Australian by-elections, 2018

[AustralianSwingVoter]

https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/1038368217817788416

[AustralianSwingVoter]

https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/1038370247244271616

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Antony Green - "I may be ultra-cautious, but you call one election wrong and you never stop hearing about it. I'm increasingly confident McGirr will win, but my caveat is still about the pre-poll votes. But even if the Liberals do win, this is a truly dreadful result. Expect a blame game to erupt tomorrow."

[AustralianSwingVoter]

https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/1038387422701088768

[AustralianSwingVoter]

https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/1038985380442165250

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Well then, with Wagga Wagga out of the way we move onto Wentworth.
The Wentworth Liberal pre-selection is tonight. Bragg was the heavy favourite, what with Turnbull endorsing him, but after he pulled out a couple of days ago after the Bullying allegations insisting that there should be a female candidate the moderate faction's support has coalesced around Katherine O’Regan, mainly due to Michael Photios (the main NSW Moderate faction-broker) putting his full weight behind her. Mary Lou Jarvis is the other main candidate now, with the full backing from the right faction however given the Wentworth branch's notorious moderation she is at a severe disadvantage. Dave Sharma still won't withdraw, despite losing all of his supporters (including Trent Zimmerman) after Bragg's insistence on the need for a female candidate. Meanwhile the no-hopers are Richard Shields, Maxine Szramka, Michael Feneley and Carrington Brigham. Peter King however probably shouldn't be completely counted out, he still has a good many friends in the constituency party still bitter about Turnbull's knifing of him back in '04.
Katherine Phelps is reportedly waiting on the results of the pre-selection before deciding whether or not to run as an Independent.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Well then, with Wagga Wagga out of the way we move onto Wentworth.
The Wentworth Liberal pre-selection is tonight. Bragg was the heavy favourite, what with Turnbull endorsing him, but after he pulled out a couple of days ago after the Bullying allegations insisting that there should be a female candidate the moderate faction's support has coalesced around Katherine O’Regan, mainly due to Michael Photios (the main NSW Moderate faction-broker) putting his full weight behind her. Mary Lou Jarvis is the other main candidate now, with the full backing from the right faction however given the Wentworth branch's notorious moderation she is at a severe disadvantage. Dave Sharma still won't withdraw, despite losing all of his supporters (including Trent Zimmerman) after Bragg's insistence on the need for a female candidate. Meanwhile the no-hopers are Richard Shields, Maxine Szramka, Michael Feneley and Carrington Brigham. Peter King however probably shouldn't be completely counted out, he still has a good many friends in the constituency party still bitter about Turnbull's knifing of him back in '04.
Katherine Phelps is reportedly waiting on the results of the pre-selection before deciding whether or not to run as an Independent.

Well then.
The Wentworth branch has selected Dave Sharma (former ambassador to Israel) as their candidate, who beat out Richard Shields on the final ballot. Nobody knows how exactly our Wentworth branch made such a monumentally idiotic decision. He is a severely flawed candidate, in addition to being a man, despite everyone's insistence that the candidate would have to be female.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Someone has leaked the pre-selection tally

[AustralianSwingVoter]

WAGGA WAGGA

Party	Candidate	Votes	%	±
Liberal	Julia Ham	12,031	25.5	−28.3
Independent	Joe McGirr	12,003	25.4	+25.4
Labor	Dan Hayes	11,197	23.7	−4.4
Independent	Paul Funnell	5,028	10.6	+0.9
Shooters	Seb McDonagh	4,682	9.9	+9.9
Greens	Ray Goodlass	1,377	2.9	−2.1
Christian Democrats	Tom Arentz	900	1.9	−0.4
	Total formal votes	47,218	96.8	−0.1
	Informal votes	1,561	3.2	+0.1
	Turnout	48,779	88.3	−2.0
Independent	Joe McGirr	23,001	59.6	+59.6
Liberal	Julia Ham	15,570	40.4	−22.5
Independent gain from Liberal		Swing	+22.5

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Wagga Wagga

Julia Ham	25.5	26.1	26.5	29.5	32.9	40.4
Joe McGirr	25.4	25.8	26.5	29.4	35.5	59.6
Dan Hayes	23.7	24.0	25.2	28.2	31.6
Paul Funnell	10.6	10.9	11.2	12.9
Seb McDonagh	9.9	10.3	10.6
Ray Goodlass	2.9	3.0
Tom Arentz	1.9

[AustralianSwingVoter]

City of Sydney Councillor Dr Kerryn Phelps, former president of the Australian Medical Association and prominent pro-same sex marriage campaigner, has confirmed that she will be running in the Wentworth by-election.

[DL]

City of Sydney Councillor Dr Kerryn Phelps, former president of the Australian Medical Association and prominent pro-same sex marriage campaigner, has confirmed that she will be running in the Wentworth by-election.

For whihc party?

[AustralianSwingVoter]

City of Sydney Councillor Dr Kerryn Phelps, former president of the Australian Medical Association and prominent pro-same sex marriage campaigner, has confirmed that she will be running in the Wentworth by-election.

For whihc party?

She's running as an Independent. She is definitely our main threat, and could well win.

[DL]

Wentworth strikes me as the Australian equivalent of the kind if high income socially liberal, inner city, creative class type ridings in Canada the US and other countries that have started to totally reject rightwing parties as those parties have embraced social conservatism and xenophobia. I’m trying to think of what the Toronto equivalent of Wentworth would be. University-Rosedale? St. Paul’s? Either way they are riding that once upon a time could go Tory in a good year and now as the Canadian Tory Party And it’s Ontario branch have gone totally populist right, those ridings are now totally off the radar screen for the Tories and in the recent Ontario election they were dead last in each. Similarly the GOP is now totally rejected by voters in places like Beverly Hills and the upper east side of Manhattan

So how long before highly educated socially liberal Australians get with the program and reject the Coalition. Ow that it’s been taken over by religious conservative nut bars and climate change deniers?

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Wentworth strikes me as the Australian equivalent of the kind if high income socially liberal, inner city, creative class type ridings in Canada the US and other countries that have started to totally reject rightwing parties as those parties have embraced social conservatism and xenophobia. I’m trying to think of what the Toronto equivalent of Wentworth would be. University-Rosedale? St. Paul’s? Either way they are riding that once upon a time could go Tory in a good year and now as the Canadian Tory Party And it’s Ontario branch have gone totally populist right, those ridings are now totally off the radar screen for the Tories and in the recent Ontario election they were dead last in each. Similarly the GOP is now totally rejected by voters in places like Beverly Hills and the upper east side of Manhattan

So how long before highly educated socially liberal Australians get with the program and reject the Coalition. Ow that it’s been taken over by religious conservative nut bars and climate change deniers?

.
Never. Wentworth has never voted Labor and probably won't even now (Phelps is our main competitor). It's the richest seat in the country. This seat isn't full of uni students, it's full of bankers and doctors and CEOs and lawyers and so on. Wentworth is the home of old money, and it's not changing anytime soon.
And remember, the ALP is far more influenced (beholden, in fact) to the Trade Unions. The ALP is far more of a worker's party than the Democrats or the Liberals/NDP or UK Labor because the Greens cater for the Uni students and modern lefties.

[DL]

Come to Toronto and visit the riding of St. Paul’s. It’s the richest riding in Ontario and full of professionals and bankers and has a large Jewish population etc... in the June Ontario election it went NDP and elected a black lesbian who co-founded the local branch of Black Lives Matter. She narrowly beat the Liberal who was a very left leaning liberal, while the Tories were winning across the province they came in a distant third in St. Paul’s running a stock broker...

The old right/left cleavsges are shifting. Nowadays to be left wing means to be open to immigration and to support abortion rights and sams sex marriage and to want to be open to the world. To be rightwing now means to reject the idea that climate change exists and to press xenophobic hot buttons and to want to ditch trade agreements.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Come to Toronto and visit the riding of St. Paul’s. It’s the richest riding in Ontario and full of professionals and bankers and has a large Jewish population etc... in the June Ontario election it went NDP and elected a black lesbian who co-founded the local branch of Black Lives Matter. She narrowly beat the Liberal who was a very left leaning liberal, while the Tories were winning across the province they came in a distant third in St. Paul’s running a stock broker...

The old right/left cleavsges are shifting. Nowadays to be left wing means to be open to immigration and to support abortion rights and sams sex marriage and to want to be open to the world. To be rightwing now means to reject the idea that climate change exists and to press xenophobic hot buttons and to want to ditch trade agreements.

"The old right/left cleavages are shifting." They are in Canada. They most certainly are not in Australia.

[DL]

I dont claim to be an expert on Australian politics but when you had a religious right climate change denying crackpot  like Abbott leading the Liberals it seemed to me that the Australian Liberal were going down the Trump/Brexit road...then there was a hiccup of relative sanity under Turnbull and now the party has been taken over by an evangelical Christian who hates all gay people...how much longer will the doctors and lawyers in Wentworth want to keep voting for something like that? We already saw in the UK how even under the leadership of someone as controversial as Jeremy Corbyn, Labour won a lot of very upscale London seats like Kensington etc... because the professional classes were so repulsed by Theresa May and her wanting Brexit and her attacks on immigrants.

[Intell]

This isn't happening in Australia, there is a stark class divide within the cities. Working class vote Labor. Rich vote Liberal, beside some professional class in the media that live in gentrifying neighborhoods that are turning green.

The class divide is more negated when you go in rural areas without industry, where even those at the lower socioeconomic divide vote for right-wing parties.

Also in the UK Corbyn's win in Kensington is due to it having high levels of income inequality with more labour-friendly demographics voting in higher droves. While there has been a shift of the professional middle class to the left in the UK, the class divide is still strong there.

[DL]

These old patterns explain a lot of voting behaviour..:until they don’t. It wasn’t that long ago that the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats were the party of the white working class. In 1976 Marin County votes for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. Last year it went to Clinton over Trump by something like an 85% to 15% margin. In the UK never mind Kensington, Labour also won seats like Battersea which are full of rich young professionals who are very Remain. I might add that Corbyn’s own riding of Islaington is a very very high income riding full of professionals and academics who at one time likely would have voted Tory.

It’s probably just a matter of time before this happens in Australia as the Liberals go the way of the GOP and the Tories the UK and Canada and make themselves totally unattractive to anyone with a post secondary education.

[Intell]

These old patterns explain a lot of voting behaviour..:until they don’t. It wasn’t that long ago that the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats were the party of the white working class. In 1976 Marin County votes for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. Last year it went to Clinton over Trump by something like an 85% to 15% margin. In the UK never mind Kensington, Labour also won seats like Battersea which are full of rich young professionals who are very Remain. I might add that Corbyn’s own riding of Islaington is a very very high income riding full of professionals and academics who at one time likely would have voted Tory.

It’s probably just a matter of time before this happens in Australia as the Liberals go the way of the GOP and the Tories the UK and Canada and make themselves totally unattractive to anyone with a post secondary education.

'young' 'youg' 'young'. Islington is also far from 'very very high income' 'Very very high income' areas in London voted tory.

[adma]

These old patterns explain a lot of voting behaviour..:until they don’t. It wasn’t that long ago that the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats were the party of the white working class. In 1976 Marin County votes for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. Last year it went to Clinton over Trump by something like an 85% to 15% margin. In the UK never mind Kensington, Labour also won seats like Battersea which are full of rich young professionals who are very Remain. I might add that Corbyn’s own riding of Islaington is a very very high income riding full of professionals and academics who at one time likely would have voted Tory.

It’s probably just a matter of time before this happens in Australia as the Liberals go the way of the GOP and the Tories the UK and Canada and make themselves totally unattractive to anyone with a post secondary education.

'young' 'youg' 'young'. Islington is also far from 'very very high income' 'Very very high income' areas in London voted tory.

Yeah, the most "very very high income" inner ridings of Chelsea & Fulham and Cities of London & Westminster remain Tory--though they swung Labour by 10 and 9 points respectively (and the latter became a marginal in the process)

It's probably in part a cultural thing re the *kinds* of ultra-high income (i.e. Rosedale vs the Annex in terms of Toronto); but also that even after the Liberals' recent provincial decimation, Toronto has an inherently far stronger "middle option", while the UK and Australia are more authentically binary.  That is, regardless of leadership, the UK Tories and Australia Liberals still operate as free-enterprise-coalition default parties--maybe it would have been different in Britain if Cleggmania turned out like Macronmania; but such was not to be.

The better Canadian comparison would be Vancouver-Langara and Vancouver-Quilchena, within the more authentically binary provincial realm of British Columbia.

[DL]

I was last in Sydney 18 years ago but to me Wentworth struck me as being a lot like Vancouver Point Grey... and it’s worth noting that when the Ontario Liberals totally collapsed it was as the NDP that won University Rosedale and St. Paul’s not the PCs. And in very very very very rich Beverly Hills people would vote for Bernie Sanders before they’d vote for a Republican

[EPG]

Sorry to derail a thread about Australia, but it is a fact that London vote intention is better predicted by race & ethnicity rather than either social class or age, with the latter in particular only acting as a small perturbation. And even this is itself a small perturbation in the overall strong predictive power of social class on vote intention in the UK. Where's that image of seats versus deprivation when you need it?

Please don't project micro-local effects of demographics on vote intention within microcosms of society, like young college graduates, onto society as a whole!

[Gary J]

The last Conservative MP for an Islington constituency was defeated in 1945.

Battersea was subject to considerable demographic change in the late 20th century. It was a surprise when a Conservative won the seat in 1987.

I am not sure that you can necessarily assume that political developments in one country will be exactly duplicated in another.