‘This Is The Most Dramatic Turnaround I’ve Ever Seen’: Kerryn Phelps Might Lose Wentworth
It's going to come down to the wire.
Postal votes favouring Liberal Party candidate Dave Sharma have kicked the contest for Wentworth into today — and, experts say, we may not know who the winner is for two weeks.
“This is the most dramatic turnaround I’ve ever seen,” ABC election analyst Antony Green said today.
Green called the election for independent Kerryn Phelps less than two hours after booths had closed in the Sydney east electorate of Wentworth.
When he went off air last night, Phelps was ahead 55-45 on a two candidate preferred basis.
He said a few factors had narrowed the gap to just 884 votes.
“There were four large pre-poll voting centres, and when they came in the vote came down to 52 percent,” Green said. “This morning they put in 500 hospital votes,” he added, of which most overwhelmingly voted for Sharma.
And throughout the morning thousands of postal votes have been counted: many of them filled in earlier than election day, where voters were more likely to elect Sharma.
“What that’s really indicating is that on the day Kerryn Phelps was the winning candidate,” Green continued. “[Other votes] indicate that the support for Kerryn Phelps came very late in the campaign.”
Postal vote update:
* There were 12,788 envelopes issued
* 6890 envelopes were sent back
* 5463 of those counted (64.38 per cent in Dave Sharma's favour)
* That means 1426 ballots yet to be counted
* There are also 1266 ballots "awaiting processing"
* Phelps ahead by 884 votes— Bevan Shields (@BevanShields) October 20, 2018
“It’s proving to be tighter by the minute,” PM Scott Morrison said this morning. “Theres still many postal votes to be counted and we will just simply wait.”
The Australian Electoral Commission provides a 13 day window to receive any straggling postal votes, which means we may not know the final result for two weeks.
If Phelps wins, it would be the first time the government has lost the Wentworth region in its 117 year history, and would represent an 18 point swing against the Liberal Party.
Regardless of the result, Phelps performance has encouraged similarly high-profile locals to explore running in the upcoming federal election.
Gruen Transfer panellist Jane Caro has suggested she will run against Tony Abbott in his seat of Warringah.
And political scientist Jill Sheppard thinks this isn’t the end of the independent surge:
“Support for the major parties has been declining over the past decade, but both Liberal and Labor seem to have written off each individual independent victory as some unique combination of circumstances. No doubt they will do the same here,” Sheppard said.
“Obviously we won’t see independent candidates knocking off Liberal members in other blue riband seats, because by-elections are a bit different — especially when the retiring member was a popular Prime Minister. But we’re going to see more and more minor party and independent politicians in Canberra until the major parties get their heads out of the sand.”
Conceding the election last night, Sharma said:
“If this is what a loss looks like I can only imagine what a victory must feel like. Tonight’s result has been over a little sooner than I expected.”
As it turns out, it wasn’t over soon at all, and Sharma might even feel victory.