to treat Liberal and Nationals. In some places, the expected swing back from Labor will benefit the Liberal Party, in other places the Nationals. But that’s another thing to calculate. So I am treating them as a single bloc. I can’t say “Coalition” in this context so where I am sicking of saying “Liberal and Nationals” I’ll say “conservative” with a small “c”.
Firstly, this chart shows the 2CP in all classic seats for all four scenarios, based on a Labor 2PP of 55.5%.
In three of these four scenarios, the Liberals and Nationals would win 18 out of 59 seats, which is what actually happened in 2017, while Labor would win the other 41. In the case of 2021 results (minus 14.1%), the conservative parties would have 20 seats.
In each scenario, the extra 2PP swing that the conservative parties would have needed to win their thirtieth seat (and thus a majority would have been):
- 5.8% – 2017 results
- 7.9% – 2017 results, 2021 boundaries
- 9.3% – 2021 results
- 8.5% – 2021 results, 2025 boundaries
Bearing in mind that Labor actually won a 5.5% margin statewide in this scenario, it suggests the electoral maps since 2021 have been substantially favourable to Labor.
That above chart shows that the conservative parties in 2017 won very few seats by a slim margin, while Labor won a lot more. This was smoothed out a bit by the redistribution, but you can still see it at the top of the pre-2021 pendulum. There are a lot more Labor seats than Liberal seats with margins under 3.5%.
Prior to the 2021 election, Labor’s seats were very evenly distributed along the pendulum. Using the post-redistribution estimates, Labor held 6-7 seats for every 4% of margin from 0% to 24%.
Things changed in 2021. Labor won eight seats with margins of 10-14% (which thus become marginal conservative seats in our scenario), but otherwise their seats were distributed in a normal shape with a peak around 76-80%.
If there was to be a uniform swing back on the 2021 boundaries, you’d expect the Liberals and Nationals to win a lot of seats narrowly and Labor wouldn’t win many seats by slim margins.
This was also flattened out a bit by the most recent redistribution. This has resulted in more seats on either side of that 14.1% swing line, but it’s also increased the peak around 76-80%.
Finally, this map shows where each seat fell under each scenario. If the polls are right in 2025 it will be interesting to see how different the 2025 map will look compared to 2017, and where the swings will be biggest.
The changes between the first and second scenario (and the third and fourth) mostly reflect redistribution changes, but the change between the second and third are all about differential swings in 2021.
Labor tended to do relatively better across Perth in 2021 than in 2017, while they did less well in places like Bunbury, Collie-Preston and Albany.
Indeed if you grab every seat that was classic in both 2017 and 2021 and compare the relative rank of each seat in both those years, some seats stick out as changing their position quite dramatically.
Labor’s swing in Southern River was 11% more than the statewide swing, and it was also particularly large in Joondalup, Burns Beach and Wanneroo. Southern River is in the outer south-east of Perth, while the other three are in the outer northern suburbs.
On the other hand seats like Albany, Collie-Preston, Darling Range, Kimberley, Mandurah and Willagee had much smaller swings. The swings there were around 7-10% to Labor, compared to 14.1% statewide. This could suggest that these seats won’t swing back as hard as other seats, but could also suggest that the enormous Labor landslide covered up a relative weakening of support here. It’s worth noting that three of these seats are regional.
We don’t have the same kind of seat-specific or region-specific polling in WA that we’re getting for the federal election, so there’s a bit of guesswork here, but there is a history of seats not falling in the order that you would expect.
The 2011 NSW state election was a landslide victory for the Coalition, and there was an expected swing back in 2015. Yet some super-marginal Coalition seats like East Hills and Monaro did not change hands. The expected swing away from Labor in WA in 2025 is about twice the size of the swing in NSW in 2015, so it’s unlikely we’ll see super-marginal seats still in Labor hands, but there could be some unusual results further up the pendulum.