How at risk is your local member?

Ever wonder how ‘at risk’ your local member might be?

Now that we have the full spectrum of quarterly polling data from Newspoll and Nielsen, not only can we run election simulations, but we can also use those simulation results to take a closer look at which seats would have been most likely to fall were an election held sometime over the last 3 months and the result was consistent with the polling.

We can split these seats up into 3 categories:

Extreme Risk – being those Coalition held seats that would almost certainly have fallen to the ALP. It would have taken an historical anomaly for any of these seats to have been retained by the Coalition.

High Risk – being those seats that would probably have fallen to the ALP. A large majority of these seats would have changed hands.

Moderate Risk – being those seats which would have been in some danger of falling to Labor. For nearly every High Risk or Extreme Risk seat which did not fall, there would most likely have been a seat in this Moderate Risk group that would have taken its place.

What’s worth noting is that there are a fairly sizable number of blue ribbon Liberal seats in the Moderate Risk group as a consequence of the size of the various swings going on at the moment in each state. So for every seat like Goldstein or Higgins that would be really unlikely to fall – those rusted on Liberal Party base seats – the risk to those other seats in the Moderate Risk category increases to take the probability weight. This suggests that seats like Casey would have been more at risk of falling than their nominal position on the electoral pendulum would ordinarily suggest. It’s also worth noting that every election throws up an odd bolter of a seat – some electorate that wouldn’t ordinarily be classified as being at risk by the simulation, yet which still ends up falling with a relatively huge and unusual swing.

This is what the list looks like (over the fold), including seat name, the state, sitting Coalition member and the mean simulated two party preferred result for the ALP. The aggregated polling suggests that there are no ALP seats currently in danger of falling to the Coalition, yet that necessarily ignores any major issues that might be happening at the local level which could cause an ALP seat to fall – such as with Belinda Neal in Robertson.

All these results are based on the new electoral boundaries for 2010.