As a follow up to last week’s series of articles on preference flows, I wanted to understand which voters end up in the two-party-preferred piles for Labor and the Coalition, and which ones exhaust.
So I took the two-party-preferred preference flows by party of first preference (as previously analysed in this blog post) and grouped them by the destination, not the origin.
We normally express 2PP figures out of 100, ignoring the exhausted votes. By that measure, the 2019 result was 52-48. But if you also add in the exhausted votes, it was 45-42-13.
The full 2PP count is available as far back as 1988, and of those nine elections the winning party won a majority of the 2PP on only two occasions – the two Coalition landslides in 1988 and 2011.
Bearing that in mind, this next chart breaks down these three statistics by primary vote.
We know that Labor did better out of preferences than the Coalition, and that is borne out in this chart.
The Coalition primary vote of 41.6% is almost exactly the same as the Labor two-party-preferred vote - Labor's 2PP was 802 votes higher.
The Labor 2PP is much more reliant on preferences from other parties. 80% of Labor's 2PP are Labor primary votes, whereas 92% of the Coalition 2PP are Liberal and National primary votes.
A majority of preferences that flowed to Labor came from the Greens. Greens votes also made up the single largest portion of exhausted votes, but much less than in the Labor pile - about a quarter of exhausted votes.
You might ask why I'm interested in this statistic. In numerous seats, the final race won't boil down to the two-party-preferred count. But it could come in handy if we have a hung parliament with uncommitted independents in the decisive position.
We don't have a direct election for premier - most voters don't get to vote for or against Dominic Perrottet or Chris Minns. But the 2PP does give us a metric of which major party is preferred to lead the government. That doesn't mean a 2PP win is a mandate for a party to govern alone, but if people have to choose between a Labor or Liberal premier, the 2PP is a useful metric.
On this topic, I'm going to look at various preference flow metrics in the nine seats held by crossbenchers, to give us some sense of what their voters might have been saying about who should be supported in government.
Hi ben. Can you give us a sense of the exhausted votes and primaries in the seats with the highest proportion of exhausted votes? I am interested to what extent CaLD-heavy seats exhaust more extensively? Thanks
Three questions: Firstly, where do you think the Christian Democrat vote will land now that the Party has folded? Secondly, Keep Sydney Open did well in 2019 – how do you think that vote will be distributed? Thirdly, do you agree with Kos Samaras that PHON drags down the Liberal Party?
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