Next up on booth map of the day, I’m looking at two seats that were previously considered safe Labor seats, but were very narrowly retained against independent challengers: Bean in southern Canberra and Fremantle in Western Australia.
For each map I’ve shown the Labor vs Independent 2CP map (but no 2CP swing map), primary vote maps for the independent, Labor and Liberal, and primary vote swing maps for Labor and Liberal.
Yesterday, the Nationals announced that they would not be renewing the coalition with the Liberal Party following the 2025 federal election. This is unlikely to be a permanent break, but rather the parties taking some time apart to re-assess their positions after a devastating election defeat.
The AEC has now commenced the distribution of preferences for the seat of Calwell. Normally the AEC does not publish distribution of preference data until the count has concluded, but in recognition of the great deal of public interest the AEC has published a page where they will post the latest DoP data after each round of the count.
For today I’ve got two maps, covering five seats in mid-suburban Sydney. While these seats are adjacent to each other, I’m keeping them as separate maps because the dynamics in these seats are different. The first map shows Bennelong, Parramatta and Reid. The second map shows the “Muslim seats” of Blaxland and Watson.
The two-candidate-preferred count in Bradfield has finished, with teal independent Nicolette Boele finally taking the lead right at the end, thanks to a very strong batch of postal votes and also a favourable batch of pre-poll ballots.
The AEC website says that there are 59 votes outstanding, but I have been informed by the AEC media team that these ballots can only be counted for the Senate, not the House, and so the House count has finished.
For today’s booth map of the day I’ve gone to Calwell, the most complex seat of 2025. This booth map shows the primary vote for Labor, Liberal and the two leading independents, and swings for Labor and Liberal.
There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the merit of Australia’s electoral system. In response to some conservative attacks on our preferential system, sometimes implicitly or explicitly suggesting a first-past-the-post system would be somehow more legitimate.
Tasmania flew under the radar in the lead up to the recent election, because of the lack of state polling in Tasmania. It was a “known unknown” to quote Donald Rumsfeld, and I do remember commenting that we didn’t know how things were going in Tasmania, but still we did not know. This did create space for some fevered commenters on this website to confidently assert that Labor was on track to be badly beaten, but now we know better.
My last few booth maps have been focused on the non-classic races – the Greens in Melbourne, and the teals in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. But a big part of the story was Labor routing the Coalition in traditional urban marginal seats, particularly those on the edges of cities, with the ultimate symbol being Peter Dutton’s defeat in Dickson.
In 2022 I wrote a blog post where I explained the phenomenon of the AEC needing to do more distribution of preferences before declaring election results, and thus needing longer to complete this process. We now have updated information for 2025, and can see that this process has become even more complex this year. When you look at how this has changed over two decades, it is a remarkable transformation.