A full display of the election results, with complete booth figures, swings and probability estimates, can be found here. This will be updated with the latest figures at irregular intervals.
Tuesday afternoon
4pm. Ali Cupper has reportedly emerged the winner in Mildura after distribution of preferences by 254 votes.
2pm. No official figures available, but the preference count in Prahran has established that Greens incumbent Sam Hibbins has prevailed over Labor’s Neil Pharaoh, apparently by around 200 votes, with the latter conceding defeat on social media. So the Greens have maintained their lower house status quo of three seats, losing Northcote but gaining Brunswick, although they stand to be gutted in the upper house, where they went in with five and will come out with one or two.
Tuesday morning
Preference distributions will apparently start being conducted today, and it doesn’t seem there are more than tiny handfuls of votes remaining to be cleared up in the primary and two-party counts. So unless the preference distribution process turns up a misplaced bundle, it would seem Labor has won Bayswater and Hawthorn, the Liberals have held on in Caulfield and Ripon, and independent Ali Cupper has scraped home in Mildura. The only significant action in the close seat counts yesterday was in Caulfield, where postals continued to save the day for David Southwick, the latest batch favouring him 145-61 and extending his lead from 338 to 410.
Monday morning
The most interesting development over the weekend from my perch was that 525 postals were added in Mildura, which cut Ali Cupper’s lead from 252 to 189. With the dealine for postals to arrive being tomorrow at 5pm, there will presumably be only one more, smaller batch to go, and very little chance that it will overturn Cupper’s lead. Tiny additions to the vote in Hawthorn and Ripon made no appreciable difference to the situation there, as related in the previous entry. Kevin Bonham has been doing good work following the count in Prahran, where only scrutineers’ reports offer any guidance as to the flow of preferences between the Greens and Labor, which stands to decide the result. Suffice to say that it’s going to be very close. The other potential wild cards when preferences are distributed are Melton and Benambra, which Labor and Liberal respectively have at least some chance of losing to independents. Then there’s the upper house …
Friday evening
Just as my interest in the count was winding down, along comes Caulfield — Liberal member David Southwick led by 1101 yesterday, and trails by 118 today. Southwick is one of three Liberals on very narrow deficits, hoping they might be overturned on the final batch of postals. The damage to Southwick was done on absents — not so much due to the swing, which was actually modest (3.6% to Labor, compared with 7.0% of ordinary votes), but the surprisingly high number cast (5692 as compared with 3130 in 2014). Labor scored over 60%, for a split of 3439-2253. Postal votes have been overwhelmingly favouring Southwick — 2682 to 1030, or 72.3-27.7 — so it will only take a small number of late arrivals behaving according to form to get his nose back in front. But there will very little in it either way.
Provisionals and a handful of pre-polls have made next to no difference in Hawthorn, where the Labor lead goes from 156 to 163. A big day of counting in Ripon (or maybe two — I don’t think I looked closely at the numbers yesterday) has failed to settle the matter — Labor has moved to a razor-thin 73 vote lead due to the latest pre-polls, which they won 2211-2059. There was nothing in it on absents (1296 to Labor and 1289 to Liberal), and Labor made their usual small gain on provisionals (147 to 124).
In Mildura, independent Ali Cupper got a handy 195-144 break on provisionals, cancelling out a 41-22 loss on pre-polls and 20-10 on absents in a race where every vote counts. She now leads by 303 votes, which will presumably be enough.
Friday morning
As the count dries up, the in doubt seats are increasingly looking less so. Labor’s lead in Hawthorn grew from 47 to 156 yesterday, as they gained the edge on absents (281-207), postals (109-86) and pre-polls (27-15). They should gain a bit more when provisionals are added, leaving John Pesutto needing something pretty extraordinary on late postals. Labor’s lead nudged from 236 to 266 in Bayswater, after provisionals broke 120-88 their way and postals went 69-67 to the Liberals. The Greens’ lead in Brunswick grew from 353 to 414 with small additions of absents, postals and pre-polls, at which point you would be pretty much calling it. It no longer seems necessary to continue following Nepean, where Labor leads by 794, or Sandringham, where the Liberals lead by 451. No progress today in Mildura, where independent Ali Cupper leads the Nationals by 281.
Thursday morning
Another good day for Labor overall, who seem to be doing better from votes cast out-of-district, whether as absent votes or pre-polls, than the in-district pre-poll votes that were counted on election night. However, I’m not clear if absent votes are all being added in one hit per electorate, or if further additions can yet be anticipated where results have already appeared. I’m tending to think the latter — since absents are usually the best part of late counting for Labor, a fair bit hinges on this.
In Hawthorn, absent votes turned yesterday’s 235-vote Liberal lead into a Labor lead of 47. Labor got 56.8% out of 2498 absents, above the 53.0% I was projecting. I was also projecting there would be 3792 in total, so I am guessing there are another 1000 or so still out there. These will be decisive if so, but it can’t be said how they might behave — batches of absent votes can behave very differently depending where they were sourced from. The Liberals also got only 50.7% out of 4242 new pre-polls (2150 to 2092) added yesterday, compared with their 56.3% of the first 7148 counted.
Things continue to go Labor’s way in Bayswater, where their lead grew yesterday from 165 to 236. Labor got 55.2% of the absents added yesterday — exactly as I had anticipated, but they were 2705 in total rather than my projected 2054. It was also a good day for Labor in Nepean, where they won a batch of 3673 new pre-polls 1903-1770 — 51.8% compared with their 46.4% from the first 14,903. Labor now leads by 492, and most of the outstanding votes are likely to be absents, none of which have been added, so the balance would seem to be tipping their Labor. My lineball projection as of yesterday is now for a Labor winning margin of 0.5%.
One late counting bright spot for the Liberals is Sandringham, where 4464 new pre-polls behaved very much like the first 9424 in breaking 2489-1975 their way. Furthermore, absent votes were added and while they went 1139-884 to Labor, there were less of them than I was anticipating (2023 rather than a projected 2566). However, I’m not sure if this is all of them or not. In any case, the Liberal lead is now 497, and with only a few scraps still outstanding, this will be hard for Labor to rein in.
The Greens’ lead in Brunswick grew from 218 to 353, but they underperformed my projection out of 2653 absent votes counted in Brunswick, scoring 1475 to Labor’s 1178 — 55.6% compared with my projected 61.8%. However, that’s also about 1000 less than I was projecting, so there are presumably more of these to come. There would seem to be another 2000 of these as well. Labor will need about 56% of what’s to come.
The Nationals have come storming home in Mildura, being overwhelmingly dominant on the small number of absent votes (575 to independent Ali Cupper’s 227), and reversing earlier form to win a batch of pre-polls 870 to 640. This slashed Cupper’s lead from 859 to 281. My earlier judgement was that the number of votes outstanding here was too small for the Nationals to close the gap, and that probably still holds, as I believe there are only a few hundred postals still to come.
Nothing today from Ripon.
Wednesday morning
Labor solidly outperformed my projections yesterday in Bayswater, scoring almost exactly half of 4559 pre-polls added, where they only got 46.1% of the first 8383. They also won 52.1% of 674 postals, after scoring only 39.6% of the 2217 counted on election night, did about as well on absents as anticipated, winning 1132-922. That gives Labor a lead of 165, or 0.2% – with not much of the vote outstanding, my projection has it coming down to 0.1%, but Labor will more likely than not continue outperforming its assumptions.
Better news for the Liberals from Ripon, where 889 postals broke 535-354 to Liberal (60.2% compared with 58.0% in the first 3735) and pre-polls went 393-304 (56.4% compared with 51.0% of the first 3302). My Liberal projection has gone from 49.9% to 50.2%, but here too the number of postals received has exceeded my projection, so if anything it might be understating their chances. That said, the margin is narrow enough that a good pre-poll batch or better than expected show on absents for Labor could up-end it. Swings and roundabouts in Nepean, where the Liberals went below par on yesterday’s postals (360-297 in their favour, or 54.8% compared with 59.2% in the election night batch of 2341), but above par on pre-polls (587-357, 62.2% compared with 53.0% of the first 13,959). Before I was projecting a 134 vote win for Labor, now it’s 26 votes for Liberal.
The Liberal lead in Hawthorn increased yesterday from 53 to 235, but only postals were added, and these were slightly less favourable to the Liberals than those counted on election night, bringing my projected final Liberal margin down from 1.1% to 0.8%. The election night postals went Liberal 1104 (60.4%) and Labor 725 (39.6%), but yesterday’s batch went Labor 1115 (54.3%) and Liberal 937 (45.7%). No further pre-polls have been added, and the outstanding ones may yet surprise in either direction. Then there are absents, which I am projecting Labor to do well on, though evidently not well enough.
The Greens are firming in Brunswick: they won a second batch of postals 442-426, after losing the election night count 950-699, and they won a batch of absents 811-537, exactly the proportion anticipated when I projected them to win by 1.0%.
Tuesday afternoon
Labor leads on the raw count with about a third done in Morwell, but my projection is that this will flip when the outstanding votes are in — Northe is on track to receive about 70% of preferences, in which case he wins 52-48 (I conducted a regression analysis to test whether the existing preference count was representative of the whole, and found that it was). Better news for Labor in Geelong, where Christine Couzens leads Darryn Lyons, and Pascoe Vale, where Lizzie Blandthorn leads Oscar Yildiz 59.0-41.0. In Shepparton, Suzanna Sheed looks seat to emerge with 54% to 55% against the Liberal candidate.
Tuesday morning
With very little counting done yesterday, the chief news is that the Victorian Electoral Commission announced it is conducting new preference throws to indicate the likely winners Morwell (independent versus Labor), Geelong (Labor versus independent), Pascoe Vale (Labor versus independent) and Shepparton (independent versus Liberal), and will publish the results later today. The removal of the two-party numbers from the media feed caused my results reporting facility to conk out, so the figures it show remain those from Sunday.
The only thing I know so far about the new preference throws is that the Pascoe Vale pre-poll count has broken 6059-6008 for Labor’s Lizzie Bladthorn over independent Oscar Yildiz, as related by Richard Willingham of The Age. This suggests the advantage to Yildiz on preferences is only 53-47, in which case Blandthorn would win handily with between 54% and 55%. Independents Russell Northe and Darryn Lyons will respectively need around 72% and 66% of preferences in Morwell and Geelong. The deal in Shepparton is that it’s the Liberals rather than the Nationals who finished second, but unless I’m missing something, it would seem to me that Suzanna Sheed is home and hosed in either case.
The only change in the seven seats where I felt the existing notional counts were following was in Ripon, where a batch of pre-polls broke 587-357 to the Liberals – 63% compared with their earlier 53%. This means my projection has gone from 0.1% in favour of Labor to 0.1% in favour of Liberal. The votes counted totals for the upper house have edged up from the forties to the fifties, but I’m still holding off looking into them in detail.
Sunday night
If you want real detail on the likely course of the late count, Kevin Bonham is your man. For starters, I will content myself with the following projections of how the undecided seats where the correct two candidates have been picked for the notional preference count stand to play out. As explained below, there are methodogical details that one might well think imperfect, but if nothing else, consider it a conversation starter.
This assumes that a) outstanding pre-polls will break the same way as those already counted, and the number outstanding is as indicated by the relevant figures from the Victorian Electoral Commission; b) postals will break the same way as those already counted, with the total number to be counted equal to the total in 2014 adjusted in proportion to the growth in enrolment since that time; c) absent votes will differ from non-absent votes in the same way they did in 2014, with the total number determined the same way as for postals. No account is made for provisionals, which should throw a handful of extra votes Labor’s way.
This makes it clear enough that the Liberals should get home in Hawthorn, Sandringham and probably Bayswater, but Nepean and Ripon will go right down to the wire. The Greens’ traditionally strong showing on absent votes should see them home in Brunswick, and it seems likely independent Ali Cupper will gain Mildura from the Nationals. I was circumspect about this in my post last night, as I expected the Nationals would do well on postals – but it turns out that, for whatever reason, very few postals are cast in Mildura. Indeed, it ranks last in the state for number of postal votes received, according to the VEC’s figures.
Then there are the in doubt seats for which the two-party count doesn’t offer an insight. Prahran will be won by whoever out of Greens incumbent Sam Hibbins and Labor’s Neil Pharoah survives the second last exclusion on preferences, which will be absolutely touch and go. Then there is my watch list of five seats (not counting Mildura) that could potentially be won by independents, as discussed in my previous post. Morwell could stay with Nationals-turned-independent member Russell Northe, and will go to Labor if it doesn’t; the Liberals might lose Benambra; Labor might lose Geelong, Melton and Pascoe Vale.
That leaves Labor with 49 seats nailed down, on top of which they might keep Geelong, Melton and Pascoe Vale, and gain Prahran, Nepean, Ripon and Morwell. The Coalition have 27 seats in the bag, including Hawthorn, Sandringham and (perhaps generously) Bayswater, on top of which they might keep Nepean, Ripon and Benambra. I’m pretty sure the Greens will have Brunswick in addition to Melbourne, and are lineball to keep Prahran. I’m giving Mildura as well as Shepparton to independents, to which it’s at least possible to add another five.
As for the upper house, we’re still at too early a stage in the count for me to be bothered putting my oar in – only election day votes have thus far been counted, and an increasing number of voters have finally got the message about the advisability of voting below the line (requiring the numbering of only five boxes in the case of Victorian state elections). However, it looks fairly clear that there will indeed be a spectacular array of micro-parties on the cross bench, and that the principal casualty of this phenomenon is the Greens.
Trent@12:47pm
Not story of the day. It will be the story after the election night.
…but either way, Lib retain seems to be the call.
B. S. Fairman@1:38pm
But there is no Menzies like figure to do that. Libs got caught up with satisfying this mythical base that they totally ignored the real base
If you take the view that a seat is marginal if the majority is 6% or less, then the Libs (not the Nats) have only one seat – Narracan – that is not marginal.
Is the view now that Ripon is a Lib hold? Margin gone from 66 to 67 since yesterday. There couldn’t be many more votes out there.
Fairman
If the federal election goes anything like the Victorian – then the Libs might go into a 1943 style death roll.
Lots of seats – Hawthorn, Nepean, Sandringham and probably others have seen cumulative swings of over 15% since 2010 – is this unprecedented? 1966 to 1972 might have been similar but not many other cases.
For what it is worth, I was speaking to my rusted on Liberal voting sister last night. Sounding off about infighting, climate change and white male MPs. Frankly, never thought I would hear it from her.
Yes Ripon is 90.85% counted now (looking at the Excel file here). Still the possibility of errors in the check count so couldn’t call it on such a margin even if that was the final check count total. Will need to wait for preference distribution.
Kevin Bonham@2:43pm
What do you think about Caulfield?
James Campbell has just tweeted that Labor scrutineers say they are 289 ahead in Caulfield with very little left to count so it sounds like Labor are actually going to win it.
For whatever reason there was a massive increase in the Absent vote in Caulfield which has wrecked the projection of it as a pretty comfortable Liberal retain. Also late postals have been breaking to Labor.
Labor wins Caulfield, Hawthorn and Nepean? Holy Mother of God. That won’t be repeated in the lifetime of anyone reading this blog.
Kevin B@3:05pm
How did you and William Bowe miss unfolding story of Caulfield?
Labor wins Caulfield, Hawthorn and Nepean? Holy Mother of God. That won’t be repeated in the lifetime of anyone reading this blog.
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You’d think so George and that ordinarily we’d be at the high point of this electoral cycle. However it’s difficult to see the Libs and Nats quickly resolving the issues that are making them unelectable. The hard right seem to be operating under the delusion that the problem is that LNP governments are too left wing and that if they do things like repeal SSM, give tax cuts to the wealthy, eliminate welfare and cut migration (at least migration from non-Anglo countries) voters will embrace them in droves. The moderates on the other hand can see that even pandering to the hard right is a major turn off for voters. It’s hard to see that they can easily kiss and make up. That would imply that either the infighting will continue or that there’ll be a split. Neither scenario would help them win elections in the short term.
The ALP won Dromana (which eventually became Nepean) in 1982 and it included Mornington then.
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/states/vic/historic/1982assembly.txt
The Liberals only held Nepean by 0.2% in 2002 and won Hanstings (which they missed out on this time).
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/states/vic/historic/2002assembly.txt
Caulfield is under quota and likely to take more ALP friendly territory from Prahran in the redistribution.
Hawthorn was won by the ALP in 1952 (it did however cross the Yarra then and the ALP also won seats like Mildura and Warrnambool that year).
Latest VEC update already shows the Lib lead in Caulfield cut from 40 to 26. If those scrutineer reports are correct, which the narrowing margin in the VEC updates supports, looks like Southwick might be done!
I don’t know how likely it would be but I’ve read other people discussing the possibility of the inner-south being majorly shaken up in the next redistribution possibly even with a new seat added which would make the most sense to be centred on St Kilda. If that were to happen it would basically create one very safe new Labor seat (actually, more likely a marginal Labor v Greens seat like Northcote & Brunswick with Liberals third) but at the expense of the ALP/Greens vote in Albert Park, Prahran & Caulfield.
@Max
Everything a party suffers a major defeat the doomsayers come out and say they will never recover or it’s an existential crisis etc etc.
Examples: Labor federally in 1966, 1975, 1977 and 1996; Labor Victoria in 1992, LNP Victoria 2002, LNP NSW 1978 (when Labor won 58% of the primary, yes primary, vote) and again 1981, Queensland Labor 2012.
Yet they always come back and sometimes very quickly.
Prahran is going to be another squeaker!
Pharoah’s primary lead over Hibbins now under 400, so it’s all going to come down to the Reason preferences. The reckon the ALP need more than 60% of these to win, unless the DLP voters send a non-negligible number their way.
Caulfield postal is higher than elsewhere because the observant Jewish population would not have voted on the Saturday. So they either vote early or postal. And having been doing this for a long time they would used to postal voting.
As for the postal swung so heavily – perhaps a population which has suffered racism and bigotry does like it?
Looks like all the counted votes in Prahran have been rechecked now, the recheck totals finally equal the 2PP total. It has Pharaoh leading Hibbins by 389 votes at this stage, with 3375 minor party votes to be distributed. It’s going to be very close.
Anyone have an idea when the VEC might conduct their full preference distribution for Prahran to determine the correct 2PP count? I assume they will have to prioritise Prahran for that.
George,
You’re absolutely right.
Brumby obtained 62 seats in 2002. Yet the Libs were back in Government by 2010.
The world moves on and the political cycle turns.
@ Trent
The VEC start with Albert Park and move outwards, there will be no new seat based on St Kilda
The other seat they start with on the south of the Yarra is Prahran and move outwards
Most likely 3 to 5 seats south of the yarra will be abolished, I would not want to be the member for Ringwood, Dandenong, Rowville
I can see a new seat being created around BAss/Cranbourne, another wone around Carlton with south Brunswick, another one around MT Cotrill and another one in the outer northern suburbs
Brumby never won an election , it was Bracks. Brumby lost the election after Bracks retired .
In NMET, from the spreadsheet with 385,000 votes counted (out of 537k enrollments), Fiona Patten has;
1.52% above the line
1.62% below the line.
How unusual is it to have more below the line than above, i guess the computer models will be struggling with that.
There are not enough voters in the seats around St Kilda to justify the creation of a new seat, without the expansion of Parliament. Prahran is 7-8% over quota and Albert Park is 3-4% over quota, which the rest of Southern Metro is under quota.
One thing to remember about 2010 is that federally the ALP were in a similar situation to what the Liberal Party are in now.
June 2010 was the Rudd/Gillard coup, August 2010 was a federal election in which there was massive ALP backlash where they formed minority government that was controversial from the start, then the Victorian election followed in November.
Even in those circumstances the Liberals only scraped through with a 1 seat majority (reduced to a minority half way through the term when Shaw went to the crossbench).
It was much easier for Labor to recover because the conflict was personality based, and the ALP are pretty widely regarded to have at least been a constructive government during that time. By contrast, the Liberal Party no longer even know who they are and the battlelines are drawn between two factions growing further apart and increasingly hostile, and they are perceived to have done absolutely nothing since being in government.
Interesting that that 1978 “Wranslide” win 60.7:39.3 TPP only gave Labor a seat margin of 63:35. The ratio of cubes rough rule would give them a 77:21 win, but the vagaries of maldistribution and rural National Country Party seats probably account for the difference.
Or look at it another way, she has 1.85% of above the line votes, 13.26% of below the line votes, something going on there.
RR
Yes and no. There was a huge swing against the Liberals in NSW 1978 (~10%) but hardly any against the Nats (actually Country Party in those days, choose your own abbreviation) ended up with just one seat less than the Libs.
The hapless Liberal Leader in that election was Peter Coleman, who lost his seat, later became Peter Costello’s father in law and also later served a few unmemorable terms as member for Wentworth.
Trent
I think next year’s election is more similar to 2013 –
2007-Labor win big victory. (83 seats)…………………..2013-Coalition win big victory. (90 seats)
2010-Rudd replaced by Gillard……………………………..2015-Abbott replaced by Turnbull.
2010-Labor win narrow victory. (72 seats)……………..2016-Coalition win narrow victory. (76 seats)
2013-Gillard replaced by Rudd……………………………..2018-Turnbull replaced by Morrison.
2013-Coalition win big victory. (90 seats)……………..2019-???
@Captain Moonlight
all the Eastern Metro seats are under quota. Forest Hill looks like a candidate to get the chop.
RE: Redistribution, I agree totally. Was just repeating a theory I’d read mentioned I think on Tally Room by a couple of people but thought it sounded pretty far fetched.
If Malvern is the most under quota they may just move the eastern boundary of Prahran to Williams Road. That moves a lot more electors into Malvern, allowing for growth in Prahran, and uses the suburb boundaries of South Yarra and Windsor, though ironically cuts the seat’s namesake suburb, Prahran, in half.
”
Greensborough Growler says:
Friday, November 30, 2018 at 4:13 pm
George,
You’re absolutely right.
Brumby obtained 62 seats in 2002.
‘
GG
It is not Brumby in 2002. It is Bracks. Brumby after taking over from Bracks lost in 2010
ven @ #282 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 4:51 pm
Bruddy autocorrect!
Rocket – Totally agree those parallels are so similar and Labor will obviously win in a landslide next year. How the Liberals recover though is likely to be a lot more difficult than Labor due to the nature of the conflict within the party, and also due to the party’s achievements (or lack thereof) in government.
In regards to state elections though, what I was highlighting was that in response to the Liberals winning government back 8 years after the 2002 landslide, I think the situation is very different this time around because that very narrow 2010 state win would most likely have never happened without Labor’s federal turmoil.
So basically looking at their chances of recovering by 2026, it will be a lot harder than in 2010 I think because firstly there will probably need to be another Labor catastrophe to trigger it, and secondly the Liberals are far more damaged as a party in 2018 than they were in 2002.
”
Greensborough Growler says:
Friday, November 30, 2018 at 5:07 pm
Bruddy autocorrect!
”
Autocorrect is a naughty thing isn’t it? It changes Caulfield to Caldwell & Bracks to Brumby. 🙂
Not confused & addled are we?
Ven @ #285 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:17 pm
Ven @ #285 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:17 pm
Exactly! My original post was” refused a cuddle”!
https://www.pollbludger.net/2018/11/26/victorian-election-photo-finishes-2/comment-page-6/#comment-3016050
I doubt Dandenong will be abolished, the combination of Dandenong, Dandenong North and Dandenong South is too big and too near growth seats to be abolished. Dandenong will likely just gain territory to the east (Endeavour Hills, Hallam, Hampton Park and Lynbrook and all options) and possibly loose its piece of Noble Park. I suspect most of Narre Warren North and Narre Warren South may be redistributed into Narre Warren and Berwick (which would take parts of Cranbourne and Bass (which will also be loosing territory to South Gippsland and may consequently get renamed)).
Trent @ #284 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:17 pm
They’ll eventually have a clean out. If you have people of the same vintage still at each others throat after the next Federal Election then all you do is delay the recovery or resurgence.
The big takeout from this election is that moderate Libs did not park their vote with surrogates like the Greens. It all went to Labor. Clearly, the Greens are not seen as a viable alternative. They’ve lost 10% of their vote in a protest environment. They’ve lost at least five of their eight Members. they are going nowhere.
I would say that some Libs did shift their vote to the greens but that was more than compensated by a shift of greens voters to labor
It was a protest of the right wing, no one was protesting against labor. And really it was the micro parties gaming the system that cost the greens most of their seats, not the labor surge (which again was a surge from the right).
Wouldn’t the much simpler interpretation be that liberals votes shifted to labor and greens voters shrunk slightly, but basically stayed the same?
Roger @ #289 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:42 pm
Perhaps. But, those Greens to Labor aren’t going back!
areaman @ #290 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:45 pm
The Greens primary is down 10%.
and in the lower house they has cost them 0 seats compared to the last election. They may even end up with more than they got last time. It may have cost them a seat or two in the upper house, but the micro party cross-preferencing cost them at least that many seats.
But I’m still not sure how that relates to your point that it was a “protest election” when that was only the case for Liberal voters, who won’t vote greens anyway.
GG & Roger – Agree with Liberal vote going moreso to Labor than the Greens.
I think that’s part of the reason the Liberals have such a good preference flow in Prahran compared to normal. Currently their 2PP result vs the Greens is sitting around 8% higher than their primary vote. They generally only gain about 5% from preferences.
That indicates to me that a lot of Liberal voters who swung to Labor probably still preferenced the Greens last. They endorsed a good state government and rejected a broken Liberal Party but still couldn’t put the Greens above the Liberals.
Which also tells me that if the 2PP count needs to be redone as Labor v Liberal, the margin will probably be larger than the Greens v Liberal one, possibly more like 59-41.
@GG
Or alternatively, the Greens vote softened by 1% against a popular and progressive ALP, they got jibbed by the Upper House electoral system, and they’re on track to be the only party to take a seat (Brunswick) off Labor. Let’s see what happens when the shine starts to come off the Andrews government.
https://www.pollbludger.net/2018/11/26/victorian-election-photo-finishes-2/comment-page-6/#comment-3016124
The Greens` main competitor, the ALP, was very popular at the election (except where there were high profile independent challenges in several safe Coalition rural seats and 4 safe ALP seats), the Greens faced increased competition of the left (Reason, Animal Justice and Victorian Socialists, a significant proportion of which comes back on preferences) and the Greens campaign suffered from several high profile preselection issues (after the close of nominations, meaning they could not be fixed). The Greens vote held up quite well considering all that.
The Greens gained about the same amount of primary vote in Prahran as the ALP (keeping them competitive there) and look like having gained Brunswick but have lost their by-election gain of Northcote. The Greens are in a good position to improve their position in the Legislative Assembly at the next election.
areaman @ #293 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:50 pm
Just a flesh wound then?
Having your vote decimated is only the start.
1. The vote is being cannaballised by others.
2. Supporters will understand that the Greens aren’t a real alternative and bail.
3. You’ll still give Labor preferences to continue their good Government.
4. Greens can shout at the moon. But hey’ll never get anywhere near Government.
alzabo @ #295 Friday, November 30th, 2018 – 5:53 pm
Dream on!
Yeah the Greens lost 10% of their vote, but considering the shocker of a campaign they had with all their candidate troubles the wonder is why it wasn’t worse.
In the LA:
– they retained Melbourne
– in lentil Birkenstock land they lost Northcote but gained Brunswick, so that’s a wash (or plus one compared to the last GE)
– they will either win or lose Prahran by the width of a bee’s dick, same as 2014, so that’s a wash
Sure, they took a big hit in the LC but that just shows how fragile their position was: lose 10% of your vote, lose 75% of your seats.
Let’s hope that Hibbins (GRN) defeats Pharaoh (ALP) in Prahran.