Australian Politics

I don’t know if ranked choice voting really works with “tactical voting”.

So, completely ignoring the reality on the ground and just talking about it hypothetically, yes, it is possible for tactical voting to play a part.

If we imagine Greens and Labor voters would (in an honest vote) preference each other, followed by Teal, followed by the LNP (and we'll ignore any 5th parties as irrelevant), and that many of the Teal voters you describe would have begrudgingly voted LNP 2nd rather than jump ship all the way to Labor or the Greens, then supposing native Teal votes are low enough, it is sensible for Labor and Greens voters to vote tactically.

If we imagine the first round of voting comes out as:

• Greens 10% (a bit less than their national average)
• Teals 20% (an easier round number, close to that 18% figure quoted below)
• Labor 30%
• LNP 40%

With honest voting distributed as described above, the Greens are eliminated first, taking Labor to 40%, and then the Teals are eliminated, giving the LNP a win with 60%.

If instead some portion of Greens and Labor vote tactically, the first round might end up as

• Greens 5%
• Labor 20%
• Teals 35%
• LNP 40%

Which sees first Greens, then Labor, eliminated, resulting in 60–40 Teal win.

It's an edge case and may or may not reflect the reality of how voters felt at the election. And tactical voting in IRV is very unreliable and requires much more specific knowledge of how other voters are going to vote in order for it to pay off than in FPTP. That same tactical voting could have hurt their more-preferred option if, say, the actual honest percentages had been

• Greens 12%
• Teals 15%
• Labor 33%
• LNP 40%

And 6% points of those Teals chose Labor, resulting in Labor getting 45% after Greens are eliminated, and then 51% after the Teals are. The strategic voting of Labor and Greens if this were the true preferences would have given it to the Teals despite Labor being the winner in an honest vote. Despite only a fairly small and difficult-to-predict change in the honest intentions.

Tagging @[email protected] for interest's sake, as well as @[email protected].

Sure, what I have is anecdata, but I will say the study is focused on the teal voters, whereas the people I’m talking about were members or organisers.

Fair enough. You did specifically talk about voters in that previous comment, though, not members or organisers.

I don’t think that’s a good read of what’s happened given the “teal” voters I know about. Almost to a person, Teal voters are ex-Liberal voters.

overall the way most people vote is to put the candidate they like the most at the top, and the candidates they like the least at the bottom. If they distrust the majors, they put the majors “later”. Basically, if you think the Teals are going to get up, but you want the Greens, you’re still better off putting the Greens on top.

I agree with this under normal circumstances, but keep in mind that the Teal candidates were not established independents, nor was the movement itself. In that sense I don't think they can really be considered as "majors" - they were potentially still outsiders. I think an example of what the study is suggesting could be that both Labor and Greens voters believed the Teals had a better chance of beating the Liberal incumbent but only if the Teal candidate survived until later rounds. For that to happen, they needed first preference votes so these voters were "tactical" in the sense that they voted to give the Teal candidate the best shot at defeating the Liberal incumbent - even at the expense of their preferred candidate.

A similar, but slightly different, method of "tactical" voting in this scenario would be to give the Teal candidate your first preference in the hope that they received a majority. I also witnessed members of my family who are consistent Greens voters employing this thought process at the previous election due to their desperation to see the Liberal incumbent removed from office. They gave the Labor candidate their first preference, hoping others would do the same and that he would win on a majority. It made less sense in our electorate, since the Labor candidate was also going to be competing against the Liberal candidate in the final round of counting. As the study noted, the voting strategies in these Teal electorates were highly unusual so I'm not sure you can use normal Australian voting habits to dismiss the findings of the researchers.

I think what’s happened is that they’re looking at 2019, the Scomo era. By that era, the voters I’ve been talking about would already have shifted to Labor or the Greens as Option 1, something they would not actually want, they just wanted a Scomo Coalition even less. I think the Teals actually are the first preference here, and a lot of these guys used to vote LNP in maybe 2015.

This seems like it could be a contributing factor, for sure. The criteria for "X voter" here is only based on how the person voted at the 2019 election - people definitely can change the way they vote from one election to another. Particularly if they have strong feelings about a particular issue (in this case it was likely climate change and gender equality).

This doesn’t pass the sniff test, you don’t need to vote “tactically” in Australia, we have preferential voting, so a Green Vote might preference a Teal and see their vote flow that way of the green candidate doesn’t hwt wnogh if the primary vote but thats a a different thing then Voting 1 Teal.

I think the point you are overlooking here is that the Teal candidates were brand new independents who had a big campaign focused on environmental policy presenting them as direct competitors to the Coalition incumbents. The study is suggesting voters made the collective assumption that their candidate/party would be unlikely to win (my guess is Labor voters: because these were Liberal seats, Greens voters: because The Greens up until this point had only ever held one seat in the lower house) so they directed their first preference vote to the Teal independents a) to ensure this new independent would gain enough votes to not instantly be eliminated in the first round but also b) with the hope that voters from other blocks (Liberal, Labor, Greens, etc) would do the same. The Teal candidate was likely the second preference for all of these blocks to a candidate from one of the other main contenders (Liberal/Labor/Greens). For example, a Labor voter might see them as more rational than a Greens candidate, a Greens voter might see them as stronger on the environment than a Labor candidate, etc. The primary goal in these electorates was not to get the first choice candidate/party elected to power - it was to ensure the Coalition lost the seat. The Teal independents were the candidates that these different groups all predicted would be the most likely to pull this off, but this required that enough people preference them first on the ballot to avoid early elimination.

This is the section on the Teal vote from the study:

The conditions for the rise of alternative actors in Australian politics have been brewing for some time. However, voter disenchantment with the major political parties alone is not enough to see a change in outcomes; there also needs to be a viable alternative for these disenchanted voters to support. The 2022 election combined several factors which supported the success of the Teal independents, including demand factors from voters and supply factors from the Teals. Voters were dissatisfied with the major parties generally, and the incumbent Coalition government and prime minister in particular. On the supply side, the Teals ran well-funded, well-organised campaigns, that were widely covered in the media – with funding from Climate 200’s Simon Holmes à Court. The Teal campaigns tapped into frustrations with the incumbent Coalition government on issues where they were perceived as weak, including climate change, political integrity, and gender equality.

Who are the Teal voters? Are they ‘frustrated urban voters’ or ‘disaffected Liberals’ registering a short- term protest vote, or do they represent a long-term change in the political behaviour of progressive conservatives? Making any assessment about the future electoral prospects of the Teals is hampered by the relatively small number of these voters in the surveys. It also assumes that the strategies of the major parties will remain unchanged, an assumption that we know will be incorrect. We can, however, make some evaluations based on the prior voting and ideological placement of Teal voters.

Based on their recalled vote in the 2019 election, 14 a majority of Teal supporters in 2022 were tactical voters intent on unseating the incumbent Liberal. Figure 3.2 shows that 31 percent of Teal voters had supported Labor in 2019 and a further 24 percent had supported the Greens. Just 18 percent said that they had voted for the Coalition. The view that Teal voters are ‘disaffected Liberals’ protesting the policies of their party therefore applies to less than one in five Teal voters. In contrast, by far the largest group are tactical voters who see their preferred party as nonviable in the electorate and use this information to defeat the most viable party—the Liberals. This is a level of tactical voting which far exceeds that found in most international studies.

How do Teal voters see themselves (and the other parties) in terms of their views about the political world? Using the zero to 10 left-right scale, Figure 3.3 shows the mean position of the various party voters on the scale. Coalition voters are, as we would expect, most likely to place themselves on the political right, with a mean of 6.7 on the scale, while Greens voters are most likely to place themselves on the political left (mean of 3.0). Teal voters are almost the same as Labor voters in their ideological position with a mean of 4.4 compared to Labor voters’ mean of 4.3. Perhaps more importantly, Teal voters are more likely to see the Liberal Party as further to the right than any other party group, except for Greens voters. For example, Labor voters place the Liberals at 6.6 on the scale, compared to 7.1 for Teal voters. These findings counter the narrative of Teal voters as disaffected Liberals, showing that for the most part, they see themselves as left-of-centre.