Marginal Seats Wash-up

[imackay]

It seemed a pretty daunting task when we began. The government had such a commanding majority of seats but we started at the most marginal and just chipped away.

With doubtful seats now declared, it's timely to look at how "Taking Mary to the Marginals" went.

Of the seats we targetted, Aspley, Mudgeeraba and Hervey Bay all fell on election night. Of the "in doubt" seats, Cleveland (by 155 votes), Gaven (by 342) and Redlands (by just 34) all changed hands to LNP.

Chatsworth, widely tipped as the most marginal finally went to Labor by 74 votes although there have been claims of irregularities as LNP had been leading until the reported sudden arrival of a bloc of Labor votes. The electoral commission is reportedly investigating.

Everton, tipped to be failrly safe came much closer than all anticipated.

Close analysis of the controversial "Greens preferences" suggest they did not flow significantly more to Labor in the 14 "deal" seats than in others, with similar proportions of voters (around 40%) choosing the "just Vote One" option.

Interestingly though, while the overall green vote was higher, it was lower in 12 of those 14 "deal" seats. It seems that a number of Greens voters were either angry at the "deal" or confused by conflicting claims about what would happen to their preferences. Given the drop in the Labor vote, it would seem that many of these previoously green voters voted LNP.
There aren't all that many issues that would cause a greens voter to vote LNP, in fact maybe just one...... Traveston.

So the preference deal didn't help the ALP, it didn't help the Greens by getting Ronan Lee back in Indooroopilly and it seemed to result in a substantial drop in the Green vote in the affected electorates, not to mention the looss in credibility.

While credibility is less tangible, the lower vote translates to a loss of several thousand dollars as each party recieves just over $1.54 for every primary vote it receives.

You'd have to say that "taking Mary to the Marginals" made a difference and I'd like to think that only some of it has showed up in the election results. Because we aimed to inform more than persuade, I think we've reached some new supporters for the times ahead.

A big thankyou to all involved. Those tired feet,walking up Brisbane's third steepest hill, were all well worth it.

Job well done all.