Category: Victorian By-Elections

End of evening. Liberal candidate Anthony Marsh has a 13.5% margin over independent Tracee Hutchison, assuming the latter does indeed make the final count over One Nation’s Darren Hercus, which my system projects her as doing by 30.8% to 28.3% based on preference estimates. Marsh’s final margin over Hercus would likely be very similar. How pleased the Liberals should be about this depends on your starting assumptions: the party would have been appalled if told about such a result a year ago, but in the more immediate time frame would be greatly relieved. It suggests One Nation’s competitiveness in November should be limited to deep rural seats, and shortens the odds on the Coalition translating what seems at present to be a slender polling lead into a parliamentary majority.

10.35pm. The 14,000 vote block of early votes that came in on the primary vote about two hours ago are now in on TCP, which I suspect wraps things up for the evening.

9.45pm. Postals, which were heavily favourable to Liberal, have reported on the TCP, which has blown out the Liberal margin over Hutchison from 9.0% to 13.4%.

9.15pm. The last and largest election day booth, Rosebud, has reported on the primary vote, and I’m less certain now that Tracee Hutchison will get ahead of One Nation on preferences, that latter’s first preference lead now being at 24.7% to 21.3%. The outcome at the final count, to be clear, will be a Liberal win either way.

8.55pm. The latest ten-minute update had TCP results from Dromana Beach and the earlier batch of early votes.

8.47pm. A huge chunk of early votes — nearly 14,000 — just reported on the primary vote. This presumably included the voting centre in Rosebud, which presumably did a lot of business, because it’s substantially lifted the One Nation vote compared with the 2645 votes from the first early voting batch. The Liberal vote has dipped below 40%, and One Nation has a primary vote lead over Tracee Hutchison that looks big enough to be maintained, but not enough to stop them being overtaken when Greens preferences are distributed.

8.26pm. We’ve now got 5531 postal votes plus a primary vote result from Red Hill. The Liberals have topped 50% of the primary vote on the postals, and done well enough in Red Hill. One Nation’s Darren Hercus has now edged ahead of Tracee Hutchison on first preferences, though Greens preferences should push the latter ahead of the former, while Liberal candidate Anthony Marsh is sitting pretty on over 40%.

8.16pm. Five booths have just landed on the primary vote, including strong results for One Nation at Dromana Beach, Rosebud West and Tootgarook and weak ones at Sorrento and Shoreham. The gap between Tracee Hutchison and One Nation has as expected narrowed, now at 23.8% to 21.2%, but Hutchison seems assured to remain ahead on Greens preferences (in which case, hats off to the VEC for picking the right candidates for its two-candidate count). Either way, the 36.6% Liberal primary vote looks insurmountable.

8.06pm. My results system, which is more aggressive than it used to be, is now projecting a win for the Liberals after a very strong result for them on early votes: 45.5% out of 2645 added, compared with just 16.4% for One Nation, who have fallen below 20%. I should add a note of caution though: these early votes are likely either or both of the two voting centres from the Sorrento end, and the polling booths too under-represent what are likely to be the strongest areas for One Nation. Even so, we’re at a point in the count where One Nation would have to be doing a lot better than the current raw primary vote numbers (Liberal 37.8%, independent 25.0%, One Nation 19.8%) if they were going to be competitive, and it’s clear from the two-candidate count that Hutchison will not be competitive in the final count.

7.56pm. The regular ten-minute update brings only two further TCP results, which only serve to confirm that Liberal candidate Anthony Marsh will prevail comfortably in a two-candidate count against Hutchison. The alternative possibility is that Hutchison will land third and Marsh will go up against One Nation, in which case it’s no easier to see how Marsh loses.

7.47pm. The small Boneo booth, with 388 votes, has reported at the modest end for One Nation with 19.1%. Two booths are in on the two-candidate the VEC is conducting between Liberal and Tracee Hutchison, which may prove to have been the right candidate pairing after all. They are breaking nearly 60-40 in favour of Liberal, suggesting they are heading for a comfortable win unless One Nation has a surge in store from somewhere or other.

7.37pm. The Dromana and Flinders booths are now in on the primary vote, and the former is as anticipated better for One Nation, who have edged out the Liberals there by 29.5% to 29.1%. Flinders on the other hand has stayed loyal to Liberal, with One Nation not even making double figures. My system is writing off One Nation’s chances of making the final count, but I’m less confident about that than I normally would be because One Nation didn’t run here in 2022, meaning there is no historic data for them. Some strong results for One Nation in the Rosebud booths could change things, but they would have to be particularly good for them. The other unknown is how early votes are behaving.

7:25pm. A third booth, Waterfall Gully, is in on the primary vote. This is a better area for One Nation, who have polled 27.2% there compared with 20.6% in the first two booths. Even here though the gap is narrow, with Hutchison on 23.7% and set to benefit from the 12.9% vote for the Greens. Unless One Nation do quite a bit better around Rosebud and Dromana, they will finish third and their preferences decide the result, presumably in favour of the Liberals.

7:17pm. We have primary booth results in from Blairgowrie and Rye, both at the weak end of the electorate for One Nation, who trail Tracee Hutchison for second by 24.0% to 20.6%. My system is presently projecting that order will remain after preferences, but it’s doing so with no historic sense of the spread of One Nation support. No doubt correctly, it’s projecting the Liberals as more likely to win than Hutchison after the distribution of One Nation preferences.

6:10pm. It appears from the Victorian Electoral Commission results page that the indicative two-candidate preferred count will be between Liberal candidate Anthony Marsh and independent Tracee Hutchison, and not One Nation candidate Darren Hercus as I would have assumed.

6pm. Welcome to the Poll Bludger’s live coverage of the Victorian state by-election for Nepean. I will also be following the count for the Tasmanian upper house seats of Huon and Rosevears as updates on the dedicated post. The Victorian Electoral Commission advises we should not expect results until “approximately 7:30pm”. Counting of early and postal votes will take place this evening, as well as election day votes. Results will be updated every 10 minutes. The VEC does not break out its early voting results by location (it will rectify this at the general election in November), so the substantial number of votes that appear under “Early” will be a mixed bag of result Rosebud and Dromana, where One Nation is likely to poll well, and Blairgowrie, where they should be relatively weak.

The first of three by-elections in as many weeks will be held on Saturday for the Mornington Peninsula state seat of Nepean, where former deputy leader Sam Groth has called time on his brief parliamentary career rather than wait it out until the November election. This puts the Victorian Liberals under pressure from One Nation, with Labor declining to field a candidate in a seat where they fell 6.4% short at the 2022 election. As detailed in my by-election guide, the respective candidates are Mornington Peninsula Shire mayor Anthony Marsh for the Liberals and civil engineer Darren Hercus for One Nation. There has been no published polling that I’m aware of, but a report in the Herald Sun points to concern in the Liberal camp based on “the feelings on pre-poll” and “shit on the liver … about having to vote twice in 12 months”.

Both campaigns have faced internal difficulties, with the Herald Sun reporting concerns about the number of Liberal volunteers willing to come forward after local members were shut out of the preselection process. The Age reported the One Nation campaign committee “collapsed” in late February when two of its members resigned from the party, claiming state president Warren Pickering had advised Hercus to use a personal bank account to accept campaign donations, which would have violated the legal requirement for donations to go through a specified account. Pickering denied any such conversation took place, but The Age then reported a third former party member backing the account of the other two. Hercus said he had no knowledge of how donations were being managed and was paying most of the costs of his campaign on his credit card.

Also in the field of eight candidates is Tracee Hutchison, who has been endorsed by Independents for Mornington Peninsula, whose candidate at the federal election came within 2.3% of unseating the Liberals in Flinders after polling 21.2% of the primary vote. Rounding out the ballot paper are candidates from Legalise Cannabis, Libertarian Party (once the Liberal Democrats), Affordable Housing Now – Sustainable Australia (until recently just Sustainable Australia) and End Mass Migration (whose former status as the Companions and Pets Party might well raise eyebrows). The Libertarians have a how-to-vote card advising a second preference for One Nation and a third for Liberal, but the others have open tickets.

Nepean does not exactly fit the profile of the four South Australian seats One Nation won in March, which were distinctly more rural in character, but its demographics are not without promise for the party. By far its outstanding characteristic is that 23.8% of the population was aged 70 and over at the time of the last census, its closest rival on this count being Gippsland East on 20.3%. This is a cohort that has been running four points above average for One Nation in federal polling since the start of this year.

Analysis of the South Australian result reveals an even more reliable indicator of One Nation support is share of the adult population who finished year 12 or equivalent. The simple model 0.543 – 0.555x, where x is the percentage of residents aged over 18 who finished high school, explained 83% of the variation in One Nation support in South Australia. When applied to the relevant figure for Nepean, which ranks 71st out of the state’s 88 seats for educational attainment, this too suggests One Nation should punch about four points above its usual weight in a seat like Nepean.

The map below illustrates the variability on this score within an electorate where the median house price approaches $3 million around Portsea but barely cracks $800,000 further along the bayside. Applying the data at the suburban level to the educational qualifications model suggests One Nation could expect its vote share in the latter area to be twice as high, a point reflected in the the meagre 2% vote shares One Nation recorded around Portsea and Sorrento at the 2025 federal election.

How this translates in a context where Labor isn’t fielding a candidate, never mind enjoying the ascendancy it did at the South Australian election, is harder to say. Up for grabs is its 32.6% vote from 2022, when support for Victorian Labor was ten points higher than its current polling. While betting markets have the Liberals as short-priced favourites, it is within the realms of possibility that the homeless Labor vote will consolidate behind Tracee Hutchison while the One Nation exodus reduces the Liberals to third, a fate that became all too familiar to their candidates in South Australia. The likely result in that scenario would be a One Nation win on preferences from the Liberals, whose how-to-vote card has Hercus above Hutchison.

Live commentary

Saturday
I believe the counts are now complete, with various loose ends being tied up in both seats. These cut six votes from the Liberal lead in Prahran, which ends at 16,352 to 15,363, a margin of 989.

Thursday

7pm. New postals now added for Prahran, breaking 773-732 in favour of Liberal, increasing their lead from 954 to 995.

4pm. Finally an update from Werribee (though not Prahran), and my system is calling it for Labor. This is due to the addition of 2310 postal votes, of which the formal ones have broken 1191-1039 to Labor, in keeping with the tendency for Labor to do better on late-arriving postal votes. Rechecked totals have been added on the primary vote count, but the VEC does not do rechecking on the TCP count. These will make a few dozen votes’ difference in favour of the Liberals, but not nearly enough to disturb a published Labor lead of 593 votes, out from 441 on election night, with at most 1500 still to come.

Tuesday night

It seems we won’t be seeing further updates to the count until later in the week.

Monday night

It is apparently the case that a check count of the primary vote at least commenced today, but no updates have appeared for the published results. The uncovering of errors might tilt the balance one way or another in Werribee, but otherwise the matter will be decided by perhaps 3000 postal votes that will trickle in over the coming week.

Saturday night

2.00am. Having updated the system with estimates of the number of outstanding votes (which make a generous guess of postals in the absence of any hard data I can find), my system is calling Prahran for the Liberals and giving Labor an 84.5% chance in Werribee. In Werribee, the Liberals will need to improve on the 53-47 break in the favour on postals counted so far to close a gap of 441 votes, which is certainly possible if there are indeed enough votes outstanding; in Prahran, postals can only extend a current Liberal lead of 954 votes.

1.00am. The remaining pre-poll centre in Werribee finally came through with its TCP result, producing what one assumes is the final result for the night: Labor 20,132, Liberal 19,691.

12.13am. Correction: one of the two Werribee pre-poll centres hasn’t reported its TCP result.

11.34pm. A good night for the Liberals got better with the addition of the second batch of Werribee pre-polls, which sliced Labor’s lead on the raw vote from 3.0% to 0.6% — and my projection is the same. So the question now is whether the Liberals can wear a 446 vote deficit on postals, making it very much too close to call.

11.25pm. I’m unclear if we’re actually going to see the outstanding pre-poll TCP count added for Werribee this evening. My system’s earlier call of the seat for Labor, which I was very uncomfortable about, turns out to be based on an underestimate in the number of outstanding votes, and has been retracted now that I’ve added new (and very rough) estimates.

10.50pm. A second batch of pre-polls have been added for Werribee on the primary vote and my system is calling it for Labor again, but I’m not at all confident about that. What we have is a huge mismatch between the pre-poll primary vote count (21854 formal votes) and the TCP count (50 formal votes), which means more than half the projection is based on an estimate of preference flows that may prove awry.

10.19pm. A second batch of pre-poll TCPs slightly improved the Greens’ position in Prahran, though they’re still behind. That may be it for the evening — the Greens are nearly 1000 vote behind, which isn’t the kind of lead that normally gets chased down in late counting, particularly by the Greens in a situation where there won’t be absent votes. Nothing substantial in the latest Werribee update, apart from the last remaining booth TCP result. Now that it’s clear pre-polls are indeed being reported in batches, I more strongly suspect that we haven’t seen the last of the count for the evening in Werribee.

10.04pm. A batch of pre-polls — fewer than I expected, so there may be more to come — have been added on the primary vote for Werribee. They are not great for Labor — around 3% worse on two-party terms than the election day votes. That’s relative to the total result of pre-polls last time though, and it may be that we’re getting one batch from one part of the electorate and a later batch will be different, which my system isn’t built to factor it. The Liberals have pulled further ahead in Prahran, again because of a TCP result — this time for pre-polls — where they did better on preferences than on election day votes. It looks like the ABC has turned off booth-matching, but whether off projected or raw results, it looks much the same, namely bleak for the Greens.

10.02pm. It turns out to have been the postal TCP count: the Greens did well enough relatively speaking on the primary vote and then did very badly on the preference flow, resulting in a 17.9% LIB swing. They may at least hope that later arriving postals will behave differently.

9.51pm. I remain unsure as to what cause the Liberal landslip in Prahran — the latest update has moderated it slightly, but the Liberals are still ahead.

9.40pm. Things have suddenly slipped dramatically in the Liberals’ favour in Prahran: both my system and the ABC’s went from having the Greens ahead to Liberal ahead. I’ve arbitrarily widened my error margins in both seats. To repeat yet again, Labor’s narrow lead in Werribee could very easily be wiped out by pre-polls.

9.26pm. If you’re enjoying the coverage, please consider a donation through the “become a supporter” buttons at the top of the page and the bottom of the post.

9.20pm. Labor has strengthened a little in Werribee on my projection with the latest update, but not so much as to change my basic outlook that everything depends on a looming dump of pre-polls, which renders the 90% or so Labor win probability excessive. I will look at tweaking my model so it’s more cautious until substantial numbers of pre-polls are added. That’s not an issue in Prahran, where the pre-polls have been reported: lots of new TCP numbers in the latest update do not change by projection of an 8% to 9% swing from Greens to Liberal, which is about 4% below what the Liberals need.

9.05pm. Not sure exactly why, but the latest update from Werribee not good for Labor: their win probability now wound back to 76.7%. Still no pre-polls. Whereas there is a big whack of pre-polls in Prahran, accounting for nearly half the vote counted, and they have hardly behaved differently from election day votes, suggesting the Greens are indeed looking good.

8.58pm. There were 15,895 pre-polls added late on the night of the Mulgrave by-election count, which is presumably a rough pointer of what to expect here — more so though in Werribee’s case than Prahran’s.

8.45pm. I’ve forced through real world preference flows to my Werribee projection, and a little to my surprise, it’s calling the seat for Labor — which would be because it goes off lower error margins when it stops using preference flows. But I would want to see some serious pre-poll numbers first.

8.39pm. No new results in the latest update for Prahran, but we’ve got a second TCP from Werribee plus most of the primary vote booth results. That’s still not enough TCP for my system to switch out of using my preference estimates. Based on how Paul Hopper’s preferences flowed in 2022, I’ve tweaked his flow slightly in favour of the Liberals, and should probably tweak them a bit more. If my system was going off the preference flows indicated by the TCP count, Labor would be projected with a 1.4% lead. As it stands, my system says 2.6%. I suspect the former will be nearer the mark.

8.20pm. A huge infusion of primary votes in Prahran, six out of nine booths in all, and my system is all but calling it for the Greens. But: there’s still practically no TCP count, and if I’m wrong about preferences, I may be overestimating them. Count progress similar in Werribee: lot of primary votes now, very few TCPs, speculative preference estimates looming large in a projection that has tightened up.

8.14pm. A lot in Prahran depends on preferences for Tony Lupton, who I’m projecting at a bit over 10%. His how-to-vote card has the Liberals ahead of the Greens, but I’m punting on a lot of people not following it and splitting his vote 50-50. We’ll have a better idea how right I am about that when we see some substantial TCP numbers at the count, at which point my system will drop pre-determined preference estimates and calculate their actual flow.

8.05pm. First booth in from Prahran, plus a tiny parcel of pre-poll votes. I think the latter are distorting my projections: they show it as close, but the booth is quite large and suggests a Liberal swing of only about 3%. Four booths in now from Werribee, and my system is now leaning to Labor, suggesting an insufficient Liberal swing of 7.1%. However, I’m projecting neither major party to clear 30% on the primary vote, so I can’t be ruled out that a minor candidate can sneak through the middle. Independent Paul Hopper best placed, but my feeling is that the number of Greens and Victorian Socialists votes going straight to Labor will make it hard for him.

7.50pm. Relief for Labor as the second booth in from Werribee, Riverbend, swings a lot more gently than the first. Labor’s primary vote has plunged, but a remarkable share of it has gone to Victorian Socialists. I’m projecting a very slight Labor lead, but that leans heavily on preference estimates. Still nothing from Werribee.

7.35pm. The latest update brings the TCP result from Little River, which the Liberals won 177-117 after losing 156-122 last time.

7.18pm. Nothing new in the regular 15 minute update. When I referred earlier to “the absence of small rural booths”, I guess I should have said “except Little River”.

7.03pm. The first booth in from Werribee is Little River, with what I record to be a 13.5% two-party swing, which would be enough for the Liberals to win. Notes of caution though: only 294 votes, and a booth uncharacteristic of the electorate.

6.16pm. No surprise that the latest results update brings no figures, but the time stamps on my results pages have successfully updated, which is reassuring.

6pm. Polls have closed. History suggests the Victorian Electoral Commission will update the results feed at precise 15 minute intervals. Given the huge fields of candidates in both seats, and the absence of small rural booths, there could be quite a wait — in similar circumstances at the Mulgrave by-election, the first update with actual results was at 7:30pm.

Preview

Today is the day of Victoria’s eagerly awaited Werribee and Prahran by-elections, which between them offer an opportunity to gauge whether Labor is doing quite as badly in the outer suburban mortgage belt as recent polls have suggested, and how the Greens are holding up in their inner Melbourne heartland after a disappointing result at the Queensland election in October. As is hopefully apparent immediately above, this site will be running live results and projections using its innovative three-candidate prediction model, though as will be explained below, these will very likely be two-candidate contests.

As is so often the case in Victoria these days, both have attracted bloated fields of candidates, but Werribee appears a straightforward two-horse race that will be defined by the precise scale of the inevitable swing from Labor to Liberal. The former is defending a margin of 10.5%, which is less than the swing indicated by the remarkable recent poll result from Resolve Strategic. Ronald Mizen of the Financial Review reported last week that “internal Labor polling suggests it could be as close as 48-52 in favour of the government”, which would come as a substantial relief to it if borne out. For their part, the Liberals are managing expectations, with Chip Le Grand of The Age relating a view that the party missed an opportunity to engage the seat’s substantial Indian population by preselecting 63-year-old real estate agent Steve Murphy. Liberal sources cited in the Financial Review hopefully offered if if Murphy can manage a 5% swing, “the seat could be within reach next year” — a notion rightly debunked by Kevin Bonham.

I’m not aware of any hard intelligence of what’s likely to transpire in Prahran, where the Greens are defending a formidable 12.3% margin against the Liberals in a contest forfeited by Labor. A fair bit has been made of the fact that the seat’s last Labor member, Tony Lupton, who held it from 2002 to 2010, is running as a candidate and directing preferences to the Liberals ahead of the “toxic” Greens. While Lupton’s name recognition is unlikely to amount to much fourteen years after he ceased to represent a rapidly changing electorate, he can hardly fail to gain at least some traction in his appeal to homeless Labor voters. The extent to which they follow his how-to-vote card is another matter.

The Age today leads with a startling Victorian state poll from Resolve Strategic, though it requires a note of caution in that the sample is 559, giving it a larger than normal error margin upwards of 4%. (UPDATE: It turns out that 559 refers only refers to the preferred premier question, and that the voting intention results, as usual, combine two monthly polling surveys with an overall sample size of 1124 and a typical error margin of around 3%). The usual practice of Nine Newspapers is to produce state results for New South Wales and Victoria in alternating months using the samples from those states in the monthly national polls, but on this occasion it was evidently decided to dispense with the earlier polling period as it was conducted before Brad Battin replaced John Pesutto as Liberal leader.

The poll finds Labor plunging six points from an already weak position to 22%, with the Coalition up four to 42% and the Greens steady on 13% (the same sample of respondents in the federal poll published earlier this week had Labor at 25%, the Coalition at 38% and the Greens at 13%) (UPDATE: Make that half the same sample). Brad Battin debuts with a 37-27 lead over Jacinta Allan as preferred premier, compared with a 30-29 lead for John Pesutto in the November result. Twenty-eight per cent rated themselves more likely to vote Liberal after the leadership change compared with 11% for less likely, while 11% rated themselves more likely and 18% less likely to vote Labor on account of the rather less newsworthy fact of former Treasurer Tim Pallas’s retirement.

On that subject, I have guides up for the February 8 by-elections in Prahran and Pallas’s seat of Werribee. The ballot paper draw in Prahran was conducted last week, while Werribee’s will be held later today. Regarding Prahran, Antony Green points to the fact that Tony Lupton, who held the seat for Labor from 2002 to 2010 and is now running as an independent, has a how-to-vote card recommending the Liberals be put ahead of the Greens.