STEREOTYPES AND VOTING

Hi there, election tragics. Here’s some data in Excel form for you to play with, in the lead up to election day and afterwards.

It’s in Excel form, so you can copy it, rank the seats, compare them with the vote and do your own sums with them on election night re the swings. We will try and do the same late next week, when the results are clear in close run seats.

https://www.elaborate.net.au/PDF/Stereotypes 2019.xlsx

The file shows the official ALP 2PP votes on current boundaries for all seats, plus our five most interesting stereotypes, based on 50 years of my own demographic research, including Labor’s demographic marketing campaign for the 1983 national election, which makes me very mature, indeed. I guess I’m the original tragic as far as demographic profiling is concerned.

As these are 2PP ALP votes, you can calculate the LNP 2PP vote by simply subtracting these figures from 100 percent for each seat, unless of course, it turns out to be won by an Independent.

Here’s a brief run down on the key stereotypes and their significance.

Working Families, are mainstream, average Aussie families, with skilled blue collar dad and a white collar mum, with an anxious eye on the family budget, flatlining real wages, transfer payments and tax cuts. Rank the excel file by this stereotype and you see a lot of them in marginal seats in Queensland and Western Australia. An awful lot. Too many to include here.

Goat Cheese Circle residents are inner city, very high income professionals. Lots of bike pants, Green votes, and senior public servants. They liked Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 but not Tony Abbott.  The votes of most of these are wasted in formerly safe Liberal seats, but some of these seats may swing to Independents  in NSW or Labor in Victoria.  A swing in 2019 against the liberals among this group would shore up my local member in Griffith and help Labor in Macnamara, the old Melbourne Ports. But not help Tony Abbott all that much.

Swinging Voters are made up of the demographics which consistently lead the swings either way at elections since 1966. Look for your local Nappy Valley, with lots of pre-school kids. Motivated by costs of housing, child care and part time jobs. These seats are strongly clustered in WA and any big swing amongst this demographic could turn very ugly for the Coalition, particularly very late on election night. I can still remember Mick Young late on 1969 election night, joking that the 1969 election would have been won for Labor, if there had been another state to the west of Western Australia. Conversely, the seats with fewer swinging voters which would be more likely stick to the Coalition are in Tasmania and National Party strongholds in the bush.

Coming of Age voters are young adults, often first time voters, moving away from parental political influences and starting out on life’s journey for themselves, with fewer visits to the Bank of Mum and Dad. There’s a few of these in marginal Coalition seats, like Brisbane, Chisholm, Swan and Reid and the one-time Labor seat of Ryan. There’s also some marginal Labor seats, like Griffith, Moreton, Hotham, Perth and Macnamara, but given the Newspoll swings in the relevant states, there’s not much joy there for the Coalition.

The Digitally Disrupted are working in blue collar and white collar jobs, currently among the first to be displaced by technology. There’s a big overlap with Working Families, which explains their anxieties at the moment. Typically these jobs are frozen in terms of numbers and then wither as a percentage of the workforce. In terms of seats, this is pretty safe territory for the Labor Opposition, but there are some marginals for the LNP in Queensland in Flynn and Forde. There’s also some marginals for Labor in Lindsay, Braddon and Lyons and if swings in NSW and Tasmania go the Coalition’s way, these would be vulnerable.

We’ve already posted some scatterplots using these stereotypes, showing how Goat Cheese Circle voters influenced the Green Primary vote in 2016 and how the Working Families group dominated those seats swinging to Labor. The full picture can be seen on our 2016 Dashboard under Demographic Profiles, Family Types, Voter Indices. https://www.elaborate.net.au/ADSElect2016%20PostVote.htm

It shows, subject to ecological fallacies of course, seats swinging to Labor in 2016 dominated by Working Families and the Digitally Disrupted and swings to the Coalition dominated by Goat Cheese Circle voters who liked Malcolm Turnbull.