Now that we have the final booth results for the Tasmanian state election, I’ve decided to add another chapter to a series of blog posts analysing the geographic trends of individual candidates within each party within each electorate. You can read my blog posts about the 2021 election and the 2024 election here. I’ve also done similar analyses for ACT elections.
There is no official party ticket in Hare-Clark elections – there is a ticket of candidates (usually seven for the main parties in Tasmania) but the order is rotated on ballot papers. Candidates compete with each other for votes.
In some cases one candidate stands out from the pack and dominates the vote, but quite often two or sometimes more candidates all poll a substantial share of the party’s vote. And when that happens, there are usually interesting geographic trends in how that vote is spread.
Not only is it a curiosity, but a well-balanced candidate share can be advantageous in close races. In the case of Bass, the Liberal ticket polled 3.34 quotas, while Labor polled 2.2 quotas. But thanks to the second and third Labor candidates being finely balanced, and the Liberal vote being more concentrated in their top three, the third Labor candidate came very close to winning while the fourth Liberal was knocked out in earlier rounds.
This table plots out the primary vote (as a share of the party’s total vote) for each candidate, in the order of their vote share, for Labor, Greens and Liberal.
The Labor vote is quite well balanced between two lead candidates in Braddon, Clark and Lyons, but in Bass and Franklin it is dominated by one leader: Janie Finlay was the only incumbent in Bass, while Dean Winter as the party’s leader would usually be expected to dominate his party’s ticket. Still “dominate” is a relative term, compared to some of the lead candidates for the Liberal and Greens parties.
On the Liberal side, Jeremy Rockliff well and truly dominated his ticket in Braddon. Bridget Archer was also quite dominant in Bass. Two candidates were finely balanced in Lyons and three all did quite well in Clark. Eric Abetz barely polled a third of the Liberal vote in Franklin, but that was a big lead over the second Liberal candidate.
The Greens tickets were also interesting. In Franklin in 2024, the Greens may have had a chance of winning if the vote had been distributed between two tickets. But traditionally the Greens vote is focused behind one dominant candidate, with the rest simply running as support candidates.
The Greens had the good fortune in 2024 to have two strong candidates in Clark: one incumbent MP and a long-standing local councillor. Both of them ended up winning.
In 2025, the Greens vote in Franklin was more concentrated than in any other electorate, with Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff in a dominant position. With a reduced Greens vote and the election of Peter George, the prospects of a second Green in Franklin had faded.
Ironically this year it seemed like Bass was the electorate where the Greens showed some possibility of winning a second seat, but that was the division where the Greens vote was most concentrated behind their incumbent, after Franklin. Braddon is the only electorate where there is no incumbent Greens MP. The lead candidate Vanessa Bleyer polled a smaller share of the party’s overall vote, with more Greens voters clearly voting for whoever the rotation put up top.
I won’t cover every map, but I’ll run through the ones of interest.
Bass
Bridget Archer won all but two booths on the Liberal side – just one in rural parts of Bass, and another on Flinders Island, where Michael Ferguson won. And with Archer excluded, Ferguson won most booths.
The Labor map in Bass only became interesting once you excluded the lead candidate, Janie Finlay. She topped the Labor primary vote in every booth. It gets more interested with her excluded.
Four different candidates came second to Finlay on the Labor ticket at various booths. Jess Greene tended to dominate northern parts of Launceston and the Tamar Valley, while Geoff Lyons dominated the southern suburbs. Luke Moore also won a number of booths.
Braddon
The Labor vote in Braddon is relatively evenly split between Anita Dow and Shane Broad. Broad dominates the eastern end of the division, including Davenport and Ulverstone. Dow dominated Burnie and the more rural western end of the seat.
Jeremy Rockliff won all but a handful of booths in Braddon, with Gavin Pearce winning a few rural booths. Once you exclude Rockliff, Pearce wins a majority of booths, but Felix Ellis does better at the more urban eastern end of the division.
Clark
The split in the Labor vote in Clark is remarkable. The division is mostly divided between two local government areas: Glenorchy and Hobart. Josh Willie topped the poll every booth in Glenorchy, while Ella Haddad topped the poll all across Hobart.
The same is not true of the Greens vote in Clark. While there are some patterns (Vica Bayley does better at the southern end while Helen Burnet does better in the Hobart inner city), there is a smattering of support for both.
The Liberal map is fascinating because Madeleine Ogilvie won very few booths, but she tended to get second place in quite a lot of them. Simon Behrakis, who ended up losing his seat, tended to come first across Glenorchy, while Marcus Vermey’s heartland is further south.
Franklin
The Labor and Liberal maps aren’t particularly interesting in Franklin. Dean Winter won most booths over Meg Brown on the Labor side, while Abetz won most on the Liberal side.
It was more interesting to look at the relative strength of the two elected independents, Peter George and David O’Byrne.
Prior to the election, there was an assumption that O’Byrne would do better on the eastern shore of the Derwent, which has always been his heartland, and George would do better in the rural west of the seat. But George did so much better than O’Byrne that he also ended up winning quite a few booths, and the bigger ones at that, in O’Byrne’s heartland.
Lyons
Lyons produced the most diverse and interesting maps in the state at this election. On the Labor side, the ticket was topped by a sitting MP and a recently-retired federal MP, while on the Liberal side there was a close balance between two incumbents, neither of whom have the star power of Rockliff, Abetz or Archer.
On the Labor side, six of the seven candidates topped the poll in at least one booth. Jen Butler won in Brighton on the northern outskirts of Hobart, and a smattering of other booths. Brian Mitchell tended to win in rural areas close to Hobart in the south-east, while Casey Farrell won in the Derwent Valley to the west of Hobart. Richard Goss did best in the southern outskirts of Launceston.
Six Liberal candidates also won at least one booth in Lyons, but the map appears to be more ordered than on the Labor side. Guy Barnett dominated in the north, both rural and in the Launceston area, but also was top in the Derwent Valley. Jane Howlett’s support is unsurprisingly concentrated in the south-east, which she used to represent in the Legislative Council. The other four candidates seem to have won booths in the rural areas between Hobart and Launceston.
