James Campbell: Why we can expect to see some strange and wonderful election results

While voters’ opinion of how the Coalition has handled some issues has continued to deteriorate, a new RedBridge poll will bring comfort to some — but it’s the battle of preferences that holds the surprises.

Coalition fans can draw some comfort from the latest RedBridge-Accent tracking of marginal seats.

For though the voters’ opinion of the Coalition handling of issues continues to deteriorate, along with their view of the Liberal Party and its leader, Labor has suffered a two-point drop in its primary vote.

The drop means the party’s primary has now fallen 1 point below where it was at the last election.

Alas for the Coalition, its primary has dropped five points below where it was in 2022.

That’s because the voters leaving Labor haven’t jumped on to their pile but have headed off to “other”, which by also taking votes from the Greens and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation grew five points and is now a whopping 15 per cent.

Add that other vote to the Greens 12 per cent and Paula Hanson’s One Nation 6 per cent and you have a strange new world in which Coalition and Labor between have only a third of Australians’ votes each with the other third heading off elsewhere.

Labor has suffered a two-point drop in its primary vote. Picture: Getty Images

The difference between the rates of preference flows could be the difference between a good and a bad night for Peter Dutton. Picture: AFP

It’s always been fraught predicting the outcome of marginal seats based on national polls which is why it was decided to commission RedBridge-Accent to replicate the major parties track poll of the sorts of seats they would have been monitoring in this campaign.

But on top of the difficulty of working out state and regional variations, we now have the problem of trying to work out where the preferences of the one-in-three Australians who aren’t voting for Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton are likely to go.

Historically One Nation’s preferences have on average gone 65 per cent to the Coalition but that can vary between regional and suburban seats.

This time the Coalition is pinning a lot of hope on the fact that at the last Queensland state election they flowed to LNP at a rate of 75 per cent.

The difference between those two rates of preference flows could be the difference between a good and a bad night for Peter Dutton.

And given they are likely to be uneven around the country, we can expect to see some strange and wonderful results.

Happy Election Day!

Originally published as James Campbell: Why we can expect to see some strange and wonderful election results