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!
