Prahran – Victoria 2026

@ Local Hack, interesting intel about the Labor preselection. A little while on here we were saying Fiona McLeod (Higgins candidate in 2019) would have been a strong candidate, I wonder if it’s her?

Either way, both Greens & Labor taking this seat seriously and running strong campaigns & candidates only makes the Liberals’ very slim chances of retaining it even slimmer. Rachel Westaway’s best friend in this campaign would have been Labor writing it off and running dead, just setting up another LIB vs GRN rematch like the byelection. Simply having Labor on the ballot alone would make that contest much, much harder for the Liberals than the byelection, but Labor running dead would have at least toned that difference down a little bit.

A strong Labor campaign and result actually only helps the Greens, since preferences generally flow around 85-15 here. Unless of course Labor surpass the Greens, but I generally agree with the others that 2026 isn’t the year that they’re going to outperform 2018 & 2022, even if they have a stronger candidate.

I still stand by Rachel Westaway needing a minimum 42% primary vote to be competitive in the seat. That represents a +6 primary vote swing from the byelection, and probably very favourable preference flows on top of that. I can’t see any realistic way that Westaway outperforms an extraordinarily favourable byelection (held when the Liberals were polling better than now, too) by +6 on primary votes.

I’ll just note too, Labor have delivered ANZAC Station in this seat which is huge. On top of that, the line which runs through the seat (Sandringham) is taking over the cross-city line and their off-peak services are being doubled next year.

The Pakenham/Cranbourne being taken out of South Yarra Station has minimal impact for residents within this seat, it only impacts people from the other side of Caulfield on those lines getting to South Yarra & Richmond. The only negative impact that has within the seat of Prahran is fewer services at South Yarra Station, but that is offset by:
– Increased frequency on Sandringham Line which cancels it out;
– Frankston line running through the loop still provides loop services from it;
– A whole new station (ANZAC) in the seat providing a third way to get into the CBD

So the impact of Metro Tunnel on Prahran is actually extremely significant. It’s probably one of the seats that benefits the most from it, especially since so many people also commute by St Kilda Road trams.

Rachel Westaway is bizarrely campaigning to have the 58 tram returned to Domain Road from Toorak Road. But I’m not sure if she has looked at a map? Domain Road is north of both the Toorak Rd & ANZAC Station stops, meaning if it ran down Domain Rd instead of Toorak Rd, there would no longer be a direct interchange with any of the other St Kilda Road routes, or with the new ANZAC Station.

In fact when trams were re-routed from Domain to Toorak Rd, the local community were happy with that. Sure some of the businesses along Domain Rd liked having trams running past, but I was in that strip of shops last Saturday morning and it’s hardly struggling. Every cafe was overflowing due to it being opposite ‘The Tan’.

Long story short, the Metro Tunnel will score brownie points for Labor in Prahran due to ANZAC Station being within the seat and the improvements to the Sandringham Line. I don’t think they’ll win Prahran, but I don’t think their vote will tank either, especially with a good candidate and actually putting effort in.

One thing that I think will likely make it harder for Labor to win is, if it ends up as a Labor v Greens contest, I don’t think the Liberal flow of preferences to Labor here will be all that strong, even if the Liberals revert to preference Labor above the Greens. At least nowhere near as strong as in Melbourne at the Federal election. Liberal voters in Victoria seem to absolutely despise the Allan government, perhaps even more so than the Greens who are very quiet in Victorian state politics. Many Liberal voters will put Labor last I feel.

Ultimately Labor and the Greens being at loggerheads in as many seats as possible is probably ideal for the Liberals – forces Labor to not only divert resources but naturally the party is forced to look to the left for their voters in seats like Prahran and it potentially leaves the centre exposed.

For the local campaign though the Labor and Green primary being as close to each other as possible helps the Liberals but I’d be interested to know exactly what kind of voter Labor would target here – disaffected Greens or maybe Hibbins-Westaway voters?

I agree with that Adam, Liberal preferences would probably have a pretty even split even if they put Labor above the Greens.

That said, unlike the overlapping federal result (where the Liberals would have finished a distant third), I can’t see them finishing third here with an incumbent MP and state polling that’s about 6% better than the Victorian federal result.

The overlapping federal result was roughly:
ALP 34
GRN 31
LIB 27

If you applied how current VIC state polling compares to the VIC federal result to these figures, you end up with something like:
LIB 33
GRN 30
ALP 28

That doesn’t even factor in Westaway having incumbency so she could probably do about 2% better than that and I think will almost certainly win the primary vote. So I don’t think there’s much chance of LIB preferences being distributed.

I think the result will look similar to 2018. That might sound weird because 2018 was a Labor landslide and a disaster for the Liberals and the Liberals will certainly outperform that in 2026, but 2018 was the old boundaries that included Toorak, so matching the 2018 result on these boundaries would be a pro-Liberal swing everywhere.

I dont really see this becoming a ALP V GRN seat in 2026 maybe in the future possibly but Labor is still les popular now in 2022/2018 even if they have a stronger candidate.

It’s about as likely as the Liberals winning the seat – ie not very

100% agree with both of the above comments.

Good timing in relation to comments about Resolve’s demographic breakdown showing a 37% LIB primary among the 18-34 cohort in Victoria, Redbridge just released a new VIC poll today for the AFR which also has a demographic breakdown!

Noting that Redbridge does it by generation rather than age bracket, and the 18-34 cohort is made up of roughly 65% Gen Z and 35% Millennials, Redbridge’s breakdown had the LIB primaries at:

Gen Z – 20%
Millennial – 32%

That would put the overall 18-34 cohort’s LIB primary at 28% if you were being kind to the Liberals by considering that 32% to be uniform across Millennial ages, but of course the younger Millennials are likely to skew closer to Gen Z and older Millennials closer to Gen X, so more realistically I’d probably translate that to an 18-34 result of about 26%.

That’s far more in line with other demographic polling where the LIB vote sits around 20% for that cohort, when you factor in the state Libs’ overall support is about +6 compared to federal Libs.

Also I think Redbridge tend to be the leaders in the field when it comes to their demographic analysis. So I would put a lot more trust in their demographic breakdowns than I would those in the Resolve poll. That’s without even factoring in that the Resolve breakdown looked like a massive outlier, while Redbridge’s is almost perfectly in line where it would be if you applied the federal vs state polling variance to federal trends.

Interestingly, Kos’ Facebook post about it states that the Coalition primary is “bolstered by strong numbers in Rural Victoria, but they are under real pressure with an under performing primary vote in provincial city seats, Melbourne’s outer south-east and the Frankston Line where many battleground electorates sit”.

Looks like the polling is supporting the view that the ‘sandbelt’ is no longer the path to victory for the Libs that it was in 2010. Those 8%+ margins will be hard to erase.

Finally, on demographic trends, Kos states that the generation that has inflicted the most damage on Labor is Gen X. That’s where the biggest change/swing is.

Sorry I completely miscalculated something in the above post the wrong way around!!

With a Gen Z primary of 20% and Millennial at 32%, and the 18-34 cohort splitting around 65-35 between Gen Z & Millennials, that would actually equate to an 18-34 primary vote of 24%, not 28%. I accidentally allocated the 65-35 split the wrong way around!

(And then of course the other caveats around younger Millennials being more likely to be on the lower end of the Millennial figure also still applies)

@Trent while there’s still just under a year to go, one does wonder if a possibility like the SA Election 2014 occurs – TPP in favour of the Coalition, but with the largest swings in the wrong areas, and lackluster ones in the ones needed to gain government. Hence also why there’s the speculation about the possibility that Labor could still retain government but lose Bendigo East (if it was to occur, it would be the first time I believe – losing the leader but retaining government).

I don’t think it’s impossible for the Coalition to win the election, but I also think there’s quite a lot of seats among the “must win to form government” that are more like two term strategy seats – those that are reluctant to support a Coalition opposition, but would swing heavily in favour of them only after they win government and prove themselves satisfactory.