Beyond the Landslide: How Labor Won 2025

AEC open data, simple robust parsing, and clear visuals

Sparsh Sindwani (4140265)

Audience & Goal

Audience: engaged voters, students of politics, policy analysts.
Goal: go past headlines to show where Labor’s 2025 gains came from — by division, state, and swing — using official AEC open data.

Data status

## All required files found. ✅

Seats won (2025)

Caption: If present, this confirms the final seat tally by party; look for a clear ALP majority and relative crossbench size.

Seats that changed hands (2025)

## # A tibble: 20 × 3
##    State Division   `From → To`                                                 
##    <chr> <chr>      <chr>                                                       
##  1 NSW   Banks      Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
##  2 NSW   Bradfield  Liberal → Independent                                       
##  3 NSW   Calare     The Nationals → Independent                                 
##  4 NSW   Hughes     Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
##  5 QLD   Bonner     Liberal National Party of Queensland → Australian Labor Par…
##  6 QLD   Brisbane   The Greens → Australian Labor Party                         
##  7 QLD   Dickson    Liberal National Party of Queensland → Australian Labor Par…
##  8 QLD   Forde      Liberal National Party of Queensland → Australian Labor Par…
##  9 QLD   Griffith   The Greens → Australian Labor Party                         
## 10 QLD   Leichhardt Liberal National Party of Queensland → Australian Labor Par…
## 11 QLD   Petrie     Liberal National Party of Queensland → Australian Labor Par…
## 12 SA    Sturt      Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
## 13 TAS   Bass       Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
## 14 TAS   Braddon    Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
## 15 VIC   Aston      Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
## 16 VIC   Deakin     Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
## 17 VIC   Goldstein  Independent → Liberal                                       
## 18 VIC   Melbourne  The Greens → Australian Labor Party                         
## 19 VIC   Menzies    Liberal → Australian Labor Party                            
## 20 WA    Moore      Liberal → Australian Labor Party

Caption: Changes of hands show where momentum shifted. Concentrations in one state/region often signal localised swings.

Division swings (2025 vs 2022)

## *Caption:* The swing distribution skews **towards ALP**; median swing ≈ 3.1 pp.

Top 15 biggest movers

## *Caption:* Largest absolute swing: **Braddon (TAS)** at 15.2 pp.

State-level TPP (2022 vs 2025)

## *Caption:* Biggest ALP TPP gain: **TAS** (9 pp). Smallest/negative: **NT** (-1.3 pp).

First-preference shifts (by state)

## *Caption:* Average change across states — Australian Labor Party: 2.6 pp | The Greens: -0.9 pp.

Ethics & integrity (brief)

  • Counts ≠ causes: swings show association, not causation.
  • Context: redistributions, incumbency and local campaigns affect results.
  • Source reliability: all data from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) open CSV downloads.
  • Reproducibility: this document reads raw CSVs, applies light cleaning only, and shows all transformations.

References (APA 7th)