Category: Victorian By-Elections

BludgerTrack 2025 2.0 (open thread)

Federal polling trends suggest Labor’s position is weakening in its stronghold state of Victoria.

This site’s renowned BludgerTrack poll aggregate has been given a seasonal makeover, now boasting state-level federal polling trends for the five mainland states (Tasmania being almost entirely lacking in published data). Its principal insight is that Labor has – assuming always that the polls are to be believed – a problem on its hands in Victoria. Two-party swings in the other states are in a narrow band from 1.2% in Queensland to 2.1% in New South Wales, but the current reading for Victoria has it at 4.6%, enough to wipe out the advantage Labor has established there in recent years. Labor can take some comfort in the fact that the state is not rich in marginal seats, a uniform swing of that size being only sufficient to cost it Chisholm and McEwen.

The state-level measures are created by combining separate trend measures for national voting intention and the respective states’ deviations from it, the data for which can be accessed from the “poll data” tab at the top of the BludgerTrack page. The only comparable effort I’m aware of is The Guardian’s poll tracker, which also has trend measures for a range of other demographic indicators, though it doesn’t seem to be drawing on too many data points for some of them. The big difference overall between the two is that The Guardian assumes the polls to be very heavily skewed to Labor, particularly on the primary vote, and duly points to a fairly comfortable Coalition win. BludgerTrack assumes the polls to be broadly accurate, particularly Newspoll and the related entities of Pyxis and YouGov, and has for some time pointed to a near dead heat on two-party preferred.

The imminence of a federal election notwithstanding, there is inevitably not much to report this time of year, although a The West Australian yesterday related that a very firm view had taken hold within Labor’s WA branch that the Prime Minister plans to call an election for April very shortly after the state election is held on March 8. It was also revealed yesterday that Victoria’s state by-election for Werribee will be held concurrently with the Prahran by-election on February 8.

Yuletide miscellany: more duelling pendulums, plus preselection and by-election latest (open thread)

The Australian Electoral Commission joins the redistribution wonk party with its own set of estimated margins for the looming federal election.

The Australian Electoral Commission has published its post-redistribution margins for New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, holding off for the time being on the Northern Territory as the redistribution there has not been finalised. This involves two sets of numbers: two-party preferred, which boil the issue down to Labor-versus-Coalition without regard to whether Greens or independents may have been in the mix, and two-candidate preferred, which tackles the sometimes knotty issue of estimating new margins between the parties and independents who actually made the final count at the last election.

The AEC’s report repeatedly observes that its numbers “may differ to the calculations of people external to the AEC”, by which they principally mean Antony Green but also me and Ben Raue at The Tally Room. Links to an extensive accounting of my own estimated margins were provided in an earlier post, which also offered a broad overview of the principles involved in making the calculations. I’m pleased to say my two-party margins are similar to the AEC’s: within 0.2% in 80 seats out of 100, and out by more than 0.5% only in the cases of Hume and Hasluck.

Now more than ever though, two-candidate preferred is a vexed question particularly where independents are involved, as they will not have been on the ballot paper in the parts of the electorate that have been added in the redistribution. Antony, Ben and I are all free to exercise common sense in treating the teals as a collective unit, which at least solves the problem in the cases of Warringah and Mackellar. Not only does the AEC feel it does not have the liberty to make such judgements, but Ben Raue also relates that its system is not designed to combine Labor-versus-Greens results from different electorates, which can readily be used to calculate fresh margins for Wills and Cooper — though not for Melbourne, which absorbs territory from Higgins and Macnamara, both of which had Labor-versus-Liberal two-candidate counts.

Ben Raue identifies the following electorates as ones in which mismatched two-candidate preferred counts must be combined from different parts of the electorate as redrawn by the redistributions (not counting those where the problem can be solved by falling back on two-party preferred, as can always be done where the seat is a “classic” Labor-versus-Coalition contest). These are Bradfield, Fowler, Grayndler, Mackellar, Sydney, Warringah and Wentworth in New South Wales, and Cooper, Goldstein, Kooyong, Melbourne, Nicholls, Wannon and Wills in Victoria. For reasons just explained, people external to the AEC are painlessly able to finesse the issue in Mackellar, Warringah, Bradfield, Cooper and Wills, which undoubtedly makes the non-AEC calculations more instructive in these cases. That leaves nine seats where varying degrees of creativity are required. In Labor-versus-Greens contests, this is a simple matter of estimating preference flows. But estimating support levels for independents in areas where they didn’t run last time is a very considerable challenge.

The differences in the various approaches taken are outlined at length in Antony Green’s post on the subject:

I base my estimates on a comparison of of House and Senate votes. Ben Raue uses an estimate based on the difference between two-party and two-candidate preferred results. William Bowe has not tried to adjust primary votes but rather allocates zero votes to the Independent and applies preference flows on accumulated primaries.

The chief virtue of my own method is the elegance involved in not requiring any data external to how people actually voted for the lower house of 2022, but it comes at the very substantial cost of crediting independents with very small vote shares in the newly added parts of their seats. However, the AEC’s approach is in this respect worse, as it apparently credits the independents with no votes in these areas at all (though I don’t see how that can be the case in Kooyong, where my own estimate for Monique Ryan is lower than the AEC’s). Antony Green’s and Ben Raue’s methods are of more practical value in addressing the task at hand, which is estimating how big the swing will need to be for the seat to change hands. Whether or not this is happening can be determined on election night by comparing the booths that have reported their results with the equivalent results from the previous election.

A few other bits and pieces from the last week or so:

• A second Victorian state by-election looms to go with the one to be held on February 8 in Prahran after Tim Pallas announced his resignation as Treasurer and member for Werribee, which he held in 2022 on a margin of 10.5%. The Age reports the Labor preselection front-runner is John Lister, a local teacher and Country Fire Authority volunteer.

• DemosAU has a poll on the ban on social media use for under-16s, which finds 64% supportive and only 24% opposed, but 53% expecting the law will be ineffective compared with only 34% for effective. The poll was conducted December 5 to 16 from a sample of 809.

• Keith Pitt, who has held the Bundaberg region seat of Hinkler for the Nationals since 2013, has announced he will retire at the election, taking the opportunity to call for the party to abandon net zero emissions targets and support coal-fired power. There has been no indication that I can see of who might succeed him in Hinkler.

• The Nationals have preselected Alison Penfold, senior adviser to party leader David Littleproud and former chief executive of the Australian Livestock Exporters Council, to succeed the retiring David Gillespie in the Mid North Coast New South Wales seat of Lyne. Penfold won preselection ahead of Melinda Pavey, former state member for the upper house and the corresponding lower house seat of Oxley, and Forster accountant Terry Murphy.

• Left-aligned Ashvini Ambihaipahar, St Vincent de Paul Society regional director, Georges River councillor and unsuccessful candidate for Oatley at last year’s state election, has been confirmed by Labor’s national executive as candidate for the southern Sydney seat of Barton, to be vacated at the election with the retirement of Linda Burney. One of those overlooked, former state upper house member Shaoquett Moselmane, resigned from a party position in protest, Elizabeth Pike of the St George Shire Standard reporting rumours he may run as an independent.

• James O’Doherty of the Daily Telegraph reports that Warren Mundine will seek Liberal preselection for the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, to be vacated at the election with the retirement of David Fletcher and contested again by teal independent Nicolette Boele, who came within 4.2% after preferences in 2022. Mundine is a former Labor national president turned conservative who ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in Gilmore in 2022, and was the public face of the campaign against the Indigenous Voice together with Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Price.

• Slightly old news now, but it had hitherto escaped my notice that Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Labor member for the abolished Melbourne seat of Higgins, will be making do with third position on the party’s Victorian Senate ticket.

Weekend miscellany: duelling pendulums, Tasmanian seat polling and more (open thread)

Summarising federal redistributions ahead of the looming election, polling pointing to a status quo result in Tasmania’s federal seats, and various other electoral news.

Antony Green has published a pendulum display of post-redistribution seat margins for the federal election along with some explanation of what this entails. He did so exactly as I was finalising my own parallel effort, which I present here in the shape of a mock-up of the entry page for the federal election guide I’m hoping to publish around mid-January (a Western Australian election guide will precede it by a couple of weeks).

The margins shown are simply those from the 2022 election where no redistribution has been conducted, but the redistributions for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory require a process of distributing the votes from 2022 across the redrawn electorates. The Northern Territory redistribution is still in the public consultation phase, but I have taken a punt on the proposed boundaries (in this case simply a matter of drawing the line between Solomon and Lingiari) being adopted as they seem impossible to argue with, and it appears Antony Green has reached the same conclusion.

I believe the redistribution calculation methods used by Antony and I are identical with respect to how they handle ordinary votes, (i.e. those cast on election day or at pre-poll voting centres), but we have presumably adopted different methods to deal with the difficult question of “non-static” vote types, such as postals, which are published in aggregate for the whole electorate with no indication of geographic variation. I haven’t crunched the numbers too thoroughly, but the biggest anomaly I can see is that we have landed 0.5% apart in the substantially redrawn seat of Chisholm. We are in agreement that the margin in Deakin is a tiny 0.02%, but where he has it in favour of the Liberals, I make the seat to be notionally Labor.

Where we substantially differ is in seats where an independent is part of the equation. Calculations here are necessarily speculative, as independents will not have been on the ballot paper in newly added areas (where transfers have been conducted between teal seats, this can be dealt with by treating them as a collective). Antony has a method involving comparison of House and Senate vote shares which he says is “imperfect, but so are all alternatives”. The imperfection of my method, which gives independents no primary votes from newly added areas and allocates only the preference flows they might have expected from the other candidates, is that it’s very harsh on the independents, a fact most apparent with respect to Kooyong, where my 0.1% margin for Monique Ryan compares with Antony’s 2.2%.

Complete accountings of my redistribution calculations can be observed through the following links, for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Northern Territory.

Polling and electoral developments of note:

• This week’s Roy Morgan poll had the Coalition leading 52-48, out from 51-49 a week before, from primary votes of Labor 28% (down two, their worst result of the term), Coalition 38% (down half), Greens 13% (up half) and One Nation 6.5% (steady). The previous election two-party measure was a dead heat, unchanged on last week.

• The Australian reported last Saturday that a EMRS poll covering all five seats in Tasmania pointed to a status quo result of two Labor, two Liberal and one independent. In Labor’s precarious seat of Lyons, a generic party-based question has Labor on 34%, Liberal on 31%, the Greens on 11% and Jacqui Lambie Network 4%, while a separate question specifying candidates had 40% for Labor’s Rebecca White, 31% for Liberal candidate Susie Bowers and 9% for the Greens. The Liberals were well ahead in Braddon, leading 44% to 27% on the primary vote with the Greens on 9% and JLN on 7%. In Franklin the results were Labor 36%, Liberal 35% and Greens 11%, suggesting Labor would survive a substantial swing.

• Liberal MP Paul Fletcher announced this week that he will not recontest his seat of Bradfield. Fletcher retained the seat by 4.2% in 2022 in the face of a challenge from teal independent Nicolette Boele, who will run again at the coming election. His announcement comes shortly after teal independent MP Kylea Tink said she would not contest the seat following the abolition of her existing seat of North Sydney, much of whose territory will be transferred to Bradfield. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on two contenders to succeed Fletcher as Liberal candidate: Gisele Kapterian, an international trade lawyer and former staffer to Julie Bishop who shares Fletcher’s moderate factional alignment, and Penny George, director of corporate affairs at AstraZeneca and wife of state upper house member Scott Farlow. Kapterian was endorsed last year as the candidate for North Sydney, but had the rug pulled from under her with the seat’s abolition.

• Liberal MP Ian Goodenough, who lost preselection in his northern Perth suburbs seat of Moore to former Stirling MP Vince Connelly, has surprised nobody by announcing he will seek re-election as an independent. Connelly was the member for Stirling, part of which is now the southern end of Moore, from 2019 until its abolition in 2022. Goodenough claims to have been told that “opportunities might arise that would be of benefit” if he didn’t run.

• The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks column reports former Senator Joanna Lindgren is “poised” to be preselected as the LNP’s candidate for the Ipswich region seat of Blair, held for Labor by Shayne Neumann on a margin of 5.2%. Lindgren served in the Senate for a year after filling a casual vacancy but failed to win re-election at the 2016 double dissolution. Trevor Evans, who lost Brisbane to the Greens in 2022, is expected to again be chosen as the party’s candidate for the seat at a preselection to be held today, though he faces an opponent in Fiona Ward, a past federal and state candidate and regular preselection aspirant. Two contenders are named for the party’s preselection for Lilley, held for Labor by Annika Wells on a 10.5% margin: Kimberley Washington, a former staffer to LNP-turned-independent Senator Gerard Rennick, and Dylan Conway, an army veteran and founder of a mental health charity.

• Sarah Elks of The Australian reports Clive Palmer has launched a High Court bid to overrule a section of the Electoral Act that disallowed him from re-registering his United Australia Party for the next election after his voluntary deregistration of it in September 2022. The report quotes electoral law expert Graeme Orr saying the section exists to prevent newly deregistered parties having their names poached and did not reckon seeking to de-register and re-register, the “obvious reason” for which was to avoid having to make financial disclosures.

• The Victorian state by-election for Prahran will be held on February 8, with the ballot paper draw to be held on January 17. Tony Lupton, who held the seat for Labor from 2002 to 2010, has announced he will run as an independent, calling his former party’s decision to forfeit the contest “cowardly”. The Liberals will choose their candidate in a preselection ballot today.

• South Australia’s state redistribution has been finalised. Ben Raue at The Tally Room has taken a much closer look than I have, and concludes that the already minimal changes from the proposal have become even more conservative in the final determination. One change is that the seat of Frome will become Ngadjuri, owing to concerns raised that the seat’s namesake had been involved in a retribution attack on an Aboriginal encampment.

• Poll Bludger regular Adrian Beaumont offers an overview of results for last month’s US presidential and congressional elections with a more optimistic take for Democrats than most commentators, especially their prospects at the November 2026 midterm elections.

RedBridge Group: 51-49 to Coalition in Victoria

Another poll showing soft support for Labor in Victoria, where it has opted to sit out the Prahran by-election.

RedBridge Group last week had a poll of state voting intention in Victoria that has the Coalition leading 51-49, unchanged on the last such poll in late September and October. However, the primary votes suggest this implies an unusually strong preference flow to Labor: the Coalition is up three on the primary vote to 43%, which reflects a five-point drop in others to 13% rather than a further loss of support for Labor, who are steady on 30%, or the Greens, who are up two to 14%. The poll was conducted November 6 to 20 from a sample of 920. UPDATE: Full report here.

Labor has announced it will not field a candidate for the looming by-election in Prahran resulting from the resignation of Greens-turned-independent member Sam Hibbins, despite having held the seat as recently as 2010. The Greens have endorsed Angelica Di Camillo, a 26-year-old environmental engineer who had been preselected for the federal seat of Higgins before the redistribution abolished it. The Age reports a Liberal preselection vote is expected to be held on December 15, but there has been no indication as to who might run.

RedBridge Group also had a state poll for New South Wales, which doesn’t get its own post because I’m presuming there will be another along from Resolve Strategic in a week or two. This maintained a pattern of soft polling for the first term Labor government, credited with a 50.5-49.5 two-party lead that compares with a 54.3-46.7 result at the March 2023 election. The primary votes are Labor 37% (unchanged from the election), Coalition 41% (up from 35.4%) and Greens 9% (down from 9.7%). This poll was also conducted November 6 to 20, from a sample of 1088.

Weekend miscellany: economy, nuclear and abortion polling, preselection latest (open thread)

More signs that economic sentiment may have turned the corner; Labor recruits a former state leader for a key state in Tasmania; and more besides.

With every pollster in the game bar the increasingly intermittent YouGov having weighed in over the past fortnight, it’s likely that a lean week awaits on the federal polling front, barring the usual weekly Roy Morgan poll. Besides the other new post on campaign finance, that leaves the following to relate:

• SECNewgate’s latest Mood of the Nation survey finds signs of improving economic sentiment: 35% confident and 65% not confident inflation will decrease over the coming year, compared with 31% and 69% in September, and 35% (up eight) anticipate the economy will improve over the next three months, with 38% thinking it will get worse (down eight). Labor is rated better to tackle the cost of living by 29% with 30% favouring the Coalition, reversing the result in September. It also finds 33% support lifting the nuclear energy ban with 42% opposed, and 64% saying they would be less likely to vote for a party that restricted access to abortion rights, compared with only 11% for more likely. The survey was conducted October 31 to November 4 from a sample of 1417.

• Labor has confirmed two existing political figures as candidates for federal seats in Tasmania, with former state leader Rebecca White confirmed as the candidate for Lyons, which she has served at state level since 2010. Incumbent Brian Mitchell, who survived a 4.3% swing to hold out by 0.9% in 2022 (a correction after the Liberals disendorsed their candidate mid-campaign in 2019), agreed to go quietly, saying the party should “grab her with both hands” if White sought a federal career. The north-western Tasmanian seat of Braddon, where Liberal member Gavin Pearce will retire after boosting his margin from 3.1% to 8.0% in 2022, will be contested for Labor by Anne Urquhart, who has served in the Senate since 2011. Among the many factors considered by Kevin Bonham are the recount that will be required to fill White’s state parliamentary vacancy, and the appointment to fill Urquhart’s Senate vacancy.

• A Liberal preselection for Mackellar, which teal independent Sophie Scamps won from the party in 2022, was won by James Brown, chief executive of the Space Industry Association of Australia, former state RSL president and former son-in-law of Malcolm Turnbull. Other candidates included Michael Gencher, executive director of Israel advocacy group StandWithUs; Brook Adcock, former Qantas pilot and founder of Pandora Jewellery; David Brady, chair of Deafness Forum Australia; and Paul Nettelbeck, director of a foreign aid not-for-profit; Lincoln Parker, a defence analyst; and Vicky McGahey, a high school teacher. Nothing came of a reported push to reopen nominations so that Sophie Stokes, former Commonwealth Bank executive and wife of former New South Wales Planning Minister Rob Stokes, might be persuaded to run in a field deemed to lack a strong female contender.

• A particularly interesting state by-election looms in Victoria after the resignation of Prahran MP Sam Hibbins, who quit the Greens last year after admitting to an affair with a staff member from his office. The seat has successively been held by Labor, Liberal and the Greens over the past two decades, reflecting a close three-way dynamic similar to that of the partly corresponding federal seat of Macnamara.

Mulgrave by-election live

Live coverage of the count for Victoria’s Mulgrave state by-election.

Click here for full display of Mulgrave by-election results.

End of Saturday night

Labor candidate Eden Foster’s 40.1% primary vote, while more than 10% down on Daniel Andrews’ share in November 2022, is enough to ensure the only remaining point of interest is who finishes second. Liberal candidate Courtney Mann leads independent Ian Cook by 21.6% to 18.9%, leaving 19.5% from various other candidates to be distributed among the three during the preference count. To close the gap, Cook’s share of the latter needs to be 13.85% higher than Mann’s, whereas at the general election he did little better than equal it (29.6% to 29.2%, the rest going to Andrews), and there’s little reason to expect different this time.

Consequently, the 56.2-43.8 split in Labor’s favour on the indicative TCP count is of only academic interest, and will probably be pulled over the next few days and a fresh Labor-versus-Liberal count conducted. Based on my own preference estimates, I’m projecting Labor to win that one by 56.5-43.5, though it seems that’s at the high end of what’s generally expected. This gives Labor 25% of preferences from Ian Cook, 80% from the Greens, 83% from Victorian Socialists, 64% from Animal Justice, 30% of Libertarians and 25% from Family First, and splits the rest evenly. To pull off a freakish win, Mann would need 74% of all preferences.

Live commentary

11.35pm. We’ve got what I take to be our final numbers for the evening, which include a third batch of early votes that were very strong for Labor — so much so that they are now performing above par on early votes, in swing terms.

10.51pm. A big missing piece of the puzzle has been added with the second batch of early votes on TCP, which had hitherto been in the count only as primary vote. What was previously listed as a 27.2% swing against Labor on TCP now registers as 9.9%. They have nonetheless slightly boosted Ian Cook’s vote against Labor on the progressive TCP count, which is unlikely to be the one that applies at the final count. Still outstanding for this evening are one booth on both primary TCP, and another just on TCP.

10.23pm. Labor have claimed victory and Liberal have conceded defeat, although the Liberals at least say they expect to finish ahead of Cook.

10.19pm. The last two updates have brought three TCP booth results, which confirm what was already known.

9.51pm. The only new result in the latest update is a TCP result from the Brandon Park booth, which slightly improved Ian Cook’s position relative to Labor. Whether that becomes the operative count is still an open question, but Labor is clearly not in danger either way.

9.34pm. The latest update brings another election day booth primary vote result, which does nothing to change the situation.

9.21pm. The latest update brings one new election day booth on the primary vote, and it must have been a good result for Labor because it’s almost cancelled out the impact of my correction to the error that was selling the Liberals short on the TCP projection (it had been splitting preferences 50-50, whereas now it’s going about 58-42 to the Liberals).

9.17pm. I note that a big new batch of pre-polls got added on the primary vote in the previous update, and they confirmed my earlier suspicions — the swing against Labor on the primary vote is now 13.4%, whereas before it was well over 20%. The 27.2% TCP swing against Labor currently indicated on early votes can thus be expected to come down dramatically when these new votes are added to the count.

9.14pm. I’ve identified the error that was inflating Labor’s projected TCP against the Liberals. The next update, which should be along in a few minutes, should bring it down to about 55-45.

9.05pm. There are now seven booths in on the primary vote, and still only two for TCP (plus postal and early votes on both counts), and the situation appears to have settled in.

8.49pm. The regular once-every-15-minutes update brings another election day booth on the primary vote and the small number of absent votes (if you’re wondering how a by-election can have absent votes, these are in fact telephone-assisted votes), neither of which much changes the situation.

8.36pm. The latest update (they happen every 15 minutes) brings a fourth booth on the primary vote and a second on TCP, together with the batches of postals and early votes that have been added to the count, which have both. Ian Cook has fallen further behind the Liberal on the primary vote. The Labor-versus-Liberal and Labor-versus-Cook two-candidate results from the 2022 election were very similar, so presumably the 6.2% lead has on the Labor-versus-Cook count will be broadly indicative regardless of what happens. I still think my projection of 7.6% is probably flattering Labor a little, but in any case it seems they are going to win fairly comfortably despite a double-digit hit on the primary vote, about half of which is going to the Liberals.

8.23pm. There is now an election day booth in on TCP, together with the early and postal results. Cook remains 2.7% behind the Liberals, and I wouldn’t care to venture how much chance he has of closing the gap on the primary vote. My system has a method for projecting this that says it won’t happen, but I’m not entirely sure how much I trust it at this stage of its development. My preference estimates suggest Labor will win by about 8% if he drops out, but the size of the primary vote swings are making me think that’s flattering to Labor. I’ll now revisit my preference estimates.

8.07pm. The postal TCP votes are added and Ian Cook no longer leads on the TCP count, suggesting he’s unlikely to beat Labor even if he finishes second. One further booth has reported on the primary vote, and the primary vote gap between Cook and Liberal has narrowed from 3.4% to 2.9%. His primary vote is similar in both size and distribution to the election. Apart from early votes, Labor are down a bit over 10% and Liberal up a bit over 5% — but the early votes are strikingly worse for Labor elsewhere. It may be that this is because they are from one particular location that’s weak for Labor, and will come more in line with the rest of the result when further votes are added.

7.55pm. The first two election day booths have closed the gap between Ian Cook and the Liberal candidate, from nearly 10% to 3.4%. We also have a TCP result on the pre-polls, which were bad for Labor on the primary vote, but are nonetheless striking in having Cook well ahead. My probability estimate is still not giving him any chance of making the final count, but given the imbalance between election day and postal/early votes, it may not be reliable.

7.40pm. My results page conked out for a few minutes after the first upload, but I’ve patched it up now. As was the case in Warrandyte, we have the slightly confounding (from my perspective) fact that postals and pre-polls have reported before any of the election day booths. Labor is on 41.3% of the primary vote, and Ian Cook appears set to finish third with 17.1% to the Liberals’ 26.9%. My projection does not get the Liberals anywhere near closing the gap on preferences, and is close to calling it for Labor.

6pm. Welcome to the Poll Bludger’s live coverage of the count for Victoria’s Mulgrave state by-election. Results are likely to be a bit slow in coming (and will only be updated every 15 minutes), given the field of ten candidates and the fact that all the booths are in urban areas. If the Warrandyte by-election in August is any guide, the first batch of results to come through may in fact be postals, which was something I had never previously encountered (and which my results system struggled with at first). The candidates chosen for the Victorian Electoral Commission for the indicative two-candidate preferred count are Labor’s Eden Foster and independent Ian Cook, so its results will be redundant if Cook performs below expectations and the Liberal candidate looks set to reach the final count instead. If my system calculates that this is likely, it will fall back on preference estimates to project a final result.

Mulgrave by-election minus one day

Slightly mixed reports on how concerned Labor are about independent Ian Cook’s chances at tomorrow’s by-election for Mulgrave, the Victorian state seat being vacated by Daniel Andrews.

Tomorrow is the day of Victoria’s Mulgrave by-election arising from Daniel Andrews’ exit from politics. While it is generally expected that Greater Dandenong mayor Eden Foster will retain the seat for Labor, independent Ian Cook is expected to at least match his feat from the November state election of outpolling the Liberals to reach the final count. In the estimation of Shannon Deery of the Herald-Sun, Cook was “seen as a bloke seeking to exact revenge on Daniel Andrews” last year, but has now “convinced some that he is genuine about representing the local community and being a fiercely independent MP”. This is said to be backed by Labor internal polling, but as Deery tells it, “no-one is seriously suggesting Labor will lose the seat”. The Sunday Herald-Sun’s Backroom Baz column came close to suggesting otherwise, invoking what was presumably the same internal polling as a cause of “mounting concern” in the Labor camp. Here too though, Labor sources familiar with the polling said Eden Foster “should get there on preferences”.

As usual, this site will feature live results and commentary from 6pm tomorrow evening. My page for the former stands ready and waiting here – I have it geared to assume the Victorian Electoral Commission will be conducting a Labor-versus-Ian Cook indicative two-candidate preferred count (a detail that flummoxed many conspiracy theorists who developed an outsized interest in the contest last November), but have no hard information on this at present. A detail worth noting is that the number of election day polling booths has been considerably pared back, from twenty (some of which were split booths in neighbouring electorates) to ten. This is a marked departure from the Warrandyte by-election in August, which utilised the same eleven booths from last November.

Mulgrave by-election minus sixteen days

A field of ten candidates for Daniel Andrews’ old seat includes the independent who outpolled the Liberals last year.

Today was the day of the ballot paper draw for the Victorian state by-election for Daniel Andrews’ old seat of Mulgrave, to be held a fortnight from Saturday on November 18, an occasion I have marked with the publication of my by-election guide. Ten candidates have nominated, a substantial field by normal standards but not a match for the thirteen challengers Andrews attracted last November.

For what it’s worth, independent Ian Cook drew highest out of the fancied contenders at number three, followed by Liberal candidate Courtney Mann at five and Labor candidate Eden Foster at eight. This will be the first outing for the Liberal Democrats under their new name of Libertarians, and their candidate has drawn top position on the ballot paper. The party under its old name could count on a major spike in its vote if the ballot paper gave it greater prominence than the other Liberal party – we will see what happens this time.

This is Victoria’s third state electoral event since Labor’s re-election in November last year, following the supplementary election for Narracan in January (required due to the death of a candidate during the campaign period before the election) and the Warrandyte by-election in August, neither of which were contested by Labor. This time both Labor and Liberal are in the field, as is independent Ian Cook, who made it to the final preference count and slightly outpolled the Liberals on the primary vote.

Ignoring Jeff Kennett’s argument that the party should give Cook a clear run, the Liberals have preselected Courtney Mann, policy adviser to state leader John Pesutto. The Donald Trump-admiring candidate from 2022, Michael Piastrino, responded to Mann’s preselection by endorsing Ian Cook, his own favoured preselection contender having been overlooked. Whoever out of the two makes the final count will need a swing of 10% to 11% to defeat Labor, whose candidate is Eden Foster, clinical psychologist and mayor of Greater Dandenong.

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