Ben is joined by Jill Sheppard and Emily Foley to discuss the long-term trend of the major parties losing primary votes: what is causing the trend, how it might play out in 2025 and whether they can do anything to reverse the trend. The seat of the week is Bruce in south-eastern Melbourne.
In yesterday’s blog post I analysed the historical evidence for sophomore surge having an impact in Australian federal elections, dating back to 1998.
“Sophomore surge” refers to the phenomenon of a first-term MP performing relatively better than other candidates for their party, doubly so if they defeated a former MP from another party at the previous election.
I have referenced the concept of “personal vote” and “sophomore surge” quite a few times during this campaign, and in the past, but I thought it would be useful to actually collect data and analyse how much of an effect we can detect from the swings data.
Over five weeks after the state election was held, the WA Electoral Commission has finally concluded the counting procedure for the WA Legislative Council, with the button pushed yesterday afternoon. This resulted in the full distribution of preferences, electing the 37 members for the chamber.
Ben is joined by Duncan McDonnell from Griffith University to discuss the close of rolls and nominations and the role of Gen Z voters in the election. The seat of the week is Lingiari in the Northern Territory, and we also talk about Indigenous enrolment and parliamentary representation.
Australia has used preferential voting for over one hundred years, and in that time the party system has changed quite a bit. Since the 1950s, there has been an increasing trend of minor parties picking up votes, but until recently these votes were not enough to actually win many seats. So their main contribution, in the House of Representatives at least, was in having their votes flow as preferences to one of the major parties.
Nominations were declared at midday yesterday across Australia, but it took all afternoon to slowly get a sense of the candidate figures. I hope everyone found my live blog helpful, as I attempted to summarise as many seats as we could find data for. I ended up collating about 60 seats just before the AEC published their full dataset.
10:00 – Hello and welcome. I’m going to be using this live blog to cover the declaration of nominations today.
Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson and Phoebe Hayman to discuss the role of the Greens in the federal election: the seats they are defending and are challenging for, the rivalry between Labor and the Greens and how the electoral system shapes their relationship. The seat of the week is Wills, in the inner north of Melbourne.
From one election to the next, the swings back and forth of Australian politics can look cyclical – that things start and end in the same place. But when you widen the time frame, things look different. Over time, some place move from being safe seats to marginal seats, or even from being safe seats for one major party to the other major party.