Kernot likely to take seat from Labor or Coalition - not the Greens Friday, July 30, 2010

Can Cheryl Kernot, or indeed any micro-party or independent candidate, win a Senate seat in New South Wales (NSW) this election? Based on my simulations, it does not look like it. However if Kernot can get about 5% of the vote she will have a chance to take a seat from Labor or the Coalition, meaning that we might see both an Australians Greens senator and an independent returned from NSW - an amazing result for a state which split 3 Labor 3 Coalition at the last election.

Predicting a senate result is hard. However, we now know several things about the contest on 21 August.

• We have a list of candidates.
• We know the ALP will get roughly 39% of the vote.
• We know the Greens will get roughly 12% of the vote.
• We know "roughly" means probably a margin of error of about 3.5%.
• We know that the ALP is preferencing the Greens above all other parties.
• We know (from my previous work) that randomly allocating preferences returns mostly the same result as a real election with preferences allocated by the parties.
• And finally, we have results from 2007 for a host of micro parties such as the Christian Democratic Party (CDP).

Using the current polling swing for the Greens in NSW of 3.7% on top of the 2007 Senate vote in NSW of 8.43%, we set a rough vote for the Greens of 12.13%, we do the same process for the Coalition and Labor. Then we set up a scenario using pyapollo (my senate simulator) inputting all the candidates and all the details we know about their estimated votes and preference deals. Then we run it, a lot of times.

Here's a graph of the results:

So what is happening in this graph?

[more after the jump]

Greens to win two Senate seats in Tasmania and other quarterly Newspoll results Wednesday, July 21, 2010

A collapse in the Labor primary vote would crush Labor in the Senate and give the Greens a serious chance of winning two seats in Tasmania if the results of the most recent quarterly Newspoll figures were repeated at the forthcoming federal election on 21 August 2010. The Liberals would stage a dramatic turnaround, beating their 2007 result after spending most of the last two years in the doldrums.

Despite these wild swings in the number of seats won in the Senate, the effective result has not changed. The Coalition will lose its blocking power in the Senate and the Greens will gain control of the cross benches, giving them balance of power along with Labor and the Coalition.

Read more after the jump...