Throughout this week, and perhaps the next, I will be posting booth maps for interesting seats, or clusters of seats. I will be doing this while also tracking the election results as seats continue to be called. But these maps generally just show the ordinary election day votes, so shouldn’t change much, outside of corrections.
For today’s post I’m starting in the inner north of Melbourne. There are three seats in this area that were Labor vs Greens contests this year: Melbourne, Wills and Cooper.
The first layer of the map shows the 2CP swing. I should note here this is my own calculated swing. The AEC had issues with properly calculating the previous 2CP in thirteen seats where new areas were added to a non-classic seat, which I explained here. When I first made this map using the raw AEC swings, it showed big swings to the Greens in the parts of Wills that were previously in Melbourne, rather than swings against.
This layer is fascinating, because the Greens actually gained swings in lots of places. Small swings were made in much of Cooper, but not at the southern end, particularly those bits added from Melbourne. There were also big swings against the Greens in the areas moved from Melbourne to Wills, but the Greens gained swings everywhere else in the seat. After all, the Greens did get closer to winning Wills, so you’d expect positive swings. There were enormous double digit swings to the Greens in the northern end of the seat, around Fawkner and Gilroy.
Every single booth in Melbourne has a swing against the Greens, with the biggest swings around Richmond.
The pattern is interesting if you look at the 2CP percentages. The Greens still won all of the booths in the south-eastern corner of Wills, despite the swings to Labor. In Melbourne there is a clear east-west divide, with Richmond and the newly-added areas south of the river giving Labor a majority. Despite the large swings to the Greens, Labor still won the northernmost booths, but not by quite as much.
Finally I’ve included maps showing the Greens primary vote swing and percentage. Probably the most interesting is that while the Greens 2CP was similar in Richmond and south of the river, the Greens primary was much lower south of the river. This seems to be due to a higher Liberal primary vote south of the river. While many of these votes would have flowed to Labor, they didn’t flow by anywhere near 100% and thus it contributed to a higher Greens 2CP relative to the primary vote than they achieved in Richmond.
If you have suggestions of other seats (or a cluster of geographically and thematically linked seats) please let me know.