Mulgrave – Victoria 2022

In every election I’ve observed, the “vibes” caused by campaigning are always useless. There is no chance of this seat being some unique outlier among the surrounding seats in Eastern Melbourne. The only way to lose it is if the Coalition is winning in a landslide. Even if Labor is treating it as a close election there would be much more important territory to direct resources to. Doing that simply plays into their opponents’ hands in getting distracted by whoever screams the loudest on Dan’s porch.

The biggest risk might be the sheer number of candidates causing a large number of informal votes, although chances are that’s a bigger danger for Labor’s opponents seeing as they can just issue a HTV going from 1 to 14 top to bottom if they wish.

@ Adda, only a part of this seat is Eastern Melbourne. South of the Monash freeway here is the SE Manufacturing belt centred on the Dandenong Rail Corridor this seat is where the two Melbourne’s meet.

There are outliers and surprises in every election.

What reasoning is there for this seat to be the outlier? The Liberals are campaigning against Dan Andrews everywhere, not only here. If the seat were to be lost with a 16% swing (emphasis on the if, since there’s no evidence of that being the case) then it means that they are losing majorly in east/SE Melbourne. It’s not going to be localised to this electorate.

This version of Mulgrave is quite different to the one at the last election. Most of the good Liberal booths were removed, and it now focused more clearly on Springvale and parts of the south-east manufacturing belt. It’s a safe Labor seat.

Maybe the sheer number of candidates will cause a swing against Andrews, but I just can’t see such a rock-solid Labor seat being lost.

@Adda

I generally with you that it is very unlikely that Labor will lose this. I’m just cautious of claims like “there is no chance of this seat being some unique outlier”.

Also, I think there are some who genuinely believe there could be double-digits swing against Labor in the southeast, such as in Dandenong (but won’t be anywhere near enough to flip it), the Narre Warrens, and Cranbourne.

My point is that even if this seat were to fall, it wouldn’t be because of it being an outlier among the surrounding seats in east/southeast Melbourne. Double-digits across those other seats means that this seat is just one among many that face the same trend. I argue specifically against the notion of this being the lone outlier (say, by being lost while Labor has a comfortable win in line with polling).

Surely the Labor party machine are conducting internal polling? And those results are showing no cause for concern?

”and Daniel Andrews would survive only narrowly in Mulgrave, where independent Ian Cook is said to be gaining traction”

@Daniel T

What is the source/context of that quote? Is that from the ‘leaked polling’ a couple days ago?

@Scott

Yes, they do, and from the campaign activities (or lack thereof) their internal polling doesn’t say this seat is at any risk whatsoever.

Neil Mitchell is reporting fictional numbers. Could have been fed to him by multiple people for multiple reasons.

Daniel Andrews will likely win on primaries, and even if he doesn’t there’s plenty of room for him to get home on Green votes and leakage. If they’re going for a Fowler situation, worth noting that Liberal preferences only split 70/30 to Dai Le.

This isn’t a seat they can take for granted, and if Daniel Andrews resigns and goes to a byelection, Labor might not win it.

But I don’t think “my business was shut down by the health department, but it’s because of unproven corruption I swear!” is the winning hook Cook thinks it is. Still expecting a Liberal vs ALP runoff.

My tendency is that if the Herald-Sun says an unusual seat is competitive, it probably isn’t. “Sluggate” is not going to resonate with institutional Labor voters like the press thinks it is.

Particularly not if you see the photos the health dept took of his kitchen.

3AW Neil Mitchell has an exit poll in Mulgrave of Ian Cook ahead of Dan at prepoll released today.

I am hoping this is accurate and puts all the other polls to shame in a week’s time.

^ just to clarify the above post, this was based on a Facebook mem doing the rounds at the moment from a group called ‘dump dan Andrews’ after posting I went o verify the information but I can’t find it posted anywhere. The closest thing I came up with was someone has leaked an alp internal poll to neil saying that they are worried about a few seats but Mulgrave isn’t one of them.

If someone can verify this exit poll, please post the results here as a reply.

My search continues.

Ok found it

53% to Ian Cook 38% to Dan.

https://www.3aw.com.au/why-ian-cook-is-quietly-confident-he-can-defeat-daniel-andrews-this-weekend/

2 mins 10 secs into recording.

Let’s hope this is the poll to go buy.

Exit polls are nowhere near scientific, partly because they are self-selecting, not everyone answers and those more likely to are the more enthusiastic voters which in this case are more likely to be those voting against Dan.

Unlike scientific polls there is also no weighting. The 53-38 is a strange result too because it only adds up to 91; so it can’t be a 2PP and it’s way too high to be primary votes when there are 14 candidates.

Not to mention that Neil Mitchell has been talking about fake “leaked polling” for a while now, he did the same 4 years ago and was way off.

A final note too is that each vote type has a very different result.

In Caulfield in 2018 for example, the results were this:

Early – 55% Liberal
Ordinary (Election Day) – 57% Labor
Postal – 70% Liberal
Absent – 60% Labor

Wildly different, and early votes usually skew more conservative (opposite to in the US), so an early voting exit poll wouldn’t be indicative of the other vote types.

There is misinformation that Andrews will lose he will win.
Bookies odds suggest 90% chance

Bookies’ odds are not a useful indicator considering that they’re determined by whatever punters are placing, which is typically a blend of conventional wisdom and baseless faith about the direction of the error polls will have (see the midterms just now for an example when they were wrong about this). In this case, I expect the seat of Mulgrave has quite a bit of “dumb money” from those hoping Dan gets knocked off so the odds should be underestimating his winning chances.

Bookies odds are accurate within their limits.. they are quite accurate in estimating the likelihood of a win in a individual seat.. Dan in.Mulgrave when i looked last
Paid 1.10 for a dollar outlay..that gives a 90% chance of a alp win.. minimal return for a outlay. The best odds they show are 1.01 that is a 99% chance of a given party win
I know they can get their sums wrong on a global result

Here-say is suggesting that the one story about Andrew’s potential bronze statue, regardless of how silly and banal it is, is actually reaching low-information punters who have been otherwise switched-off and disengaged right up until the weekend.

It’s not being received very well by low-information voters either. Only reading the headline, they are being mislead to believe that this bronze statue was something floated by and advocated for by Andrews himself. This is playing to the perception by punters that he is self-absorbed, and another more extreme perception that he is a “dictator”.

Time will tell if it is going to have any impact on the political geography at all. Worth noting that it is probably the only cut-through “success” Coalition have had their entire campaign. Their engagement numbers and sentiment on social media have been otherwise dismal for example.

The bronze statues were Jeff Kennett’s idea, back in 1998 when he assumed he’d be the next one.

Kennett is utterly furious at the thought that the next one might be Andrews.

I don’t know how much the hearsay is actually impacting anyone who wasn’t already anti-Dan.

Fair point @Expat and thanks for reiterating the actual background behind the story.

I figure the same as well, those most mislead or animated by this story were likely already on the anti-Dan train.

Also side-note: it looks on the surface like Kennett, has been a better social media performer in the last few days than Guy and their campaign machinery. Would love to see some numbers on this. Reflect poorly on the Guy campaign.

While postal votes do generally skew conservative, Caulfield isn’t really a representative sample because it has a large Orthodox Jewish community who don’t vote on Saturdays.

*better social media performer pound-for-pound, given the investment being placed in Guy’s campaign.

Mick, they really aren’t accurate. Particularly when a single individual can change the entire market for a seat (something I have done more than once). One is much better served by looking at a seat-by-seat model. As for Mulgrave, the odds should be 99%+ instead of 90% if not for the cooker money (kind of like “MAGA money” in US markets continuing to give money on Biden after the election).

I’ve worked in the gambling industry, and I bet on seat outcomes in elections, and my impression is election betting odds from Sportsbet are not credible at all.

Sportsbet views election betting as a marketing tool to get people like us into gambling. They don’t put much effort into their bookmaking.

As @Adda points out, the low volume in seat markets means that one person dumping a large bet can skew the odds significantly.

They are accurate within their
Limitations. They may err on a total basis or may get an individual seat wrong… but they
Are quite accurate in estimates for safe seats. Eg would Pauline
Hanson win Blaxland or would Scott Morrison be defeated by the communist candidate..the accuracy of what I have said can easily be verified.. how many seats deemed safe for one party or another return a member of the opposite party.. eg how many with 1.01 return would be wrong..I hazard a guess as none.

Sure. But correctly predicting safe seats is not much better than one of us, or a model whose only input is the margin of the last election.

I’d also say that usually Sportsbet’s odds for outcomes such as “Communist Party to win Cook” or “One Nation to win Blaxland” are too short!

https://www.tallyroom.com.au/vic2022/mulgrave2022/comment-page-3#comment-778871

It also matters how many and which of the prepoll voting centres are being counted. I expect that Cook would be polling worse at Glen Waverley pre-polling centre (which is near the boundary of the district of Mulgrave) than the Mulgrave pre-polling centre in Dandenong Rd.

Good discussion Nicholas
But stat’s are only useful
When they enhance a way
Of analysis

Genuinely surprised to see Aidon McLindon is a candidate for this division. What has been doing down in Melbourne since moving on from Beaudesert? Howard Lee too? This ballot paper is stacked.

McLindon spent some time as a “consultant” according to Wikipedia, and was most recently working as a student wellbeing officer for many Catholic schools across Melbourne. He was terminated, as he tells it, after seeking support from management for a colleague who didn’t wish to be vaccinated and he wanted to provide a pathway for antivax teachers, which his boss/es promptly rejected and they fired him. After that, he teamed up with Morgan C Jonas to form the Freedom party of Victoria, combining Jonas’ existing following on Facebook with McLindon’s political experience and ability to spell tricky words like “foreign” (true story, Jonas seems like a very simple man and I’ve no idea why McLindon has linked up with him (perhaps he got in for some of the money they plan to raise from their followers to fight the results of the inevitably “stolen election”)). McLindon now begins his daily High Noon briefings with “good afternoon, fellow victorians” which always gives me a chuckle.

Is there any chance Andrews could lose this? Ian Cook’s campaign has a lot of money, and is very prominent. I imagine he’d just be taking votes off the Libs and worst case scenario there could be an above average swing against Andrews.

Is there any chance? Yes, the margin is 15% but it’s capable of going down to 5%ish, and bridging that gap is possible. Dai Le made the 15% gap, but there are a few differences between these situations:
– Dai Le had the advantage of a retiring MP combined with an ill-suited candidate, whereas Andrews possesses a personal vote.
– Dai Le had a powerful network in the Vietnamese community that allowed her to achieve results akin to the teals without the unfettered funding. Cook has no such network, most of his support is outside of Mulgrave. He doesn’t live in the electorate apparently.
– Dai Le received fairly good preference flows from other parties (I recall reading 65% of the greens?) but Cook and his “Cooker” co-candidates who will run dead, McLindon and Piastrino, will receive very limited preferences from non-cooker candidates.

To add to Douglas point I am not sure if a white businessman will appeal to working class ethnic voters like Dai Le did

Dai Le was a councilor who had strong networks in the area and was facing an unpopular parachute with zero local connection. This is incomparable to the situation in Mulgrave where Andrews has a powerful, well recognised brand against a motley indistinguishable crew fighting for the minority which strongly detests Andrews. There is no clear or compelling alternative for the average voter who is on the fence about Dan Andrews.

Thanks @douglas, fascinating.

“good afternoon, fellow victorians” – the man who in the prior decade founded and led the “The Queensland Party”.

To be honest it’s worth keeping an eye on.

When I drive around Melbourne there’s only one seat where I’ve seen the ALP candidate’s face defaced, and that’s in Mulgrave.

What strikes you when you drive drive around Mulgrave is how few ALP signs are up relative to any of the independents, and that of the ones that I’ve seen up ……50% of them have moustaches painted in….guess whose?

So, I have an open mind.

@douglas – Dai Le received 35% of Greens preferences (split 65/35 against her), but that’s quite high considering Greens were recommending preferences to Labor, and the generally strong preference flows for Greens to Labor (against Liberals) in that election. What that means is that a conservative independent isn’t as likely to lose out on Green preferences as a Liberal. I think that might help in Melton, but not Mulgrave.

Interesting comments above about how Dai Le is different from the other independents. Also, I should add that she was the local deputy mayor and has electioneering experience having contest three times for a state seat.

It looks like there are a number of out-of-electorate candidates. Throwing money at the campaign doesn’t always work. Think Clive Palmer. The Liberal or Ian Cook may erode Dan’s margin but won’t flip the seat. I also think that the anti-Dan field of candidates may split votes and ironically send preferences to Dan instead of to the Liberal or Ian Cook.

As for Howard Lee, people may know him as the Kim Jong-Un impersonator but they probably don’t know his real name and will not vote for him because they think he’s some random Joe trying his luck.

I’m a bit less skeptical about Cook’s chances in Mulgrave than I was a few days ago, but I have to concur that exit polling for individual seats is not a particularly useful tool as there is basically zero stratification in the sample. It’s more useful for studies of how particular groups and demographics voted than as a predictor of results in my opinion.

The problem for the independents will also be how many there are – one of them (realistically only Cook has a chance) needs to snowball into the 2CP, which might be hard if they’ve split the protest vote, and then their preferences are spraying all over the shop.

Cook claiming their exit polling has him getting 57% TPP…! Extraordinary if true, but I wonder what the methodology is and who conducted it.

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/state-election/exit-polling-suggests-shock-upset-in-dan-andrewss-mulgrave-seat/news-story/30be1cddfcff3e3be21a74fdedc56a3e

Cook clearly is trying to elevate himself above the other pretenders in the pecking order as the “main challenger” and try to get himself a decent enough primary vote to make the 2CP. Will it work? Maybe if the Herald Sun and 3AW give him enough free runs but that on its own is not enough to win.

@Daniel, I’m also less skeptical after reviewing the situation in more detail. One factor that I think is important here is that a 2CP match-up between Andrews and and IND is probably going to be a lot tighter than a Labor vs Lib in terms of margin. Reasonable potential for a preference snowball like Expat points out. And given current state of play in this division, I also think that Andrews vs Cook is the more likely 2CP match-up contest here too (just). On the night I wouldn’t be surprised if we do not have a result because the 2CP will be difficult to determine by the VEC and might end up being suppressed (not sure if VEC do this like the AEC do).

@Entrepreneur honestly wouldn’t be surprised if exit polls in this division suggest this for the pre-polls. However I expect the votes to potentially be the TPP inverse on Saturday when less politically-engaged and less animated voters turn up and submit a soft status-quo vote for Dan.

My prediction:
Labor ~40%
Cook ~20%
Lib ~20%
Greens <~10%
Freedom Party ~3%
Family First & DLP ~2%
AJP ~2%
Long-tail of other independents combined ~3%

I am not game to provide a TPP estimate for such a messy spread of first-preferences.

@john
I knew I remembered 65, I just remembered the wrong way around! 🙂
I don’t think Cook will get green preferences as well as Le did, as the optics of him and the people he aligns himself with are not greens-friendly (Sky news, McLindon &co). I say this even though he has been very mysterious as regards any actual policy (because I suspect his only policy is revenge for the increasingly dubious closure of his business).

@votante
I am under the impression that, excepting Andrew King, every other candidate is local (don’t quote me on that).

My view is that this is still totally safe for Andrews and it seems the ALP campaign agrees with that if the comments about “limited signage” are to be taken seriously. At bare minimum, he needs to be below 40% primary to be in danger of losing and there’s no good reason to believe he is facing a 17% decline or more. Then Ian Cook needs to make 2CP and have an unrealistically strong flow of preferences against a well recognised premier at the top of the ballot. Past precedent is that such situations will result in significant leakage.

Simply too many implausible events need to coincide for me to consider this anything but safe. As for the “exit polling”, it’s a simple attempt to present oneself as the winnable candidate in this mess regardless of the facts.

Correct that to 20% decline in primary vote – looked at the wrong column.