Better than never, the Poll Bludger now brings you its guide to the March 25 New South Wales state election, containing the usual features: comprehensive written reviews of all 93 seats accompanied by tables, charts and interactive maps of booth result from the 2019 election; a guide to the Legislative Council; and a summary overview page. I regard it as still needing work to the extent that the “profile” sections on the seat pages do not yet offer the usual level of demographic and redistribution detail, and the Legislative Council page is wanting for candidate photos, though no doubt only a diehard follower of the site would be alert to such deficiencies. Margins and post-redistribution party votes are based on my own calculations, which partly explains the delay. For the most part, these differ very little from those calculated by Antony Green for the ABC.
We also have a new poll result courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald and Resolve Strategic, which apparently does not follow the normal practice of this series in producing state polls combined from two monthly national surveys. It is instead reported as encompassing 803 respondents from Wednesday to Sunday, and is thus no less timely than this week’s Newspoll and Freshwater Strategy polls. The results, however, are particularly encouraging for Labor, crediting them with a primary vote of 38% (up a point on two months ago) as compared with 32% for the Coalition (down two), 11% for the Greens (down one) and 13% for independents (up one). The pollster does not provide two-party preferred, but this would pan out to upwards of 56-44 in Labor’s favour based on preference flows in 2019. Dominic Perrottet nonetheless records a combined very good and rating of 45% compared with 40% for very poor and poor, respectively compared with 43% and 28% for Chris Minns. Perrottet retains a 38-34 lead as preferred premier, unchanged in margin from his 33-29 lead two months ago, reflecting a lower undecided rate.
Sprocket
If you can give us a row by row and column by column analysis of that Morgan table, I would be grateful.
thank you appears one morgan poll i missed. average primary difference is 0 over 6 months ,this is different to the 8% gap of the 2019 election.
this polling company seems to overstate liberal and national party primary
and by default understate the alp primary. if you do the equivalent of bludger track just for the primary votes of Labor and the coalition it is highly probable that the alp will outpoll the primary vote of the coalition over this 6 month period.Looking back over elections which the coalition won each time since 1988 they outpolled labor in terms of primary votes each time. It appears to me that labor is ontrack for a majority government… unless something dramatically changes or the polls post sept 2022 are in error.
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Well the recent polling has ALP two party preferred support in a range from 52 to 56%. The central estimate would be 53%.
Using William’s seat margins table, that is a range of from 4 to 12 seats won, with a central estimate of 7.
That would be a range from a fairly complicated Labor minority government (with a slim chance of an LNP minority government if they were very persuasive with the independents), through to a comfortable Labor majority.
What will it be? It’s fun having a bit of doubt in an election. From interstate, you would have to think Labor will win and be somewhere around the majority level. However, I don’t know how the Government is perceived on the ground and how the campaign is really going.
An issue with the link on the entry page map now fixed. Thanks.
https://www.pollbludger.net/nsw2023/LA.htm?s=WinstonHills
Shellbell
Won’t go through all of them, but what stands out like dogs balls is:
LNP 2019 election – 41.6
LNP 2023 Morgan – 32.5
Therein tells the tale..
In the upper house, Mark Pearson (AJP) is retiring – their new candidate is Alison Waters.
Jeremy Buckingham of Legalise Cannabis is probably worth mentioning too – he’ll be chasing a lot of the same voters as AJP, and he’d be just as likely to win as them.
Silvana and Fred Nile seem to be running for “Revive Australia Party (Fred Nile Alliance)”. He’s not even the lead candidate, but he can’t resist having his name attached to it. Here’s an annoyingly hard to read (and find) PDF with some (but not all) of the minor upper house groups:
https://elections.nsw.gov.au/NSWEC/media/NSWEC/Registers/Register%20of%20Groups%20of%20Candidates/20230203-State-Groups-of-Candidate.pdf
The Tally Room has some commentary on the NSW LC
Assessment
The current Legislative Council consists of 22 members of parties of the right – 17 Coalition, 2 One Nation, 2 Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, and one Christian Democrat (technically now an independent). It also included 20 members of the left – 14 Labor, 3 Greens, 2 Animal Justice and one ex-Greens independent.
If polling reveals a shift to the left, it is quite plausible that the left could at least win half the seats, or possibly reach up to 22.
It is worth noting that the Coalition’s relationship with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers is not very constructive, and so this should not be taken as a solid pro-government majority, but does give a sense of ideological trends. A Council with the Greens and Animal Justice in the balance of power could look quite different, particularly if it is paired with a Labor government.
The Coalition won nine seats in 2015 and eight in 2019, so a repeat of the last election would see them lose a seat. This was offset by an increase in the number of right-wing minor parties, with the Christian Democrats losing one seat and One Nation winning two, so the last election did not change the 22-20 political divide.
The Greens currently only hold three seats but are only defending one. They should have no trouble winning back the seat they lost when Justin Field quit the party after the 2019 election, and may have some chance of winning a third seat, as they did in 2011.
One Nation does not appear to be polling as well as they did in 2019, but they are not defending any seats, so it is quite plausible they could win a single seat leaving them with a block of three.
Animal Justice have a good chance of retaining their seat, but their vote is not high enough for that seat to be safe.
The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers should have a high enough vote to retain their seat but don’t usually do well enough to be competitive for a second.
Fred Nile no longer has a party behind him. He will have trouble winning another term, after having held a seat since 1981.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/nsw2023/lcnsw2023
The combined right have 11 out of 21 hanging over from 2019. If Labor win by any margin the left should get 11 seats (50% = 11 quotas). (That assumes minor party preferences from either side of the spectrum leak or exhaust as much as each other, so they cancel out.) That would tie the upper house, which would be… interesting. Getting the Greens, AJP and the Shooters on side at the same time?
For a left majority, Labor need to win with a 2pp of at least 54.5% (12 quotas), which would be right at the limit of any polling. Either that, or they could get lucky with fractions of quotas: something like AJP and LC getting 0.7 quotas and both getting up, along with 8 ALP and 2 Grn. That sort of thing is just about impossible to predict.
The rest of the minor / unregistered parties in the upper house, mainly floor scrapings from the Wikipedia article…
On the minor left, Voluntary Euthanasia has morphed first into the NSW branch of Reason and then something called the Public Education Party. (Sounds harmlessly obscure.) Keep Sydney Open has somehow become an independent ticket for Elizabeth Farrelly. They got 3% between them in 2019 (two-thirds of a quota), so that’s potential extra votes for AJP / LC / a third Green, assuming their vote mostly vanishes. (Farrelly got 10% at the Strathfield by-election last year, so she’s not a complete nobody – I doubt she’ll get anywhere near an upper house seat though, even with a party label.)
Even more minor left: there’s two different socialist parties, because when you got 0.3% last time splitting the vote is a perfectly logical thing to do. There’s Socialist Alliance, who are registered, and Socialist Equality Party, who aren’t. Usually that’s where I’d throw in the Life Of Brian joke, except… here come the CDP!
The two Niles are running as “Revive Australia Party (Fred Nile Alliance)” – god knows what happened to Seniors United. Meanwhile, Lyle Shelton is running for Family First (the new one), who aren’t registered in NSW. (He ran for Cory Bernardi’s Conservatives at the 2019 federal election, then was briefly Fred Nile’s successor in the CDP – he gets around.) On top of that, Milton Caine is another former senior CDP member (ran for them in several elections in the Newcastle area, both state and federal) who’s running on his own ticket called “Christians for Community”.
Three different splinter groups of a party that no longer exists, none of them registered… that’s quite a disintegration. An article from 2020 on that mess here:
https://www.eternitynews.com.au/opinion/the-last-battle-whats-going-on-in-the-christian-democrats/
Sustainable Australia have 36 candidates in the lower house – more than any other party apart from the main three, so they’re giving it a red hot go (and have plenty of money coming in from somewhere). They got 1.5% last time (a third of a quota), so… maybe? AJP won with 1.9%, so they’re knocking on the door.
The rest of the rest… mostly ungrouped independents with a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Half of them can’t even be googled. I’m sure the NSWEC likes taking their money.
Speaking for the NSWEC, check out this PDF. A big long list of candidates, for both the lower and upper house alphabetised by… first name. About as user-unfriendly as it gets.
* Speaking of in that last para, obviously. (Self-nitpick.)
From memory Sustainable Australia had an anti-immigration platform, so may getting funding as useful idiots to degrade the environmental vote.
New thread.