So the
results of the Griffith by-election are in... Some people are staring at those figured with wide eyes in surprise wondering what they mean, but there are two things you need to remember:
1. There are a lot more minor players, with two new independents picking up some vote, the bullet train for Australia party getting a small share, and the pirate party hitting harder than I expected.
2. Palmer united isn't running a candidate.
3. There was a very low voter turnout.
So, how is that significant?
1. The positive swing in primaries for the liberals
isn't because of an increase in popularity, it is because the Palmer United voters had nowhere else to go. That 3.4% of voters would normally prefer the libs anyway, yet the liberals hardly picked up a third of them, or picked up all of them but bled voters elsewhere, the truth is somewhere in between.
2. The negative swing towards labor isn't because there are less popular, but rather labor voters had other choices to go for. All those minor parties took their small cut of labors vote, and that resulted in a negative swing.
Still, the .3% swing in labors favor in the two party preferred is much smaller than they wanted, but it could be disproportionately small. People don't need to vote for the winning party, and with such a low turn out I would guess that labor lost more voters to apathy than the liberals.
This also explains why the greens actually picked up votes. While they
should have been bleeding to the pirate party and loose at least 1% of the primary swing, instead they picked up. This is most likely because greens voters, as supporters of a minor party, feel the need to vote when ever possible, so while they lost voters to the pirate party, the ones they had left counted for a larger spice of the vote, resulting in the appearance of a positive swing. Indeed, while in this election they got 6.5 thousand voted, last one in 2013 they had almost 9 thousand...
The only things you can really take from this election are:
1. Griffith voters are getting unhappy about the current government.
2. They are even
less happy about having to vote.