When you look at the NSW election results at the state level, there are some general trends that dominate when it comes to preferences. Labor generally benefits from stronger preference flows than the Coalition, with the Greens being the dominant party providing those preferences. But elections aren’t decided by a statewide vote, rather by individual seats.
At the individual seat level, different candidates contributed to the preference pool, and there were different amounts of votes that exhausted. In some seats, you could imagine a change in the preference flow which could have changed the result.
For this post, I’m focusing on the twelve closest classic Labor vs Coalition races. This includes four Labor wins and eight Coalition wins, covering the twelve seats won by 3% or less.
By my estimate, I think stronger One Nation preferences could have helped the Liberal Party to win Camden and Penrith, and stronger preferences from the Greens and other candidates could have helped Labor to win Ryde, Terrigal and Oatley.
We usually report two-party-preferred (2PP) figures as two numbers that add up to 100%, ignoring the exhausted votes. But those exhausted votes were formal, and in different circumstances could have flowed to a candidate and changed the result.
In none of these twelve seats did the winning candidate manage to poll more than half of the formal vote on the 2PP count.
Indeed the number of seats won by a candidate who didn’t manage a majority of the two-candidate-preferred (2CP) count was close to a record high, just one seat behind the 2011 election. This likely reflects the increasing number of close races, since the rate of exhaustion actually went down.
So, on to these twelve races. This first chart shows each minor candidate in these races, colour-coded by their party. The chart shows the proportion of each candidate's votes that flowed to Labor or the Coalition. The remaining share exhausted.
Candidates from the same party didn't have the same preference flow rate, but they tended to be pretty similar. Greens candidates were more likely to preference Labor and less likely to preference the Coalition, but they also had much lower exhaust rates than the others.
About 30-40% of Greens voters exhausted, compared to 50-60% for Shooters and One Nation voters.
This next chart is a long one and runs through how many raw votes each candidate contributed to the margin. If 1200 of a candidate's votes flowed to Labor and 600 flowed to the Liberal, that's a net contribution of 600 to Labor's margin. The chart also shows the number of exhausted votes, and the final margin. After the chart, I'll run through the seats.
I think there are five races which could have flipped with stronger preference flows: Camden, Penrith, Oatley, Terrigal and Ryde.
One Nation only ran in three of these seats. In two of those races (Penrith and Camden) there were more than enough One Nation exhausted preferences to have flipped the seat to the Liberal Party. The Liberals barely held on to Holsworthy, but could have won it much more comfortably if more One Nation voters had marked preferences.
There are also two seats where a stronger preference flow from the Greens and other candidates could have flipped the seat for Labor. Labor lost Oatley by 754 votes, with over 3000 exhausted votes, all cast for candidates whose preferences favoured Labor. I'm less convinced about Oatley because the Greens only contributed a small share of those exhausted votes - the others were for other candidates with less strong flows.
In Terrigal, the Liberal Party won by 1167 votes. There were 1519 exhausted Greens votes and 1184 exhausted Sustainable Australia votes.
The Liberal Party won Ryde by just 54 votes, so it wouldn't have taken much to change that result. Greens preferences strongly favoured Labor, but there were still 1689 exhausted Greens votes, along with 677 Sustainable Australia votes and 666 IMOP votes, which only slightly favoured Labor and Liberal respectively.
There are three more Liberal seats where the number of exhausted votes for Labor-favouring candidates exceeded the margin, but it would require almost all of them to favour Labor to change the result: Drummoyne, Miranda and Winston Hills.
I can't see a plausible argument for different preference flow rates changing the outcome in East Hills, Monaro or Goulburn.
Ben: deep into what ifs? What about Kiama? Preference distributions in Kiama have confirmed it was “Choko” Greens who re-elected Gareth Ward. Overall, on your figures, in NSW Greens preferenced Labor (59.5%) to Coalition (7%). In Kiama it was 53% v 16% – ie Ward & Gibbens. If the state trend had prevailed in Kiama Kate McInerney would have won by +250 votes. Of course some of the 16% went to Gibbens & exhausted.
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