It’s a close-run thing, but I’ve now published a guide to the Callide state by-election to be held this Saturday, 18 June, in Queensland. I won’t be doing live results on Saturday night, but there has been a lively conversation on the Callide 2020 page which has now moved over to the new page.
There’s a lot to be learned about the trends in this election by looking at how the largest party groupings performed in the two Houses. While the major parties generally polled a lower vote in the Senate than in the House, that pattern varies widely.
In this post, I’ve included a map showing the difference for Labor, Coalition, Greens and One Nation, and you can click through to see the results in both houses for those parties along with the UAP and LDP.
On election day I published a blog post looking at how the crossbench had been expanding over time and how that had largely eliminated the risk of a “wrong winner” outcome, where the party losing the two-party-preferred count wins a majority.
I realised the other day that we basically have all the data we need now to revisit this topic and see how things have changed.
Most people who read this website would have a reasonably good sense of the formal process of counting ballots: the counting of a primary vote, a two-candidate-preferred count, and the full distribution of preferences, where each candidate is excluded one-at-a-time until there are only two left. The AEC eventually will publish all of this data for every seat, even where a candidate has won the seat on primary votes, making preference flows redundant.
Ben is joined by William Bowe from the Poll Bludger to wrap up the 2022 federal election. We discuss the undecided Senate races, the close House races, and the paths to victory for the Coalition and chances for future hung parliaments.
There’s been a lot of chatter online in the last few days challenging calculations about the low primary vote for the newly-elected Labor government, not by disputing that figure, but by arguing that it is higher than the vote for the Liberal Party. It’s been all over Twitter from some of the more ferocious ALP supporters. This has been a faulty logic, because it doesn’t include the vote for the other Coalition parties.
On Wednesday I published a blog post arguing that the House of Representatives electoral system needs to change to proportional representation, but I stayed away from any discussion of specific models. Since then, there’s been a lot of discussion of various models, so I thought I would try my hand at a few different models that I think could potentially work.
There’s been a lot of chatter about the low primary vote for the major parties, and Labor in particular polling their lowest primary vote in many decades.
There has been a lot of talk about the “teal vote” at this last election, identifying a movement of independents almost like a party, and trying to gauge levels of support for their agenda.
Since the election, there have been numerous arguments from right-wing Liberal Party figures that the party should give up on winning back the inner city seats they have lost, and instead look elsewhere to rebuild their numbers.