Nominations will be announced next Monday for the upcoming South Australian state election.
As we get closer to that deadline, I’ve been updating my list of candidates in my election guide.
It now contains 208 candidates. This is not the final list. There are usually a bunch of candidates who pop up on nomination lists without having been properly announced prior to the close of nominations – both random independents and lower-profile candidates for more significant parties. But it is interesting to look at the pattern.
165 out of 208 candidates are running for four parties: Labor, One Nation, Liberal and the Greens. I expect all four of these parties will run a full slate of 47 candidates, but their progress in announcing those candidates before the last possible minute gives insights into their campaign capacity.
Labor has announced candidates for all 47 seats.
One Nation are in second place, with 45 announced candidates, ahead of the Liberals in 40 seats and the Greens in 33.
I haven’t seen One Nation with this level of candidate preparedness outside of a Queensland state election before now. While they have run close to a full ticket in recent federal elections, they only ran in 19 seats at the 2022 South Australian state election.
Often when One Nation runs a large number of candidates, quite a few candidates emerge on nomination day with no prior campaigning. But most of their candidates already have pages on the party website.
Apart from these four parties, there are 24 independents, 11 Animal Justice Party candidates and and eight other candidates running for six small parties.
I have also been tracking the apparent gender of candidates. Labor is running 46.8% women (two more women and they’d be a majority). The Greens are running 57.6% women. The Liberal Party is running 37.5% women, while only 22.2% of One Nation candidates are women.
Only about a third of independents are women. The independent field includes a handful of members of the new SA Socialists party (yet to be registered, as a spinoff of the Victorian Socialsits) as well as some teal types. It also includes a number of former major party MPs such as Frances Bedford.
Overall this candidate list shows that One Nation’s strength is not just in the top-level polls, but they are turning that support into a somewhat stronger ground game.
