Rankin – Australia 2025

Even though the likelihood is slim the lnp should target here. Removing the treasurer and future leader could deal a major blow to the party same way with frydenberg

The issue here this more like a Labor Heartland ethnic working class seat than Longman which is white working class. I expect a lot of Rankin to become better for Labor overtime with increased immigration. There is a growing Muslim community here. I do concede it is more mixed demographically than seats in Melbourne or Sydney. if the Libs want to knock out Chalmers they are better off supporting a Dai Le Style Independent

@Ninalan at the 2021 census, 6.7% of Rankin was Muslim (identical to the UK in terms of percentage of the population that follows Islam), much higher than the Queensland average of 1.2% (comparable with the US at 1.3%) or the nationwide average of 3.2%.

Labour parties seem to do better among Muslims worldwide, not just the Australian Labor Party in parts of Sydney and Melbourne with high Muslim populations (e.g Lakemba in Sydney is a majority-Muslim suburb). Tower Hamlets is one of the most Muslim boroughs of London, and it is entirely within Labour-held constituencies in both the UK Parliament and the London Assembly. On the borough level, the Aspire Party (a left-wing democratic socialist party in Tower Hamlets) is the largest party. The entire borough of Tower Hamlets is 66.5% religious, with the most common religion being Islam at 39.9% (in some areas it would be above 50%).

Being the Treasurer may boost Chalmers’s profile here. I don’t see this as a target seat. Rankin has a young-ish and relatively large migrant demographic. On the topic of Muslims, I don’t think they will be swinging to the LNP especially if the Gaza conflict is at or near the top of their minds.

@Votante yeah I didn’t include this on my map of target seats. The only Labor seat that I put as a target was Blair.

@ Nether portal
Further to your point about Muslim voters i would look at the success of George Galloway who is a far left socialist among Muslim voters in the UK. I expect the Muslim vote to grow in Rankin and other working class outer suburbs as low property prices make it easier to purchase in such suburbs. Having said that Rankin does have more middle class areas as well.

@Nimalan regarding George Galloway, he won the by-election because the Labour Candidate was disendorsed regarding the comments of October 7 attack plus I would say Galloway probably more like Bob Katter (other than foreign policy) being Socially Conservative and Economically Left-Wing.

Rankin will remain a Labor seat so long as it contains Woodridge and its surrounding suburbs. Due to its reputation for crime and poverty, Woodridge will always remain one of the few affordable places in Brisbane for the long term unemployed and new migrants who haven’t built up much wealth yet. I’ve been told by others that Noble Park serves a similar purpose in Melbourne. It will always be in the economic interests of these places to vote Labor over the Coalition.

@ Marh
I agree he won due to Labor being dis-endorsed in Rochdale but he has won against Labor before in Bethnel Green and Bow 2005 and Bradford West in 2011. He is like you said more socially conservative especially LGBT issues. You are correct he has a very anti-western foreign policy not just on Israel but other issues as well.

Nimalan and Marh, Galloway’s socially conservative views (including anti-LGBT) would play well with the Muslim demographic who are generally quite religious and typically possess those views anyway, as seen in the Muslim majority suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne which voted strongly against same sex marriage in the plebiscite.

@Yoh An, there is a weaker correlation between Liberals to Conservative and Left-wing to Right-wing for non-western countries. Putin for example is Socially Right-Wing, Economically Centrist (Has Left-wing Social Services combined with Right-wing Crony Capitalism), and has a Anti-Western Foreign Policy using non-western leftist rhetoric. There are also Social Liberals that backs Trump and others Western Right-Wingers due to anti-communism.

@ Yoh An
I would also add George Galloway has probably won more support from the Muslim community due to Foreign Policy rather social conservatism on LGBT issues. Although it maybe an effective combination. If such a candidate existed in Australia they maybe do well in Blaxland, Calwell etc. The issue is that in the UK it is FPTP while in Australia they will need preferences and i am not sure if the Libs will preference a candidate with anti-western foreign policy

Agree Nimalan, that is why the Coalition/Liberal Party tactic of trying to win over these Muslim communities may be futile. Whilst they share the Liberal Party/Coalition’s views on social issues, it is a completely different matter for economic and foreign policy issues.

I agree that George Galloway’s stance on Israel/Gaza was a big factor. The stars were aligned for him as the Labour candidate was disendorsed. Worth noting at by-elections is that voters can send a message to the ruling party or the incumbent party knowing that they can’t change Prime Ministers. This means a known personality like Galloway can have more sway than Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer would. I would be careful when extrapolating by-election results to general elections.

Jim Chalmers will be the first treasurer in nearly two decades to bring in back-to-back surpluses, that alone should retain his seat.

@caleb its just an accounting trick. theyve pushed heaps of expenditure “off budget” and played with numbers to make it appear that way. if the coalition did the same thing we would have been in surplus 10 years ago

@Caleb @John I think the last actual surplus was in the Howard/Costello years when the economy was greater than its ever been before. When Howard left office in 2007 we had no net debt.

@NP agreed

Not to mention commodity prices

Labor hold in 2025 but could go either way in 2028. Will depend on redistribution and how bad chalmers/Labor do between now and then. Got a below average swing compared to other qld seats in 2022

Hypothetical question. If albo were to lose the election and charmers his seat who becomes leader?

John, isn’t Richard Marles still Deputy Labor Leader? As deputy, he would naturally be first choice for leader unless someone decides to challenge him.

Labor has, unlike the liberals, many options. Marles, bowen, plibersek, even o’neil all have a chance.

@Yoh An he asked about what if Jim Chalmers hypothetically lost his seat.

@Darcy I can’t stand Plibersek. Marles would be the best choice.

Plobersek got too much baggage Bowen is annoying O’Neil I s major failure.marles probably be the only option

Marked might be the deputy PM with a safe seat and factional support but he’s not the best communicator (frankly, both he and Albo aren’t the best communicators as they’re both quite slow and a bit stagnant).

Chalmers would be ideal. He’s young, energetic, hails from Queensland but without the baggage of Kevin 07. He just needs to hold his seat and be in contention whenever Albo resigns or retires.

hence why the libs should target this seat. a decent swing in 2025 plus a favourable redistribution after the election could help them unseat him in 2028 when there would likely be a landside against labor should labor be governing in minority any bad decision by the minority labor govt ccould be used against chalmers

@ Nether Portal

So you can calculate Rankin
It overlaps with state seats All of Woodridge parts of Stretton, Algester, Springwood and Waterford. Following suburbs in Rankin
1. Algester and Algester South
2. Berimba
3. Brown Plains
4. Burrowes
5. Calamvale
6.Springwood-Chatswood Hills
7. Crestmead
8. Heritage Park
9. Kingston
10. Mabel Park
11. Regents Park
12. Marsden
13. Rochdale South
14.Stretton
15. All of Woodridge

@Nimalan thanks. I’ll do it when the TPP is finalised in Algester as it has no TPP yet on the AEC website.

It’s also weird that Rochdale South is in Logan/Rankin but Rochdale itself is a Brisbane suburb in Bonner/Mansfield with a housing estate that votes LNP on all levels of politics.

I wouldn’t put Rankin outside of the reach of the LNP

@ NP
I think the electorate boundaries follow the council boundaries. There is an external Rankin booth in Rochdale. Sometimes booth names are not suburb names for example Chatswood Hills and Moreton Downs (Petrie) so i have still marked it so that booth is not missed.

It is possible that Chalmers loses a bit of his 2PP margin.

Following the UK, US election results, I sense a big swing to the Greens in the northern part of Rankin. The Greens vote can go all over the place.

Dearborn, Michigan, is a mainly Arab-American city. Trump won the vote whilst Jill Stein (a Green presidential candidate) scored 18%, which is insane considering nationwide, she got just under 0.5%. I don’t think LNP can pick up a swing the same as Trump’s in areas with large Muslim or Arab-Australian communities.

Add to that, there’s the general realignment of working-class, outer-suburban voters moving to more right-wing parties. This would be a tailwind for the LNP.

Some of the largest swings to Trump were among ethnic minority particularly Black, Hispanic and Asian males in urban areas. Seems to be a gender divide moreso than an racial divide. Trump also scored huge swings among young 18-29 males across the board.

I do agree with Votante there will be a surge in the Greens in parts of the electorate. By Queensland standards, it is quite a Muslim electorate but as Brisbane is a smaller city this electorate covers a wider range of demographics. I expect the Australian Greens to outperform the US Greens as the Greens are more well known, get more media coverage and are better resourced. Unlike in the US, Muslims voting for the Greens does not play the role of spoiler as we have seen in Kuraby (state election) when it actually achieved a slight swing to Labor versus the LNP in 2PP terms.

@ Dan M
I agree it was a gender divide, while Kamala Harris did slightly worse than Biden in 2020 dropping from 86% to 85% that does mask a gender divide with Kamala Harris under performing among Black men but over performing among Black women. In the US with voluntary voting differences in voter turnout can skew such results. If more progressive Young males did not show up to vote that will impact the overall result. Also according to US exit polls, there is not really much of an education polarization among Non White voters.

I also assume Latinos would have moved Right even if there wasn’t the high inflation as the growing Right-Wing Populism in Latin America (which actually is ironically among the wealthy) creeped into American Latinos given the similarities and friendly between America’s Right and Latin American Right. White Working Class actually stayed the same as 2020 as seen from the working class bellwether county Clallam County which voted for Harris ending its bellwether streak since 1980.

I think the reason why American Muslims and Arabs switched to Trump is the way how American politics are structured making it more like a protest vote rather than who is better or worse as seen in Dearborn (majority Arabs from both Christian and Muslims) and Hamtramck (Muslim Majority although Dems still won there narrowly)

@ Marh
Also not all Hispanics consider themselves to be people of colour and as many assimilate over time they pretty much just become White Americans. I think if exit poll data looked into 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics we may see differences with first generation. It is a bit like who Dutton can make inroads into 3rd generation Italians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Maltese etc who dont experience racism etx

@Nimalan, agree that Eastern and Southern European Australians share similar traits to Latinos in America given a large No vote to The Voice and increasing support to One Nation as evident in Western Sydney and Northern Melbourne and at the same time, racism (aka Anglos calling them ‘Wogs’) is a thing of the past

Sorry, you’re all so busy splicing and dicing the result and extrapolate what happen in the US to Australia you’re missing the bigger picture here.

Like the US, reducing tariffs and mass migration over the last 30 years that seen GDP rise, but simultaneously the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Women are increasing benefiting as they predominate in economically secure roles (in government, hospitals, etc) where there a female employment targets. Men are now often working in economically precarious roles especially tradies. Less discussed is tradies may only get paid when the home they worked on is sold, feasibly they make only get one or two lumpy pay checks a year….so you can imagine how brutal it is for them with all these building company collapses? This is the driver of the gender vote, a tale of two very different economic experiences.

Also you need to factor in, in the US the working class has typically got two, sometimes three jobs to make ends meet. So the choice is either get paid and put a meal on the table or vote.

In Australia voting’s compulsory hence the working class vote is even more volatile. That’s why you see seats like Holt with a Beta of 2.0 (ie. They are highly volatile with the seat specific swing typically double the statewide swing). This was mackerras meant by losses above and retentions below the pendulum swing typically cancel each other out.

It’s only in the SW Sydney and the outer ring of Melbourne (>20km from Melbourne CBD) you see the economic combination of prolonged damage from the lockdowns, inflation, no wage rises, rising mortgage arrears which drove the result in the US. We have a two tier economy so for Qld, WA and the NT China’s growth insulates them from the malaise, even the NAB’s discussion of it upwards increase in loan arrear on Friday alluded to this.

Finally, wealth is becoming more concentrated. Put simply, “progressive” and affluent areas are not growing in the same number or rate that lower income ones are. This is an existential problem for the Greens and the Teals which are typically found in and confined to higher income areas….and probably the motivation as to why the Greens are angling for the Muslim vote.

In short, Rankin isn’t the type of seat which fits this profile yet. Long lockdowns and economic growth pretty much insulate it from being a seat that is sufficiently economically stressed to look at swinging to the LNP.

Those seats are to be found in NSW and Victoria, and yes gender and race will be a feature, but it’s symptom of a very difference economic experience.

But if you don’t focus on the economy drivers you won’t get to understand how Trump built is multiracial coalition of men….economics trumps ethnicity every time.

I think rankin will swing about 3-5% this coming election. If the coalition can tie Labor and specifically Jim charmers to the CoL crisis they may be able to do something.

@Marh Argentina and Brazil have both elected right-wing populist governments in the past 10 years. Jair Bolsonaro (aka the Trump of the Tropics, he espouses various Trumpist views and even expressed doubt that Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election) was elected in 2018 but lost in 2022 and like Donald Trump did in 2020, he and his allies (including some American conservatives like Tucker Carlson) claimed the election was rigged and his supporters stormed the Brazilian Congress, refusing to accept that leftist former President Lula was elected the new President of Brazil (note that Lula is from the Worker’s Party which has been involved in corruption when in office so some people who support Bolsonaro are moderates who are anti-corruption). In 2023, libertarian right-winger and Trump admirer Javier Milei was elected President of Argentina.

From the mid-2010s to the early 2020s there was a period of Latin American politics called the conservative wave or the blue tide where conservatives from across the spectrum (i.e both centre-right and right-wing) defeated social democratic or socialist parties in various Latin American countries. Some countries were unaffected but the ones that weren’t were the authoritarian ones: Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela (plus Cuba which is a one-party communist state but I didn’t include it because it’s a one party state).

Back to Australia, I also agree that the Liberals can do well among Italians, Greeks, Croats, Macedonians, Maltese and even Lebanese Catholics. What I’m curious about though is why Indians tend to vote Labor federally but are often Labor/Liberal swing voters on the state level in NSW yet India has a popular conservative government with the BJP of Narendra Modi.

@ Marh
Totally agree, Interestingly, i grew up in an area with a lot of 3rd generation Greeks back in the 2000s while there was a “skips versus wogs” thing when i was i a teenager it was more playful teasing and the 3rd Generation Greeks were deeply proud of their heritage. To add to your point about the Voice on Nether Portal’s analysis of voice versus republic the two electorates that actually furthest to No were actually Gorton and Scullin both of which have the highest concentrations of Southern and Eastern Europeans. Other seats that had a fairly big swing to No from republic to voice were Hindmarsh and Menzies which both have large Southern Europeans.
https://jumpshare.com/v/sWhD36pYcp9VRfbskv6D -Nether Portal’s analysis

@ Nether Portal
I agree with you about the Right wing leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro. Interestingly, the Latin American Right are also Pro-Israel unlike Communist government of Cuba or Venezuela which are Pro-Palestine. Cuban Americans are very Pro-Israel.
One your point about Indians/Other South Asians. I agree this demographic is often white collar, well-educated and high income. However, this one factor that means this demographic may not be as fiscally conservative as you would initially think. South Asians are among the most recent wave of immigrants to Australia so median age, level of home ownership (especially owning homes outright), inter generational wealth etc will be much lower than Australian average. Issues such as Retirees tax will be less important as most South Asians are a less likely to be retired or approaching retirement while things such as child care subsidies, free kindergarten etc will be more pressing given the younger nature of the community. In the UK a higher % of South Asians are 2nd and 3rd Generation there is greater wealth accumulation for this reason. It maybe the case in the next 25 years South Asians maybe become more Conservative as they go through what is described as the Life Cycle effects.

@Nimalan the right is usually pro-Israel. Cubans are right-leaning likely because they are anti-communist.

In regards to the 2026 mid tre,s the republicans should hold all their seats in the senate as 19 of the 20 are in solid republican states aside from Maine but that woman is moderate and has been there since 1997. The problem is gonna be for the demo to hold all theirs as they have places like georgia which should flip back to the republicans. They also did well in new jersey new Hampshire new Mexico virginal and michigan.

The largest shifts were amongst in Latino and under-30 voters. It may have more to do with the working class revolt rather than racial and generational divide. This is just my guess. This also explains the breakdown of the blue wall – Michigan and Wisconsin.

Nevada is very service-based and tip-based economy (think tourism and hospitality). It was a light blue state for many election cycles but flipped Republican. Due to economic pessimism, people were willing to give the other mob a go.

The US inflation rate and unemployment rate have gone down over the past 2 or 3 years but the compounding effect of inflation is hurting people. This is tru when it comes to the cost of essentials (medicines, groceries, fuel, housing).

Unfortunately for Albo and Chalmers, and before that, Biden and Harris, a lot of voters aren’t swayed by last quarter’s economic statistics.

There might be a curse of the incumbents in the post-pandemic, high-inflation world. Just ask Chris Hipkins and Rishi Sunak, though the latter may be because of the “it’s time” factor and the deep unpopularity of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

@Votante Chris Hipkins (Chippy) was also unpopular, as was Jacinda Ardern after her landslide re-election in 2020.

Also Nevada was the only state that Trump didn’t win in 2016 or 2020 that he won in 2024. Trump is also the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2024 (20 years ago!) to win the popular vote (remember Hillary Clinton didn’t win the Electoral College and thus never became President but she did get three million more votes than Donald Trump did in 2016).

Chris Hipkins didn’t have the flair of Jacinda Arden. To be fair, NZ Labour’s margins and seat count were inflated due to the incumbency boost in 2020 and approval of their COVID management and a weak opposition.

The US Republicans have won the presidential popular vote twice since 1988, Bush Senior’s only election win. Trump won his 2016 states plus Nevada.

Biden won with an “I’m not Trump” platform. It works when you’re in opposition but not when you’re the sitting VP and incumbent party in 2024. It actually backfired as it made people recall the pre-Covid times and people believe the pandemic was one-off and will not return with the return of Trump. Biden repaired the blue wall, so to speak, and won back working-class voters. It helped as he is from a blue-collar town and had a working-class pedigree.

@ votante Biden wouldn’t know what working class even meant. Biden’s never worked a day in his life. He’s spent his entire career as a politician. Trump at least knows what it’s like due to his extensive business background and while he May have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth at least he has the experience of having employed many working people.

In 2020 Biden was actually running against trumps record now he and Harris were basically saying I’m not trump vote for me. Instead of actually putting up some policy.

@Dartg Vader, I agree with your last paragraph. I mentioned it earlier. Harris copped a beating as voters couldn’t see what’s in it for them. Many Biden voters either abstained or decided to give the other side a go.

I meant Biden had a blue-collar family background though he then became a lawyer and a senator and so on. He grew up in what is now part of the rust belt.