Ben is joined by Glenn Kefford from Macquarie University to discuss the new Liberal leadership, competition amongst right-wing minor parties and the Wagga Wagga by-election.
You can subscribe using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
I was joined on Wednesday evening by Stewart Jackson and El Gibbs to discuss the Liberal leadership spill and the seat of Lindsay.
Our discussion of the Liberal leadership spill focused on some of the broader issues but was conducted before the rumours of a second spill strengthened later tonight. I expect our chat will be somewhat out of date in the next few days but most of it should still be interesting regardless of who comes out on top.
Read the Tally Room guide to Lindsay
Stewart Jackson’s University of Sydney profile
You can subscribe using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
With the federal election guide now complete, I decided to check in on which seats have been attracting the most comments. Comment sections are now open for all 159 federal contests, and some of these pages have been quite active.
These are the seats with the most comments. There’s some obvious marginal seats but also a few surprises.
| Seat | Comments |
| Hume | 49 |
| Ryan | 44 |
| Macnamara | 39 |
| Lindsay | 38 |
| Cooper | 36 |
| Cook | 33 |
| Brisbane | 28 |
| Higgins | 27 |
| Lilley | 23 |
| Reid | 22 |
| Casey | 20 |
| Herbert | 20 |
| Hughes | 20 |
| Stirling | 19 |
| Deakin | 15 |
| Isaacs | 15 |
| New England | 15 |
| QLD Senate | 15 |
Overall (as of Saturday evening) 1153 comments had been posted on 140 different guides, with nineteen races yet to attract a comment.
If there’s a seat that interests you, please join in!
For those who haven’t already noticed, I wanted to let you know that the guide to the next federal election is now finished and up on the website in total.
The guide includes profiles of all 151 House of Representatives races, and all eight Senate contests.
You can use these links to see a full list of lower house links:
Or you can use this map to navigate to any seat of interest. Click on the seat and a pop-up box will appear, including a link to the guide.
And here are links to the eight Senate contests:
Please let me know if there are any errors by commenting on the relevant post or by filling out the contact form on the front page of the guide. I will make some small changes as the election gets closer, and will occasionally do updates of candidate lists.
Meanwhile I am now posting one seat per day for the Victorian state election.
I’m joined this week by Jill Sheppard (@jillesheppard) and Osmond Chiu (@redrabbleroz) to discuss research into what candidate attributes influence voters’ choices, and profile the marginal seat of Gilmore in southern NSW.
Links to things discussed in this episode:
You can subscribe using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
Today’s episode is a slightly shorter interview with the Poll Bludger, William Bowe, where we run through the results of the by-elections and what they might mean.
You can subscribe using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.
The by-elections last night ended up being quite clear and not particularly close in the end. I’ve put together a few maps to highlight some interesting elements.
This first map shows Longman. You can toggle between three different results layers: the 2PP vote, the 2PP swing to Labor, and the swing to One Nation.
The second map shows Braddon, and starts with the primary vote for independent candidate Craig Garland. You can toggle to a 2PP swing map. Overall the ALP has achieved roughly the same result as in 2016, so booths have swung in both directions in equal parts.
I’ll be back later tonight with a quick podcast, but enjoy these maps in the meantime.
8:56 – Nothing has changed in Braddon, Longman and Mayo. The sitting MPs are on track for increased majorities. We are starting to get voting figures from the two western by-elections. At the moment the Greens are on track for a distant second in Fremantle, with a chance of falling into third place behind the Liberal Democrats (presumably favoured by confused Liberal voters). We have no preference data from Perth. The Greens are doing quite well but still trail Labor on primary votes.
7:44 – I’m going to refrain from updates for a while, since it seems reasonably clear that the three sitting MPs in Braddon, Longman and Mayo are on track for re-election with increased majorities.
6:34 – Just after posting I saw a second booth has reported. Garland’s vote is down to 20%.
6:31 – We have one booth in Braddon and it’s produced swings against both major party candidates. Independent Craig Garland is on 26% of the vote. Of course it’s far too early to extrapolate but this suggests he will do well. It’s worth noting that Garland did much better in the more rural west of Braddon in the March state election. Presumably this booth is in his better areas and it doesn’t suggest a big result for him in Burnie or Devonport.
6:00 – Polls have just closed in the seats of Braddon and Longman. Polls will close in Mayo in half an hour, with Perth and Fremantle following in two hours from now.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m at a friend’s wedding tonight so these posts will be a bit more sparse than normal. I’ll try to bring you quality over quantity, and there will definitely be some maps before the night is done.
Polls have now opened in three of the five Super Saturday by-elections, and polls will open in Western Australia in just over an hour.
Feel free to use this post as an open thread to discuss the day. I’ll be back with another post for the results at 6pm AEST.
I’ll be at a friend’s wedding tonight so will only be posting intermittently. Don’t expect me to be first with the latest booth. Quality over quantity will be my approach tonight.
Of course I will do some wrap-up blogging on Sunday, and I’ll also be appearing on Buzzfeed’s twitter show on Sunday at 11am so please tune in. I’ll be recording a special episode of the podcast later on Sunday and hope to get it out the same day, but it should at least be available for your Monday morning commute.
The AEC publishes daily updates of how many people have voted pre-poll, and have requested a postal ballot (which is not strictly the same as someone voting), and you can use this data to get a sense of the rates of early voting.
We’ve had a strong trend of increasing pre-poll voting at recent elections at all levels of government, but that trend hasn’t been consistent in every seat. This first table shows the breakdown of vote by type in the five by-election seats in 2016.
| Seat | Ordinary | Pre-poll | Postal | Absent | Others |
| Braddon | 76.41 | 13.38 | 6.44 | 1.90 | 1.87 |
| Fremantle | 71.83 | 13.10 | 7.91 | 6.49 | 0.67 |
| Longman | 52.15 | 31.94 | 11.18 | 3.51 | 1.23 |
| Mayo | 69.49 | 17.29 | 7.85 | 4.46 | 0.91 |
| Perth | 68.81 | 14.58 | 8.18 | 7.01 | 1.43 |
Longman looks very different to the other seats, with almost one third of votes cast as pre-poll votes, and a slightly higher postal vote, resulting in barely half of the vote being cast as an ordinary election day vote.
So a higher pre-poll vote in Longman is expected, but the trend (as compared to last time) can be interesting.
This table shows the equivalent counts up to the last comparable point (Thursday for pre-poll, and Wednesday for postals).
| Seat | 2016 prepoll | 2018 prepoll | 2016 postal | 2018 postal | Prepoll change | Postal change |
| Braddon | 6,796 | 9,410 | 5,263 | 5,767 | +38.5% | +9.6% |
| Fremantle | 9,786 | 6,365 | 8,727 | 7,584 | -35.0% | -13.1% |
| Longman | 24,052 | 29,008 | 12,624 | 12,503 | +20.6% | -1.0% |
| Mayo | 12,346 | 16,876 | 9,787 | 10,539 | +36.7% | +7.7% |
| Perth | 12,703 | 6,801 | 8,874 | 6,931 | -46.5% | -21.9% |
This is pretty convincing evidence that we should expect a big drop in turnout in the two WA by-elections, but wouldn’t expect much (if any) drop in the other three.
The pre-poll vote has increased substantially in Braddon, Longman and Mayo, while it has crashed in Fremantle and Perth. The postal vote has dropped slightly in Longman but there have been substantial increases in these categories in Braddon and Longman.
This isn’t a thorough blog post, but I thought readers would be interested. I’ll see you for more coverage tomorrow night.