The next Victorian state election will be held on the 29th of November and public polling has begun to become more frequent, ReachTel, Galaxy, Essential, Morgan, Ipsos, and Newspoll have all released polling in the last few weeks, so it's time to update my latest model. Venom (Victorian Electoral NOminative Model) is largely based off of my Federal model but has a few additional features to account for a recent redistribution (redistricting) and for polling errors. Like the Federal model Venom takes into consideration the prior voting history of each electorate, incumbent strength (where applicable), and public polling. Venom calculates a predicted two-party preferred vote for each seat 10,000 times. Currently Venom predicts a Labor majority government more than 99.9% of the time based on current polling.
Tables in this diary are colour coded. Shades of red reflect Labor predictions, shades of blue represent Liberal predictions and Nationals predictions are dark green. The percentages indicate the overall percentage of simulated outcomes where one of the Coalition parties wins the seat. The final column is the median two-party preferred result with the Labor percentage first, that is Labor-Coalition.
The column graph shows the number of simulations in which the governing Coalition wins a certain number of seats in the 88 member Victorian Legislative Assembly. Red columns represent a Labor government and blue columns a Coalition government. As Victoria, inconveniently, has chosen to have 88 seats in their Legislative Assembly it is possible for the voters to elect a deadlocked parliament with 44 members from each major party. As Victoria has fixed term elections this could prove to be rather problematic. This column representing this hung parliament situation is grey.
It is possible that not all seats will be won by either Labor or one of the Coalition parties.
The Greens have come very close to winning a number of seats in the past and on current polling would be considered non-zero chances of winning one or more of Brunswick, Melbourne, Northcote, Prahran, and Richmond. The Greens would almost certainly support a Labor government if the later didn't reach 45 seats themselves.
Whilst there are no rural independents at present in the Victorian parliament there is always the possibility of unexpected victories. National held Morwell is perhaps the most likely seat to elect an independent as there is significant local resentment at the government response to a mine fire that burned for 45 days and dumped large amounts of toxic smoke on the town of Morwell.
I'll run a fresh simulation on Venom whenever fresh polling data is available.