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).
Here's a graph of the results:
So what is happening in this graph?
[more after the jump]
The x-axis is the primary vote received by Kernot in each simulation. As you can see, we start at 1% and walk up to a vote of 14%. We do this in 0.5% vote increments, and at each step in the vote, we run 200 simulations. For each simulation at this vote point, we randomise the preferences of each candidate, force Labor to preference the Greens ahead of all other parties (as per their declared deal) and also we randomly distribute the vote of all candidates around their base vote using a Gaussian distribution around a margin of about 3.5%. So each of these 200 simulations are "what if" scenarios based on each party getting roughly their predicted vote at that vote point. As Kernot's vote increases, the vote of all other candidates decreases in proportion to their original vote. This is based on the assumption that her vote would generally come equally from all parties, instead of just cannibalising, for example, the vote of the Greens.
The y-axis shows two different scales, depending on the data set. For the ALP, Green and Kernot's votes, it shows the percentage primary vote that candidate received in that simulation. For the simulations won, it shows the percentage of simulations won by Kernot at that vote point.
Can Kernot win? Well, can she break 7.5% of the vote? Probably not. 7.5% of the vote is approximately where she starts to win in more scenarios then she loses. This number is probably not co-incidentally about half a quota. However, what is interesting, is that if Kernot is going to win a seat, it will mostly like come at the expense of the Labor party or the Coalition - NOT the Australian Greens. The rising Kernot vote has hardly any impact on the Green's lock on a seat - as we can see, the % of simulations won by the Greens never drops appreciably below 90%, despite a softening of their vote as Kernot rises. If Kernot can pull her vote above 5%, I would say there is a real chance of both the Greens' Lee Rhiannon and Cheryl Kernot making it into the Senate.
Most likely, Kernot and her backers must know her chances are slim to none, and so are probably setting themselves up for a new party after the election.
If we look at the very first simulation where Kernot wins a seat, we can see a couple of interesting things.
Firstly, it does not occur until Kernot is on 2.5% of the vote. This reflects that the micro-party candidate that polls highest has an instant advantage, since they are in a position to scoop up preferences from other micros and surf to a full quota - ala Steve Fielding's relatively high 1.7% in 2004.
If we look at key moments in the count for this scenario, Kernot gets early preferences from Darrin Hodges Ungrouped 1, Equal Parenting and the Liberal Democrats (LDP). The Sex Party, a candidate I consider a chance of the breakout 2.5% of the vote, is only on 0.3% of a vote in this scenario and are eliminated early, which is very low but within the margin of error. This keeps Kernot in the vote until the Australian Democrats are eliminated, freeing votes from them, William Bourke - Ungrouped 5, Jennifer Stefanac - Ungrouped 7 and Independent Hamish Richardson.
The big "if" in this scenario (and remember this was just one out of nearly 6000) is that Kernot gets over 3% of her quota from the CDP, who I would say are unlikely to preference her in real life. However, it is a good example of the theory that if all the micro parties and independents followed a simple rule - preference each other above the major parties - we would see a lot more independent Senators.
Finally, Kernot picks up preferences when Carers Alliance are finally eliminated, which keeps her just ahead of the Greens and Labor, who are both just short of a quota. Greens then pip Labor for the last spot. This leaves us 2 ALP 2 Coalition 1 Green and 1 Independent (Kernot)
Obviously, this is just one random scenario out of thousands, showing that while there are many paths into the Senate, the first step is to get good preferences from micro parties and the second step is to then outpoll them in the first few counts.
Edit: I should add that my own personal opinion is that Kernot will struggle to break 1%. She has not appeared to have laid the ground work for a run and where is her support going to come from?
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