The South Australian state election is shaping up to be a contest unlike any other recent Australian election, with three major parties competing across the state.
We have seen a rise in support for minor parties over recent years, but most elections still produce clear contests between the major parties.
That may not happen in the upcoming South Australian state election. Nick Xenophon’s SA Best is running candidates in most seats, and recent polling suggests the party will do very well.
There hasn’t been a great deal of statewide polling, with just two polls conducted in 2018, and three others in the second half of 2017. In those five polls, the vote for SA Best has ranged from 18% to 32%, while the Labor vote ranged from 23.5% to 37%, and the Liberal vote ranged from 29% to 33%. Each party has come first in at least one of the polls.
If SA Best is polling neck and neck with the two major parties, they would likely come in the top two in a large number of seats, and possibly win enough seats to break down the two-party system in the state parliament.
The Nick Xenophon Team polled at least 12% in every lower house seat in South Australia at the 2016 federal election, with over 30% in just one. The party’s candidate came in the top two in four out of 11 seats. This was achieved with a statewide vote of 21.3%, trailing the Liberal party on 35% and Labor on 31.5%.
If the party can come closer to the major parties in the state election, as some polls have predicted, you would expect SA Best candidates to break through into the top two in many of the state’s 47 electorates. This will make the election much more complicated – different combinations of two parties would be in with a chance in different seats, and there could be a large number of seats where all three parties have a shot.
This will make preferences important, not just in deciding the winner but also in determining which two candidates make it to the final count.
In the absence of official party instructions, it would be reasonable to assume that SA Best candidates would do better out of preferences, gaining more preferences from Labor or Liberal when facing off against the other major party.
In 2016, Labor and Liberal both recommended “split ticket” preferences – each party provided voters with two options on their how-to-vote card – one would preference NXT, the other would preference the other major party.
Labor came third in three seats, and in those seats 75% of Labor voters preferred NXT over the Liberal party. Almost 58% of Liberal preferences flowed to the lower-profile NXT candidate in the Labor seat of Port Adelaide.
Labor recently announced it will split preferences between the Liberal party and SA Best, recommending preferences for Xenophon’s party ahead of the Liberals in half of seats – with the specific seats to be announced later. Labor is also splitting its preferences evenly between SA Best and the Liberal party in Nick Xenophon’s seat of Hartley. We don’t yet know what preferences the Liberal party will recommend.
So where might SA Best have the biggest impact? Using 2016 federal election data, we can see that the Nick Xenophon Team did better in seats outside of Adelaide, doing particularly well in the Adelaide Hills and areas to the immediate south of Adelaide, as well as in the north of the state. Within the Adelaide urban area, the party did better in the eastern and southern suburbs.
Nick Xenophon is contesting the Liberal seat of Hartley, which wasn’t a particularly good seat for his party in 2016. Xenophon will undoubtedly do better than a generic candidate, and if the party does particularly well he’ll have a good chance of winning, but his choice of seat is a gamble.
While the Nick Xenophon Team pulled votes everywhere, voting data suggests the party had a bigger impact in Liberal seats.
The small volume of polling makes it harder to predict what will happen in this election. SA Best is on track to poll very strongly for a minor party, but there is a massive difference between 18% and 32%.
The SA Best candidate will need to overtake one of the major party candidates in each seat, and then be close enough to the leading candidate to win with preferences.
If the party is polling closer to 18%, they may well only get into that position in a handful of seats, while polling a large vote but still coming third in most electorates (as happened to One Nation in last year’s Queensland election). If that happens, SA Best preferences will be decisive, but the party could win only a handful of seats.
If the party is achieving a vote close to the major parties (say around 30%), they would likely break into the top two in a large number of seats. We’d have a large number of seats where the winner wouldn’t be clear on election night, with preferences from the lower-polling major party deciding the winner, and potentially a large block of SA Best MPs sitting in the South Australian lower house, having a big influence over who forms the next government.
