EDIT 6:44PM: We’ve now got new figures for both Bellevue Hill and Bondi Beach. In both cases we saw the preference flow to Kerryn Phelps increase significantly, and between the two of them Phelps’ 2CP lead has increased by almost 1000 votes. It now looks very unlikely that extra postal votes will put Dave Sharma in front.

EDIT 9:31AM: We now have the first batch of postal votes – about 5,463 votes. Dave Sharma is winning 64.4% of them after preferences. This suggests he is roughly polling enough in the postal vote to have a chance of winning – the big question is how many postal votes are left to be counted, and whether adjustments in the election-day vote might give Phelps some breathing room. It’s also worth noting that I didn’t factor in informal postal votes when calculating Sharma’s threshold to win, up from 63% to 63.6%.

ORIGINAL POST: Since I posted last night, we had some shifts in the count following the inclusion of pre-poll votes. In short, it is no longer certain Kerryn Phelps will win. We are awaiting the results of the postal votes, which could see Dave Sharma win if he does well. On the other hand, there’s also reason to suspect a counting error in two booths which may be underestimated Phelps’ vote.

I’ll run through both of these issues in this post, and try and briefly explain why I think we had problems predicting this result last night.

Tonight’s election result was very clear. A massive swing against the Liberal Party has pushed the Morrison coalition government into a minority position, with Dave Sharma losing a seat held by the conservative major party since federation, despite a 17.7% margin built up by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

There are many things to say about the causes, and i won’t go into a lot of depth on this point. Clearly the departure of Malcolm Turnbull made it harder for the Liberal Party, and this was made worse by the manner of his leaving. The party’s inability to reconcile its base with sensible policy on climate change made it much harder for them in a seat like Wentworth, and a strong independent like Kerryn Phelps was able to exploit this position.

In this post I’m going to focus on the geography of the electorate, showing how the swings spread across the seat, and how a distinct geographic divide within the seat is much more obvious following this result.

Last week I blogged about “the three Wentworths” – three distinct parts of this electorate I had identified which I believed would behave differently. Specifically, I thought the Liberal Party was more vulnerable to a swing in the city and beach areas than they were in the harbour area. And this has been proven right.

Kerryn Phelps won the two-candidate-preferred vote in every booth in the city and beach areas, while Sharma held on in every booth in the harbour area. While the Liberal Party suffered similar swings in the harbour as they did in the beach, they weren’t enough to lose booths in places like Double Bay, Vaucluse, Watsons Bay or Rose Bay.