At the time of writing on Monday evening, there appear to be 17 close seats worth following over the next few days.
By my reckoning there are three types of seats worth watching:
- Conventional close seats – Bradfield, Bullwinkel, Goldstein, Kooyong, Longman, Menzies, Wills
- Seats now undergoing a fresh 2CP count between clear top two – Bean, Bendigo, Franklin, Fremantle, Melbourne
- Seats where the top two is not clear – Calwell, Flinders, Forrest, Monash, Ryan
For this post I will run through the first category of seats to start with, and follow up with the other categories as time allows.
Bradfield
Nicolette Boele leads by 416 votes. Just over 10,000 postal votes have been counted, but no absent or declaration pre-poll votes have been counted yet.
Based on how the teals polled in each vote category in 2022 (adjusted for the redistribution and Boele’s 2CP swing so far), it suggests she would slightly win the absent vote and slightly lose the declaration pre-poll vote. But the biggest vote category is the postal vote, and that will be decisive. My model right now has Boele falling behind by less than 200 votes. This model assumes she polls about 44.6% of the postal votes, but would need to pick up less than 46.5% to take the lead. This remains very close.
Bullwinkel
This seat was originally a Labor vs Liberal 2CP, then that was suspended due to the high Nationals vote, but it is now back as a Labor vs Liberal 2CP with the Nationals having fallen back.
Labor is currently leading the Liberal Party by just 28 votes, with a majority of postal votes reported. The Liberal Party is only narrowly leading on those postal votes. My model expects Labor to narrowly win the absent and declaration pre-poll categories and narrowly losing the postal votes, and results in Labor winning by 118 votes. Far too close to call.
Goldstein
Teal independent MP Zoe Daniel is leading her predecessor Tim Wilson by just 95 votes. There appear to be a lot more postal votes remaining than the other categories. Depending on how many postal votes return I think she will probably end up losing by 1000-2000 votes, but she may do better on the remaining votes.
Kooyong
Currently, sitting teal independent MP Monique Ryan is leading by 992 votes.
I expect her to win the absent and pre-poll categories, and overall my model expects her to end up leading by about 1000 votes at the end.
Longman
Sitting Liberal National MP Terry Young is leading by 309 votes.
There are far fewer postal votes here than in other seats analysed so far. Labor did well on absent votes and narrowly lost the declaration pre-polls, and that’s before they gained a substantial swing this year. Overall I have Labor leading by 351 votes at the end of the count.
Menzies
Labor currently leads here by 1382 votes. Labor easily won the absent votes and narrowly won the declaration pre-poll votes in 2022, and didn’t lose the postal votes too badly. My model predicts a Labor win of just over 1000 votes.
Wills
The Greens are now 2813 votes behind Labor here. The Greens should do well on the absent votes and reasonably well on the declaration pre-poll votes, but that is cancelled out in my model by Labor winning the postal votes comfortably, leaving the final margin around the same place. This seat is close to being called for Labor.
“Top two is not clear”
Does that mean that there are potentially three or four contenders in the running?
Someone on Pollbludger mentioned that the earliest postal votes favour of the Liberals or Nationals because they are from older, conservative voters.
Is there evidence of a swing to the left (to Greens in Melb or teals and Labor elsewhere) on postals in week 2?
That’s right, it’s not clear who are going to be in the top 2. In Calwell it’s not even clear who is in the top 3.
Calwell just looks like a cluster to deal with. Monash will be a lot easier to deal with by comparison.
Having examined the booths and their primary results Abdo is leading in pretty much all of them (not by much) but the biggest hurdle is that Moore/Youhanna/Liberals are all coming second in different parts of the electorate. Moore in the Hume part of the electorate, Broadmeadows and Greenvale has the Liberals in 2nd and Youhanna in the other parts of the electorate. There’s literally a mosaic of 2PPs if it came down to sorting it out individually, which means a winner is probably going to take weeks to determine.
Whilst I wouldn’t rule out any chances that either Moore or Youhanna could get close (the Liberals have no chance), I think Labor will scrape through but the seat will be marginal.
Hi Ben, re Kooyong, if there are approximately 7500 envelopes yet to count, and the split continues 62/38 Hamer’s way, she winds up pulling about 850 votes ahead. Do you think Monique Ryan then pulls a further 1850 votes ahead from then, or have I misunderstood?
What is it with Calwell? Savage drop in ALP primary vote (obviously against the nationwide swing). Australia-wide this has been a huge ALP victory: but on the back of voter support which is broad, rather than deep. In future elections it looks like the 2PP way of predicting the results just isn’t going to work anymore.
How does the AEC deal with the more complex counts like Calwell and Monash?
Do they do 3CP/4CP counts at each booth and then work from there?
Any scope for a senate like button press where all votes are entered into a computer and then see what happens?
@Alan:
Greens votes leverage ALP votes and vice versa. Those parties stood in all seats, got 48%. Add in various Liberal and National combinations, there’s 80+% for the Majors.
Teals aren’t playing the game, if they were under Party regs, their candidates wouldn’t be able to accept $500,000 from Climate 200, no questions asked.
Get a level playing field on donations, where Liberal can accept anything too, see how the Teals fare then?