Initial 2025 ADS Election Report

Initial 2025 ADS Election Report

We’ve just finished some preliminary charts and an online map (see map link on the first page) on the 2025 results based on the early counts. We will update with the final primary and 2PP results in a week or so. It was a really interesting result, in terms of the preference allocations to the two traditional major parties, following a collapse in the primary Coalition vote over the last week or so for Peter Dutton. In the final days, voters were just scrambling for anyone else to vote for really (apart from the Trumpet of Patriots) and their preferences invariably favoured Labor.

It seems the trends in the primary vote over the campaign tracked my old eponymous formula linking net satisfaction scores with primary votes … meaning that, over the same period, a change of three percent in a leader’s net satisfaction tends to accompany a change in their party’s primary vote of one percent in the same direction. My Uni Psych lecturers used to call this Cognitive Consistency. We normally see this when a party dumps an unpopular leader for the current crowd favourite (eg a Hawke or Rudd 2.0) but, this time, it was mainly self-inflicted by Dutton’s lack of campaign match fitness. Albanese, meanwhile, got a leg up early in the campaign from Donald Trump and never looked back (as did Mark Carney in Canada).

The Greens also experienced a big demographic shift in support, foreshadowed correctly by the MRP polls and which I outlined in the AFR before the election. Using the ALP Government as a punching bag for three years didn’t work out so well for Green MPs among their traditional supporters, costing the party three out of their four House of Reps seats and highlighting Greens vulnerability to a Centre Left Teal Senate campaign, as seen in the ACT.

A similar existential threat for the Coalition can be seen in their long-term decline in 2PP votes in wealthy Teal seats like Wentworth and Warringah. Both of these formerly safe Liberal seats returned a 2PP majority vote for Labor in 2025, reinforcing a trend I’ve observed over 50 years of profiling Australian votes, during which Professional women progressively re-aligned their votes from Liberal to Labor, particularly after the Coalition dumped Malcom Turnbull for Scott Morrison.

A large part of this trend has been a judgement by professional women on blokey Coalition Leaders like Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton and it will be interesting to see if Sussan Ley’s less adversarial leadership resonates more with this fast-growing political demographic over the next term of Labor Government.

As you can see from the last two charts in the attached PDF, without an increase in support of professional women over 2019/2022 levels, it’s hard to see the Coalition ever returning to Government in Australia.

Click To View Report: Initial 2025 ADS Election Report