Election Profiles Archives

16
Oct 23
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Bruised Labor Back To Basics

I had an opinion piece in the Financial Review today on the demographics driving the Voice Yes and No votes. The online edition has a lot of the charts which you might find interesting.

Here’s the link to my online op ed (behind the AFR paywall): 🔗 https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/demographics-explain-how-we-voted-on-saturday-20231012-p5ebuu

Our chief Mapper and head of Health Geographics Dr Jeanine McMullan also did a wonderful series of maps which highlight the demographic divides between the Yes and No voters and they are well worth a look.

Here’s the link to her maps which are now public access
🔗 2023 VOICE REFERENDUM (arcgis.com)

Jeanine has designed the map in conjunction with the work from our great team of forensic statisticians, so that it highlights the Yes and No votes and puts in two layers for each of the main demographic drivers for both Yes and No. There’s also a slider at the top right of the map, so you can see the clear relationship between what happened and what drove it. The Yes vote was based on the very well educated and those in professional jobs, while the No vote was driven by the big group of male Tradies and workers with a Certificate Level of Education. There’s a message in there for a Labor Government which they cannot afford to ignore.

It’s a great map, so open it and zoom around the country to see what happened, where it happened and why it happened. And don’t forget to click on the pop ups to see all the details you need to know about each seat, including their Voice votes, their MPs and their demographics.

01
Jan 24
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The Quest for Unclaimed Ground

Category:Election Profiles Tags : election strategy

I have an election strategy piece in the Australian Financial Review special New Year’s Edition for 2024.

For AFR subscribers, the link can be found here: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/odds-for-2024-point-to-another-close-labor-win-in-2025-20231212-p5eqv2

The thrust of the AFR article is that both leaders of the two major parties seem to be talking to the converted demographics which already dominate their own power bases.

While PM Anthony Albanese appears to be focussed on fighting off challenges in his own seat from the affluent inner-city Green Left, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton appears to be focussed on holding off challenges to the National Party and the LNP from the populist right of One Nation and Palmer United. Hence the ALP is losing support in the outer suburbs over cost of living issues and the Coalition is not winning back the support it lost at the last election from higher SES professionals, particularly professional women.

Election campaigns across Australia’s single-member constituencies are about winning a majority of votes in a majority of seats. This requires a combined demographic and spatial strategy.

I worked on this strategy for the ALP leading up the 1983 election for then Opposition Leader Bill Hayden, after I wrote to him, pointing out that his 1980 campaign had won him won plenty of votes, but not in the seats that could have been won. Bill was kind enough to let me publish these research papers which you can now find at https://www.elaborate.net.au/category/election-profiles/

Let me illustrate the importance of a combined demographic and spatial strategy with the Table above, which didn’t appear in the AFR story. The table shows 20 seats which changed hands in 2022, by their new MP and Party, their 2PP votes and swing, their SES and Income quartiles.

(Please note I am using here the official Australian Electoral Commission post-election allocation of preferences between the major parties and use the headings AEC: 2PP ALP, AEC: 2PP Lib/Nat and AEC: ALP 2PP Swing. This 2PP count works by assuming the ALP and the Coalition candidates polled enough primary votes to remain in the count, as 2022 preferences were distributed. Hence the ALP is shown as ‘winning’ the 2PP in Fowler, whereas the seat was in fact lost by the ALP to popular Independent Dai Le. Similarly, the table shows the Coalition ‘winning’ the 2PP vote in all formerly safe Liberal seats which were actually won by the Teals.)

The table shows that:

The only low SES seat that changed hands in 2022 was Fowler, lost by the ALP to an Independent. The only other ALP loss was the high SES seat of Griffith, lost to a Green.

The ALP tended to win Liberal seats in the medium SES range and these were mainly in WA where the swing was State based.

The ALP, Greens and Teals tended to win the seats in the higher SES ranges.

If it continues its failed 2022 strategy of targeting lower SES seats, the Coalition stands no chance in 2025 of regaining middle class and professional seats which it lost in 2022. Furthermore, these former safe Lib seats lost to Teals are evolving into marginal ALP seats.

For the ALP, the primary vote challenge remains the atrophying of its support among working families chasing well paid blue collar jobs. The West Australian Government did the heavy lifting for Labor in 2022 with this demographic and showed Federal Labor how it could be done in the other states.

The demographic target for both parties in 2025 can be found among younger, aspirational families, making a go of life and its challenges in the middle to outer suburbs. Increasingly, as Australia’s birth rate falls, this demographic is becoming dominated by Asian born parents who are currently voting Left, but consuming Right. They are supporting Labor electorally, but choosing private health insurance and non-government schools for their families.

This is a politically transactional demographic interested in opportunities and outcomes.

To have a chance at winning a narrow majority of seats in 2025, the major parties need the support of this demographic.

To win a working majority of seats, the major parties also need to regain some of their lost demographics – working families for Labor and professional women for the Coalition.

Leaders need to focus not just on voters they think they can win, but on voters who are also living in the seats that can be won.

06
Jan 24
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Seats won by major political groups in 2022 by SES & income quartiles

The odds still point to another close Labor win in 2025.

Category:Election Profiles Tags : Demographics Elections

My editor has okayed me posting the original story on spatial electoral strategy from the Australian Financial Review’s special New Year’s Edition and here it is.

It looks as though 2024 will be a rerun of 2023 in many respects, albeit with signs of cresting and then stabilising for population growth, prices and interest rates.

We are also likely to see some stabilisation in Labor’s political fortunes in Western Australia, following the mid-2023 retirement of the state’s popular premier Mark McGowan. Our modelling of the 2022 election voting showed that Mark McGowan government was worth a flat 6 per cent to that year’s federal Labor Party vote in WA.

When McGowan quit in June, this vote was up for grabs and recent polling by RedBridge indicates that McGowan’s replacement Roger Cook, is likely to comfortably retain power on March 8, 2025, and also hold up Labor’s federal vote to the same 55% percent level attained in 2022.

In Queensland, the long-running soap opera that was the once-popular premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has finally ended during an ad break, with the election of her deputy Steven Miles, as the new Labor premier.

Click to read more…..

04
Feb 24
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John Stanley of 2GB and John Black on 29th January, 2024

John Stanley and John Black – 29th January, 2024

Category:Election Profiles Tags : Demographics Elections

Had a chat with John Stanley of 2GB/4BC this week, at the tail end of yet another hot and humid Queensland summer of cyclones, heatwaves and floods. I recall making the suggestion to John that if the Labor PM was planning on fighting another election over the impact of global warming, then it would be a good idea to call it at the tail end of next summer, especially in Queensland, where he needs to win seats. We’ll see early next year if the PM was listening.

You can listen here.

25
Mar 24
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There’s an hilarious cartoon in the Australian Financial Review today, with a story from me below it. My op ed piece runs through the elections and by-elections we’ve had since the last Federal election on May 21 2022. There’s some good news in there for the Government I think, from the evidence and explanations of why it’s occurring.

What happened on the weekend to rev up the week ahead.

Category:Election Profiles,Election Profiles 2024

There’s an hilarious cartoon in the Australian Financial Review today, with a story from me below it. My op ed piece runs through the elections and by-elections we’ve had since the last Federal election on May 21 2022. There’s some good news in there for the Government I think, from the evidence and explanations of why it’s occurring.

🔗 https://www.afr.com/politics/state-polls-position-albanese-for-a-second-term-20240318-p5fd6g

Opinion polls are useful indicators to track public opinion, but by-elections and elections (including the big Brisbane Council ballot) are even more useful. It’s one thing for voters to tell someone on the phone how they are thinking of voting at the time, but altogether different when they actually front up to the booth and do it. And there’s more of them of course at an election.

Personal votes need to be taken into account here. The swing against Governments at by-elections tends to occur when it’s a Government sitting members personal vote being lost and if the Government is unpopular at the time, then that can get added to it. So they can get pretty big and bad news for a Government, if it is on the nose at the time, as we saw during the Whitlam Government in Bass.

But if a very popular Opposition MP retires, and the Government is travelling reasonably well with its constituents, we need to consider that the personal vote for the Opposition MP retiring was taken from the Government’s local candidate in the first place. The return of this vote to the Government candidate at the by-election isn’t a swing, just a reset. That’s why Aston’s figures looked good for the Albanese Government and the Dunstan figures looked pretty good for the Malinauskas SA State Government last weekend.

What demographic modelling shows us is an approximation of this personal vote and thus we can take it into account. I started researching personal votes and donkey votes 50 years ago when working for Don Dunstan, the then SA Premier, after whom the SA seat was named. We had a rare occurrence at the time with simultaneous Upper and Lower House elections and a decent set of rolls and, from memory, few minor parties to cloud the major party vote in the upper house. (You can do the same sort of thing with Senate and Reps votes, but it’s a lot harder these days with so many minor parties and more strategic voting.) I was able to isolate the donkey votes, get to the personal votes for the sitting members and the personal vote estimates was very close to demographic residuals for models we were doing at the time. So a strong demographic model, possible then in SA due to a range of demographic, economic and social factors, provided a good estimate of the vote the party could get at the relevant election and a pointer to the personal vote of the candidates.

We’ve been tracking personal votes and party votes ever since for most Federal and some State polls and the evidence tends to hold up pretty well when we look at the outcome for by-elections.

It’s interesting in that the personal vote is just that: personal. An MP in a city seat with a big population turnover tends to have a small personal vote, as the voter who’s been met in electoral office is often voting in another seat the next election and voters meet at social or sporting functions often live in other seats. But a country MP in a stable seat talks to voters who tend to live and play and work and vote in the same seat. This means when the MP meets someone it’s a local voter. And the MP builds up friends and personal contacts. Personal votes can also be negative, for cases where an MP antagonises his or her local constituents on a regular basis. I tend not to mention personal votes in election reports unless they are a couple standard errors of estimate above or below predicted votes. And, for the record, the best performing MPs in the current Parliament are female Labor representatives of regional and rural seats. And long-standing MPs for the Coalition also do well. If you’re ever running a campaign, these factors are taken into account. Or should be.

The other factor taken into account in the article is the voters’ desire for balance between parties at the state and federal levels, especially in Queensland. This is why winning State elections is not necessarily a good thing for Federal Governments of the same party. Anyway, check out the article. I hope its useful.

🔗 https://www.afr.com/politics/state-polls-position-albanese-for-a-second-term-20240318-p5fd6g

28
Mar 24
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John Stanley and John Black – 26th March, 2024

Category:Demographics,Election Profiles,Election Profiles 2024 Tags : Demographics Elections Elections

I caught up with John Stanley from 2GB/4BC on Tuesday night for an informal chat about an election review article I’d written for the Australian Financial Review on Monday. Here is a .pdf link to that page.

John and I talked about demographic and political events and themes over the timeline since the May 21, Federal 2022 election, including the curious cases of State and Federal leaders from supposedly opposing parties, and why they manage to share what, for them and their constituents, can be a mutually beneficial political relationship, as Frenemies.

As I was often told when I was a member of the Australian Senate: Your enemies aren’t the ones sitting opposite you mate, they’re the ones behind you.

I’ve just finished writing a longer piece for the AFR on the long term Australian demographic trends dominating Federal politics now and into the next decade, which is in the AFR Easter Edition today. I hope you enjoy it.

26
Mar 23
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Aspirational Left voters rise again in NSW State Election

Category:NSW Election 2023

Above is a snip of our ADS/Esri online map showing in shades of red the larger estimated Two Party Preferred swings to Labor in the March 25 NSW election at the close of counting on election night.
🔗 https://arcg.is/0rqGez

My preliminary analysis of the March 25 NSW State election vote and swings appears in today’s Australian Financial Review for subscribers only at
🔗 https://www.afr.com/politics/albanese-s-aspirational-left-piggybacks-nsw-labor-to-close-win-20230322-p5cugu

The analysis shows that the strongest swings to the ALP occurred in seats dominated by the better-paid Aspirational Left voters who also elected the Albanese Government and drove up private health insurance and private school enrolments during Covid lockdowns.
🔗 https://www.educationgeographics.net.au/new-face-of-politics/

Below is a chart from the preliminary analysis of the NSW results, showing the family income profiles of the seats you can see in the online map. Basically, the more high-income families in a state seat, shown to the right of the chart below, the bigger the 2PP swing to the ALP and the darker the red on the map, while more low to medium income families meant a smaller swing to Labor (below seven percent), or even a swing to Coalition, shown by darker shades of blue.

I should stress that only about half of the votes were counted on Saturday night, so the final results could vary to a sufficient degree to impact the results in a number of close seats.

I should also point out that that profile of both major parties in Australian politics are fading and, as they do, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ascribe even a theoretical 2PP vote to the major parties in a quarter of the seats.

Big components of the Aspirational Left include Professional Women and Asian Migrants. Professional women are now the fastest growing occupational group among Australian workers and Migrants now make up more than 50 percent of Australian Population increases since 2001.

These groups are therefore likely to increase in numbers and influence in Australia in the coming decade and exert a strong and growing influence over future state and federal elections and the uptake of private education and private health insurance.

At ADS/EGS and HGS we will be including this new group in all our future modelling.

13
Mar 23
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Read the full background stories about the Aspirational Left Families now reshaping Australia

New Face of Politics

Category:Demographics,Election Profiles

Read the full background stories about the Aspirational Left Families now reshaping Australia

Three key decisions that adults in Australia are making about their own lives, and their families, revolve around choosing who to vote for in an election, staying healthy and giving their kids the best education they can.

Sarah Ho, who moved with her family from Hong Kong when she was five, and sends her kids to a private school, is an emerging type of voter who election analyst and political demographer John Black describes as the aspirational migrant population, is drastically altering the shape and direction of culture and politics.

Sarah Ho isn’t wedded to a particular party. The marketing executive and mum of three, who lives in Lidcombe in Sydney’s west, always votes for the candidate whose policies align most with the health needs of her ageing parents, the education outcomes of her children, and someone who has progressive views on climate change.

You can now read the full Australian Financial Review stories about our research into this big emerging demographic group, which is re-shaping Australian political parties and changing the balance between private and public consumption within Australia’s health and education sectors.

With the approval of the AFR and the ABC, we are posting the original March 2 AFR page one and page three stories, together with the feature article and charts covering the Aspirational Left, along with follow-up interviews with John Black by Radio National’s Patricia Karvelas and ABC Brisbane Drive Time host Steve Austin. An ADS (Australian Development Strategies) map of the distribution of the Aspirational Left stereotype across current federal seats is also found in the links below.

Steve Austin interviews John Black on ‘The Aspirational Left’

Podcast – Patricia Karvelas speaking with John Black
🔗 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/could-a-new-demographic-tip-the-nsw-state-election-/102048382

Link to our recent Post: 🔗 Rise of the Aspirational Left voters reshaping Australia

03
Mar 23
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Here’s a snip of an ADS/ESRI online map showing dark red shading for the three federal seats of Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan. All three seats were won by the Greens from the Liberals or from Labor in 2022, despite big Two Party Preferred (2PP) swings and votes to the ALP.

Rise of the Aspirational Left voters reshaping Australia

Category:Demographics,Election Profiles

Here’s a snip of an ADS/ESRI online map showing dark red shading for the three federal seats of Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan. All three seats were won by the Greens from the Liberals or from Labor in 2022, despite big Two Party Preferred (2PP) swings and votes to the ALP.

https://arcg.is/0G4iL1

These seats are coloured red because they’re among the top-rated seats in Australia for our new Aspirational Left Index prepared by Australian Development Strategies for our new 2021 Census modelling database.

Unfortunately for the ALP Candidates in these three seats, the Coalition was so on the nose with the Aspirational Left in 2022, that the three Coalition candidates each lost more than 10 percent of their 2019 primary vote.

This ten percent loss from the Coalition leaked strongly to local hard-working Green candidates, rather than to Labor, putting the Greens ahead of Labor in the final distribution of preferences, with four out five Labor voters then tipping out the leading Coalition candidate and electing the Green.

This story played out across the nation in 2022, with 20 seats changing hands. The Coalition lost 18 seats, ten to the Labor Party, six to Teal Independents and Ryan and Brisbane to the Greens. Labor lost Griffith to the Greens and Fowler to an Independent.

Of these 20 seats changing hands in 2022, 14 of them are among the list of our top seats on the Aspirational Left Index. In other words, Aspirational Left voters decided which party won Government in 2022 and which MPs dominated the cross benches.

Radio National Podcast on Aspirational Left role in elections, from March 3, 2023:

Could a new demographic tip the NSW state election? – ABC Radio National

Could a new demographic tip the NSW state election? (Unsplash: Daria Nepriakhina)

Australian Financial Review Aspirational Left feature article, from March 2, 2023 for AFR subscribers:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/the-rise-of-the-aspirational-left-voter-who-is-remaking-politics-20230224-p5cndx

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

When the Australian Electoral Commission provided the final Two Party Preferred votes and swings from the May election in the second half of 2022, we were able to use the 2021 Census results to re-calculate our 2022 election profiles and all our Stereotypes and models of unemployment, participation rates, wealth, taxable incomes, sources of income, transfer payments, school enrolments and school fees.

We then began using the new census when our Education Geographics (EGS) arm profiled enrolment churn across more than 120 Australian non-government schools and our Health Geographics (HGS) arm profiled an unexplained surge in numbers of Australians taking out private health insurance.

Across these three areas of research by ADS/EGS/HGS we began seeing the influence on voting, choice of education sector and increase of private health insurance by a new aspirational and transactional demographic group we named the Aspirational Left.

At ADS/EGS and HGS we will be including this new group in all our future modelling.

16
Jul 22
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What if the PM ended the climate wars for good?

Category:Election Profiles,Election Profiles 2022

If Labor’s 2030 carbon emissions target is blocked by the Greens in the Senate, most Canberra Observers would expect Anthony Albanese to crab walk away. But what could happen in a double dissolution if he called their bluff, to end the Climate Wars started by the Greens in 2009?

🔗 https://www.elaborate.net.au/PDF/Financial Review, Friday, July 15, 2022, pages from 43 to 43.pdf

📷AFR

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