Possibly a little late to be jumping into the schemozzle that was Federal Politics last week, but now that Kevin’s back, there’s quite a few people giving Labor another look. It’s fascinating to me because the policy differences between Rudd and Gillard are minimal, so the difference boils purely down to personality and perception.
Anyway, that point aside, here’s Pollytics on how the 2013 Election is actually shaping up to be a very, very interesting one:
The “Swing to the ALP” figure is the change to the ALP two party preferred vote since the 2010 election. As we can see, there’s big movements to the ALP in Qld, but large movements away from them in Victoria and South Australia, with NSW and WA remaining static.
If we plug those numbers into Antony Green’s Election Calculator, we get the ALP currently sitting on 77 seats, the Coalition 71 and 2 Independents (Katter and Wilkie). The Tasmania, ACT and NT results all come from small samples in either the ReachTEL or Morgan SMS results – so they’re a bit iffy, but you get the general picture.
My election simulation produces a similar result 76 seats to the ALP vs. 72 to the Coalition, with 2 Independents.
Wait, what? That’s not supposed to happen. Labor is ahead on its own merits, and QLD seems to be the key.
Very, very interesting electoral maths about to occur.