Climate change. Women. Chinese Australians. He doesn’t like Scott Morrison. rage. Despair. Community. A desire for greater political integrity. The loss of liberal values. Molladors.
As for the explanations of the election result, we have heard it all. Like, really. All.
But is there any data that can help us choose what happened?
Well, our secret voting system means we can’t find out how specific people or groups of people voted.
But we know a lot about the voters that make up the different electorates in Australia, and we also know how those voters voted.
We’ve put together these two sources of information to see what patterns emerge. There’s no big “gotcha” that explains all the results, but again, we didn’t expect to see it.
What does emerge is that some of the key voting trends in 2022 were already brewing in 2019.
Let’s start with climate change.
The points in this chart represent each of Australia’s 151 constituencies. The colors show the winning party in 2019.
They’re a little hard to differentiate, we realize. But suffer with us, that will change.
Seats are sorted by the percentage of voters who said climate change was the most important issue for them.
Thus, the seats on the left of the graph are the least concerned about climate change, and those on the right are the most concerned.
We’ve highlighted a few seats that are worth paying attention to.
Think of them as markers to keep you focused.
Now, let’s add another dimension.
We have added to the preferential vote of two Coalition (2CP) candidates in 2019 on the vertical axis.
Voters above the 50 percent line were won by the Liberal and National parties last round.
That alone doesn’t tell us much.
But let’s see if it changes in 2022.
Can you see a pattern in the changes? (Try scrolling up and down).
It happens a little bit so don’t worry if you can’t.
The three seats we are watching, all with different levels of concern for the weather, moved in different directions.
Wentworth and Ryan moved below 50 percent, meaning the Coalition lost them in this election. Lyons turned to the Coalition, but not enough to change hands.
Let’s go back to the 2019 results for a moment.
Now, look out for this group of blue Coalition seats to the right of the chart, near Wentworth. Remember that the Coalition won them in 2019, but they have a high level of concern about climate change.
Watch them as we return to the results of 2022. Here we come.
You may notice that they all fall below this 50 percent line and all turn gray.
This is due to the fact that they were won by independent candidates who argued in favor of greater action on climate change; now they are all “green” seats.
But looking at all the seats, it’s hard to know if there’s a pattern here, right? There are movements in both directions as we change the years.
Let’s try something different.
Instead of the Coalition vote, we are now watching the change in the Coalition vote between the 2019 and 2022 elections, which is often called the swing.
There’s a bit of a step here, so let’s move on to what this chart tells us.
Seats that swayed against the Coalition in 2022 now appear below the 0% line. The lowest seats saw the largest change of vote towards Labor, minor or independent parties.
And the seats that turned to the Coalition appear above the line.
It’s a little easier to see the trends without the color soup. We will also add a trend line.
So what we’re seeing now is the relationship between the change in the Coalition’s vote and the concern about climate change.
As a general rule, the narrower the grouping of dots around the trend line, the more confident we can be that there is a stronger trend.
Voters concerned about climate change oscillated a little more against the Coalition than voters with less concern, but the relationship is quite weak.
What happens in 2019?
We have now changed the chart to show the change in the coalition vote between 2016 and 2019.
Do you see how the dots are much more grouped around the trend line?
This means that the correlation between concern about climate change and the move away from the Coalition in 2019 was much more pronounced.
However, as we know, the Coalition endured winning the government in 2019. The changes against it were not big enough for it to lose seats.
But check out Wentworth and Warringah.
Here they are atypical. Knowing what we do now, they were ahead of the independent group.
At an early stage of the blue-green storm that came in 2022, independent Zali Steggall defeated Tony Abbott in the 2019 Warringah election.
Dave Sharma narrowly won Malcolm Turnbull’s former Wentworth seat for the Liberals, after losing to independent Kerryn Phelps in a by-election.
Please note that changes in successive elections are based on each other.
Thus, in 2019, when the seats concerned about climate change oscillated against the Coalition, in 2022 the stage was being set for the “teals”.
But before we draw too many conclusions from a trend, let’s look at things from a different angle.
This graph sorts voters by how far they are from their nearest capital.
See how the 10km, 100km, and 1,000km markers are evenly spaced at the bottom?
This takes into account the unequal distances between voters in Australia.
Now, here is the distance measure proposed against the change of vote of the Coalition between 2016 and 2019.
There are again the same two atypical values, this time representing major changes away from the Coalition in seats close to the city.
Aside from the atypical values, the general trend is that regional seats turned to the Coalition, while closer to the city there were small changes.
So what happened three years later?
Similar to climate history, the results were contradictory. But the trend was the same: the Coalition’s vote was weaker in the city than in rural areas in 2022.
And this time, the oscillations against the Coalition in the city were much stronger.
Okay, you probably could have told us that the Coalition was not as popular in the city center as it is in rural Australia.
If this one didn’t surprise you, maybe the next one.
While some trends, such as the two we just saw, continue in successive elections, others do the opposite.
Here are the voters again, this time sorted by the percentage of voters who said the economy was their “most important issue” in the 2022 election.
Unsurprisingly, according to the general view that the Coalition benefits when the economy is the focus, the seats where the economy occupies a prominent place are a blue sea.
When we add the swing in 2019, we can see the Coalition’s success in campaigning for its credentials as the best economic managers and attacking then-Labor leader Bill Shorten as “Bill Australia can’t afford it”.
Voters most concerned about the economy turned more strongly to the Coalition.
Again, our two outliers are at the bottom, reversing the trend.
But this is where it gets interesting.
In 2022 there was a total investment. The most concerned voters in the economy were those who swayed most against the Coalition in this year’s election.
There are many different ways to interpret this.
One reading is that the economy was not that important to Australians in 2022, and they voted on other issues or based on their views on party leaders.
Another possibility is that while the Coalition once again campaigned in the economy, its message failed to cut through, perhaps voters preferred the Labor plan, including their vote to raise wages.
The combinations of these three trends (climate, regional division, and an apparent lack of Coalition cuts in the economy) helped to empty the heart of the Liberal Party: the rich seats in the city center. What started with the two-seater signals in 2019 turned into a blue-green wave in 2022.
La Trobe University political scientist Andrea Carson says the Liberals’ lost seats are “highly educated electorates with politically committed voters and strong independent challengers. They would normally be interested in voting in the Coalition, but we are not seeing this “.
Dr. Carson also noted climate change as a factor: “I think this shows that the warning was not heeded by the two main parties. They did not spend much time talking about climate change and those who cared about it. they have made a great profit for the Greens and the Independents. “
Indeed. These elections have seen unprecedented lows in the primary elections of Australia’s major parties, and the corresponding highs for independents and minors.
The 33% vote in Labor primaries in this year’s election is the lowest in the party since the 1930s. And they won the thing.
The most important changes of the Greens and the pro-independence movement were seen in very high and very low socio-economic zones, in what could be a sign that perhaps only “Middle Australia” feels represented by the big parties.
Dr. Carson attributes this trend to postmaterialism in richer areas.
“When you’re quite comfortable and accommodating, you can afford to worry about things beyond material concerns. And I think that’s why you’re seeing the independents and the Greens start there,” he said.
As for the poorest areas, “the Coalition has not promised any policy that benefits the lowest socio-economic [groups]so they don’t really care financially about supporting the Coalition. “
Voters in lower socioeconomic areas, such as western Sydney and northern South Australia, saw changes of more than 20% in independent candidates. While Rob Priestly fell short at Nicholls, Dai Le was successful at Fowler. He distanced himself from the teals by saying, “My electorate here has a different need from the voters who represent the pro-independence blues.”
Looking at the graph of socioeconomic trends above, Fowler is on the far left, compared to a green seat like Goldstein towards the …