Queensland State Election 2024

Apologies for the hiatus. Many interesting elections have come and gone but I have the interest and capacity to make a quick post about the approaching Queensland state election in light of the Greens announcing candidates for their best seats.

Below is a graph of where those seats “start from” with respect to the vote in the 2020 election.

In order to put them all on the same graph I have made some shortcuts and assumptions:

• LNP and Green vote totals are rounded to their nearest whole percent.

• The LNP will recommend a preference for the ALP on their How To Vote cards in all seats in 2024 (a “return to normal” after 2020 where they recommended preferences to the Greens in some seats).

• If the LNP are excluded in the 3PP count those ballots will preference the Greens at a rate of 30% in all seats

• If the ALP or Greens candidate is excluded in the 3PP count those ballots will preference the LNP at a rate of 20% in all seats.

[Edit: it appears it doesn’t work on mobile so I’ve added a labelled image at the bottom of the post]

Credit once again to Alex Jago who built a tool to make these graphs.

Each dot represents one of 8 electorates and if you hover over they should show their labels. If you grant the assumptions I mention above and there is no change in 3PP vote totals in 2024 then the seats will be won by the party corresponding to the colour of the region they are in.

The closer a seat is to the border between two different regions of colour the more “marginal” it is.

What Does This Mean For The Greens?

Based on the graph it would appear that from the Greens perspective they have 1 safe seat:

• Maiwar

Three marginal Labor vs Green contests:

• South Brisbane*

• McConnel

• Cooper

Two “long shot” seats held by the ALP:

• Greenslopes

• Miller

And two “long shot” seats held by the LNP:

• Clayfield

• Moggill

What Is Missing From This Analysis?

Quite a bit. I may make more posts to:

• Remake that graph more precisely.

• Discuss candidate factors: incumbency*, retirement, etc.

• Discuss “Headwinds”: what I call it when red-blue swing voters go one way or another in a way that helps or hinders the Greens. I would anticipate that the LNP will do broadly better in 2024 than in 2020 which cause all seats to “drift” to the right on my graph.

• Analyse the 2022 Federal and 2024 Local election results in areas overlapping with the state seats. This would be a lot of work.

• Discuss seat by seat factors like how much the Greens might looking for “low hanging fruit” swings in some more than others.

• Aggregate relevant polling (doesn’t make much sense to do until we are closer to election day).

*In the graph above South Brisbane is shown as a marginal ALP victory but further context would make that almost certainly not the case. In the last election 63% of LNP 3PP voters preferenced the Greens but I have assumed that would fall to 30%. However I would flag that I expect Amy MacMahon, the Greens MP for South Brisbane, to get a large “sophomore surge”, most likely putting the seat in “marginal Greens” territory.

Feel free to comment or contact me with any thoughts!

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What Is A Three Party Preferred?

With the historically close result of the seats of Brisbane and Macnamara in 2022 many may be quite a bit more familiar with this subject than I thought.

They are no longer publishing it but for a time the AEC was conducting a “three candidate preferred” (3CP) indicative count of ballots in the Division of Brisbane in the 2022 election. Conducting this is not unlike the “two candidate preferred” (2CP) indicative count carried out in every seat but rather than assuming the exclusion of all but two candidates the AEC assume the exclusion of all but three candidates. Here is a point in this count compared to the 3CP count in the final distribution of preferences in the same seat in 2019.

3CP Brisbane	LNP	ALP	GRN
2019	50.89%	25.37%	23.74%
2022 (83% counted)	42.09%	28.62%	29.29%
3CP swing	-8.80%	+3.25%	+5.55%

In order to win a seat in Australia’s Instant Runoff Voting system a candidate must never be in last place. In 2019 the Greens’ candidate Andrew Bartlett was in last place at this 3CP stage and was thus excluded. The LNP 3CP vote share was too high for anyone else to win anyway.

In 2022 it appears certain that the Greens’ Stephen Bates will instead exclude the Labor candidate and because the LNP 3CP vote share has dropped precipitously he will win on the preferences of ballots in this Labor 3CP vote share (which are almost entirely Labor primary votes, but also a few from 4th party candidates).

This is one particular pathway to victory for a Greens candidate, but imagine an alternative seat of Brisbane where 10% of the 3CP vote share was shifted to the Labor from the LNP or vice versa with the Greens staying the same. In either case the Greens would be nowhere near winning the seat. It’s a bizarre quirk of the voting system that the vote share required to win changes depending on the relative popularity of other parties. 29% may be good enough in one race and nowhere near in others.

One more point I’ll make before jumping into the deep end. Notice in the above chart that the three parties’ 3CP vote shares add to 100%. This will always be the case which means that if you know two of the parties’ vote shares you can easily calculate the 3rd.

Three Party Preferred Landscape

I came up for the idea of this graph:

On the x-axis is the Coalition 3CP vote share. On the y-axis is the Greens 3CP vote share. Every point on the graph represents a potential 3CP vote share in a three-corner-contest of the three parties with the coordinates (x,y) corresponding to an election with Coalition on x% 3CP, Greens on y% 3CP, and Labor on (100-x-y)% 3CP. The shaded areas are which party wins on those 3CP numbers (for the purposes of the demonstration I have assumed 80% of Labor and Greens 3CP ballots preference the other party and a 70% of Coalition 3CP ballots preference Labor).

On the left hand side of the graph the Coalition vote is low and they lose to either Labor or the Greens. The boundary between Labor and the Greens is quite complicated. On the far left (ha!) the Coalition is being excluded in 3rd place and their preferences are improving Labor’s chances of defeating the Greens. In the middle whoever of Labor or the Greens come 3rd is out of the race and allow the other party to win. On the right (ha again!) the Coalition vote is high and they win.

The distance of an electorate’s result from changing from one shaded region to another is in some sense its “margin” but unlike the traditional “two party preferred” pendulum model this is a two-dimensional not one-dimensional margin.

Here is a zoom in with with the Greens three QLD gains mapped upon it (if these graphs look ugly try opening on a different browser or a different device):

The three seats all saw a swing away from the Coalition which corresponds to a right to left movement on the graph. Each also saw a swing toward the Greens which corresponds to an upwards movement on the graph. Brisbane and Ryan moved from the blue shaded region to the green one while Griffith moved from the red shaded region to the green one, ie- Brisbane and Ryan were lost by the Coalition to the Greens and Griffith was lost by Labor to the Greens.

I must give credit to my friend Alex Jago who after I shared my idea whipped it up into existence with his programming skill. Have a play around with the graph at his site here. You can edit preference assumptions which is quite cool and makes the tool relevant to any 3rd party or independent (if you have some idea how ballots for other parties in the three-corner-contest may flow).

What Is To Come

In future elections I will be going through the Greens seats, graphing them, and determining what exactly that position on the graph means for what vote changes are required for the Greens to win. Coming soon blog posts will be:

• A breakdown of the VIC state election Greens potential target seats

• A look at the final distribution of the 2022 federal election to see the true 3CP results

• A breakdown of the NSW state election Greens potential target seats

Introduction

Hello, my name is Ben Messenger and I have been an amateur follower of elections and voting systems for some time. The community of Australian election nerds is very well serviced by the current group of psephologists, election analysts, and poll analysts (my favourites linked at the bottom of the page) but there is a niche gap in the market where I think there could be interest. In mainstream Australian election analysis the concept of “Two Party Preferred” is ubiquitous in describing the general lay of the land in terms of swings at elections and defining marginal and safe seats in “classic” Labor vs Coalition contests. However this is quite ill equipped for the growing number of “non-classic” or three-corner-contests.

The Greens (of whom I am a member) have been growing modestly for 20 years and now have 12 members in the quasi-proportional Senate, effectively a ceiling in that house for a minor party. Realistically to increase their representation federally and in most other Australian parliaments they must turn to single member electorate houses, a challenging thing for a 3rd party. A few months ago when I was thinking about starting this blog I had imagined this to be a medium term challenge but the outstanding Green result in QLD has had made it far more immediate.

The question is what is a “marginal” seat that the Greens could win, and how safe is a Green incumbent? Can that “marginal” and “safe” quality be quantified in Green seats? Can we describe this with clarity like is done for a Labor vs Coalition contests with 2PP? This will be the subject of this blog.

My next post will be an explainer of the methodology I will be conducting to try to grapple with the Greens increasing relevance in single member electorates and after that I will be delving into the Victorian state election and beyond.

P.S. The “Three Parties” in the name of this blog refer specifically to the Labor, Coalition, and Greens. I may do analysis of the odd independents or other 3rd parties when I see the chance.