Update on pre-polls & odds

I’ll be focused on Canada for the next couple of days, but time now for two quick updates on Australia’s election, now less than a week away.

First the pre-polls. Voting started on Tuesday, and it’s been busy ever since (as it happens, it’s been busy in Canada as well). You can download the figures here, although the format isn’t very user-friendly. I’ve been just looking at Victoria; for the three weekdays, Tuesday through Thursday, the state took 467,223 pre-poll votes, compared to 438,219 taken on the first five days (Monday-Friday) in 2022, an increase of 6.6%.

So if that’s the proper comparison – in other words, if the people voting during the week were roughly the same people as did so last time, but having to compress the task into three days because of the two public holidays – then there was only a modest increase, even though the daily totals were a lot higher. Reviewing the situation on Friday, Ben Raue remarked that “it would be a mistake to assume that the numbers being significantly higher day-by-day this week means that the numbers will be much bigger than in 2022.”

I was sceptical about that, but the real test was yesterday, Saturday; if it was not far off the 2022 total, then Raue’s position would be vindicated. Conversely, as I put it on Facebook, if it “is up, say, another 40% or so on 2022 then it’ll be clear that something big is happening.” That figure was much too conservative. Victoria yesterday took another 158,953 pre-polls, an increase of 79.5% on 2022.

So one of two things (or some compromise between the two) is happening: either we’re headed for a very large increase in the pre-poll total, which was already more than a third of the electorate in 2022, or else pre-polling has been massively front-loaded into the first week compared to previous years. The first seems much the more likely, but we’ll have another look at things mid-week.

Second, there’s the betting market. Last time we looked at this I mentioned that the individual seat markets tended to be “something of a lagging indicator”, taking time to catch up to a shift in voter sentiment. That’s been confirmed by recent trends. The polls now show Labor gaining a small swing in its favor, and betting on the overall result has followed suit, with Sportsbet putting a Labor victory at better than 7-1 on, with the Coalition at 5-1 against.

But you probably wouldn’t guess that from the seat markets. They too have shifted towards Labor, but they still show the Coalition making net gains: picking up four seats (Aston, Gilmore, Kooyong and Ryan) while losing only one or two (Cowper, plus Bradfield line-ball). If every favorite were to win, Labor would finish with 77 seats (down one), the Coalition 59 or 60 (up two or three) and the crossbench 13 or 14 (down one or two) – a four-seat Labor majority.

Even where the markets aren’t actually forecasting change, they seem to lean more to the Coalition side. Checking the odds last night I found nine Labor-held seats (Bennelong, Bullwinkel, Chisholm, Lingiari, Lyons, Macnamara, McEwen, Paterson and Wills) where, although Labor is favored, their challenger is at 6-4 or shorter. The Coalition has only six seats in the same position (Calare, Deakin, Dickson, Leichhardt, Moore and Wannon); the crossbench has three (Curtin, Goldstein and Griffith).

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UPDATE, Sunday 1.35pm: I’ve now checked the pre-poll figures for other states, in case there was something untypical in the Victorian ones, and there isn’t. The national increase for the first week (that is, four days as against six) is 19.7%, so Victoria at 20.8% is almost right on average, as are Queensland and South Australia. New South Wales at 14.6% is a bit lower, and Western Australia for some reason is much higher, up 45.8%.

FURTHER UPDATE, Monday afternoon: Antony Green now has a post up about the pre-polls (and postals), which is well worth a look and includes some nice graphs.