Federal election guide – more free seats

I have posted another two seat guides for the federal election as freebies for everyone to read: Boothby and Gilmore. With so many people still stuck under lockdown I thought people might enjoy having something to read.

These two seats are both very marginal, one is held by Labor and the other Liberal.

This is in addition to three other seats I shared for free last week. You can see the full list of freebie seats on the front page of the guide. If you would like to read all 97 seat guides published so far, you just need to sign up to support The Tally Room via Patreon for at least $5 per month.

I’ve shared some snippets from these two guides that I find particularly interesting below the fold:

I find the historical 2PP chart for Boothby quite interesting.

Boothby has been held by the Liberal Party continuously since 1949, but the seat has become much more marginal in recent years. The redistribution after the 1990 election made the seat a lot less safe for the Liberal Party, cutting the 1990 margin from 10.7% to 4.5%.

The seat became safer from 1993 to 2001 thanks to the Liberal Party being strong in South Australia, but the seat was still a lot closer to the statewide average.

The seat came a lot closer to the statewide average in 2004, and the seat came close to flipping in 2010 and 2019.

The dotted green line is my estimate of the margin since 2004 based on the 2019-2022 boundaries. Interestingly, Labor would have won Boothby in 2010 based on the current boundaries.

Secondly, the equivalent chart for Gilmore.

The seat of Gilmore was Liberal-held for decades prior to the 2019 election, but for most of that time it was relatively marginal, although the margin ballooned out to 14.6% in 2001.

The pre-2010 redistribution redrew the seat into a notional Labor seat, but the swing to the Liberal Party in 2010 helped them hold on. The redistribution prior to the 2016 election actually made the seat slightly safer for the Liberal Party, yet a 3.3% swing to Labor in 2019 saw the seat go to Fiona Phillips.

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