I have recently completed another update of my candidate list for the Victorian state election, and you should now see longer lists of candidates on my seat profiles.
I thought I would knock together a blog post analysing the trends and trying to compare the situation to previous elections.
Right now I have identified 533 candidates for the Legislative Assembly. This is roughly in line with the number of candidates who nominated in 2006-2018 – about 500 nominated in each of those years, peaking at 545 in 2014. But the numbers surged to a huge 740 in 2022, and we’re nowhere near that number yet.
But of course it’s worth noting that we are still almost a month away from nominations closing, and plenty of candidates emerge at the last minute. Indeed it’s not unusual for waves of candidates to appear on the official list of nominations with no prior announcement.
There’s always a few people who post in various places saying “wow, this major party is just not running in my seat” but the bigger parties will always nominate a full slate. The absence of a candidate doesn’t mean they won’t run, but it does suggest something about their capacity and how they prioritise that seat.
I have found a blog post I wrote on October 29 2022 – so a little bit later in the nomination process than we are at today – and it provides some useful comparisons.
I had identified just 422 candidates at the end of October last time, even though the list ended up blowing out to 740.
At that time, Labor and the Greens still had almost ten seats where they hadn’t announced a candidate, while the Coalition had candidates in all but two seats.
Three large minor parties have the most coverage. One Nation has announced a candidate for every seat except Northcote. The Greens are only missing in Thomastown and Warrandyte. The Victorian Socialists now have candidates in all but six seats.
Labor is short eight candidates, while the Coalition is absent in five seats. There is just one seat with both a Liberal and Nationals candidate: Ripon. In 2022, the parties ran against each other in six seats.
I thought I had noticed a large field of credible-appearing independent candidates. The number of candidates (40) is not enormous, compared to the 120 candidates who ran in 2022. But compared to the 32 candidates in the race in early October last time, or the 48 candidates announced by late October, these numbers seem roughly on par.
The gender trends are not surprising – One Nation is overhwelmingly male, while Labor and the Greens have a majority of female candidates. Animal Justice is almost entirely running women.
With five groups running candidates in most seats, there isn’t much variation in the size of the field in each seat. Warrandyte has just three candidates, with four other seats having only four candidates. Sydenham has ten candidates and Melbourne has nine. Albert Park, Benambra, Broadmeadows and Macedon all have eight.
I am also interested in the spread of candidates between parties. Just eleven parties have candidates announced so far. This compares to twenty in 2022.
Now it is possible that a number of small parties will announce a handful of candidates at the last minute – 24 parties are currently registered for Victorian elections. But there are other reasons to think the field might be narrowed in terms of the range of parties.
When looking at Legislative Council tickets, the number of groups with announced candidates varies from seven to nine. There have still not been announcements of the Labor tickets, so you can add at least one to each group. This compares to 2022 when the same 22 parties ran in all eight regions.
Again, there may be groups that emerge with candidates at the last minute, but I suspect we will see shrunken Legislative Council ballot papers, with potentially some parties focusing on one or a handful of regions rather than running statewide.
We have seen these trends at a federal level – more candidates running for a smaller number of parties, and shrinking upper house ballots. Those smaller ballots will reduce the impact of vote exhaustion, with voters asked to number at least five boxes.
