2008 Swings for Seats

Below are the graphs of the national and state based federal electoral pendulums, just click on the thumbnail to blow them up.

What they show is how many seats would fall for a given uniform swing to either major party. To use it, pick a swing on the vertical axis, trace it across until it hits the black line, then trace it up or down to the horizontal axis to see how many seats that swing would deliver to the major party. The national pendulum also has the swings for seats blown up in the top left and bottom right quadrants for swings of less than 7% to make it easier to read in terms of the seats that would change hands for the usual smaller swings.

National Pendulum	NSW Pendulum	Victorian Pendulum
QLD Pendulum	S.A. Pendulum	W.A. Pendulum

The other States and Territories are best given by a table:

Division	State	ALP Margin
Solomon	NT	0.19
Bass	TAS	1
Braddon	TAS	1.44
Franklin	TAS	4.48
Lyons	TAS	8.78
Lingiari	NT	11.16
Canberra	ACT	11.82
Fraser	ACT	15.07
Denison	TAS	15.63

With the Victorian (and national) pendulum, there’s a bit of a quirk involved with the seat of Melbourne where Adam Bandt from the Greens came second in TPP terms behind the ALP. As a result, Melbourne is sitting on a margin of only 4.71% for the ALP. However, if there were any swing to the Libs of a percent and a bit or more in Melbourne, the Libs would probably end up running second in TPP terms, forcing most of the Green vote to flow to the ALP via preferences and blowing the ALP margin out to over 15 points as result. So it’s best to keep that in mind.

Advertisement