By Jack Cross
We’re just over halfway through election season: campaign week is done, but polling week looms large on the horizon. At a conservative estimate, we’ve seen a gazillion Facebook posts announcing campaigns and a bajillion colour-coded flyers in classrooms.
Fortunately, campaign week was fairly quiet, with the most excitement coming in the Presidential and ISD debates on Tuesday.
Our voting intention PellyPoll also reveals some interesting voter movement.
Office-bearer contests
It was fairly even between incumbent SPARK and newcomers REVIVE when it came to visibility on campus, although REVIVE did lag a bit behind when it came to social media engagement.
REVIVE have put together an extremely detailed policy platform to achieve their claimed reform, but it’s unclear if this is cutting through. Is the average voter studying 14 pages of dense bullet points? Seems a touch unlikely.
SPARK, meanwhile, have relied on their achievements over the past three years and outlined a policy programme designed to support students. SPARK’s campaign seems to be asking voters if they approve of its performance and trust it to continue, rather than promoting any visionary policy (although it too has a fairly long list).
LIFT’s policy proposal has been slimmer than those offered by SPARK and REVIVE, which has been a deliberate choice: presidential candidate Lachy Flavel suggested the other groups were being over-ambitious during Tuesday’s debate. A distant third in social media engagement, LIFT has run a smaller campaign on campus, so it might be tempting to conclude LIFT has fallen flat. But campaign visibility can be a crude measure, and polling week could see LIFT significantly improve its position.
AI Party, the self-confessed joke group of the election, have had no campaign presence on campus and only started an online campaign late on Friday night. Presidential candidate Chloe Lazaroo missed the debate, only adding insult to injury for voters hoping for looser academic misconduct regulations. Pelican understands Lazaroo is currently overseas on exchange, which seems fitting for a group with no intention of actually being elected.
Freshly rebranded Social Justice have stuck to their traditional talking points about a Guild focused on protest and led by left-wing activists. The group’s flyers are certainly visible on campus, but the campaign has no presence online and the QR code on its flyers contains a broken link.
THUNDER is running only one office-bearer candidate (River Merendino for Sports Representative) and Pelican understands that this was only done for the purposes of registering the group; Merendino does not intend to campaign for the role. As stated to Pelican earlier in the week, the group is set only on electing its Ordinary Guild Councillor (OGC) and National Union of Students (NUS) delegate candidates.
PellyPoll: What do voters think?
Our PellyPoll shows SPARK winning a very slim 50% majority, followed by REVIVE on 34% and LIFT on 14%. It’s important to note, however, that Pelican’s readership is not necessarily distributed proportionately among the group’s supporter bases: so far in the campaign, our channels’ engagement has been dominated by SPARK and REVIVE candidates and supporters, with lesser engagement from LIFT. Social Justice has largely ignored Pelican, including by refusing to answer or acknowledge questions put to them. It is quite likely that LIFT and Social Justice are underrepresented in this primary vote projection, although it’s always possible that these groups do just have small numbers of supporters.
However, we did ask respondents to indicate who they voted for last year, and this is a more revealing indication of voter sentiment. We found that of the respondents who voted for SPARK last year, 73% intend to stick with their choice, while 17% are jumping ship to REVIVE and 10% to LIFT. Supporters of the late STAR group have largely transformed into REVIVE voters, with 87% intending to vote for the reformist group while 13% are shifting to SPARK.
These results are largely to be expected. About an equal proportion of voters from each major group have changed their minds. LIFT’s predecessor group, Launch, only ran a single office-bearer candidate in order to register as a group, and its supporters who were forced to vote for other groups (largely SPARK) in office-bearer contests are now returning to the group.
Likewise, it makes sense that the vast majority of STAR supporters have become REVIVE supporters. REVIVE confirmed to Pelican that it has an arrangement with AMITY in which the latter endorses REVIVE’s office-bearer candidates.
The group’s candidate for the Guild Presidency, Luke Alderslade, was originally elected as a STAR OGC back in 2022. The organiser of AMITY is Amira Nunn, who has run with STAR for several positions, including as their Guild Presidential candidate last year. Avani Mahateker, an AMITY OGC candidate, ran as STAR’s Environment Officer candidate last year. Selina Al Ansari and Blake Mercer, also AMITY OGC candidates, ran for the same position with STAR. With a substantial overlap between REVIVE-AMITY and STAR, a transfer of voters from the old group to the new alliance is entirely expected.
SPARK’s Indi Creed, who ultimately won the Guild Presidency, garnered just over 52% of valid primary votes last year, winning on first preferences. STAR’s candidate Nunn won 29%. If we consider 2023 a 100-voter election, we can apply our survey results with some back of envelope calculations. This year, we can expect at least a ten-point swing against SPARK, losing five points to STAR/REVIVE and five to LIFT. Of course, this is hardly a sophisticated model, and does not factor in any moves within the Left Action/Social Justice vote, nor a potential expansion of the number of voters that could come with more groups out campaigning.
It looks like SPARK is best placed (but by no means guaranteed) to win most of the office-bearer contests, and the success of REVIVE could come down to how preferences flow from AI Party and Social Justice, both of whom can be expected to be eliminated early. Social Justice have a reputation for running strong in-person campaigns, but Socialist Alternative-affiliated groups have historically polled poorly at UWA (for example, Left Action’s presidential candidate polled 11% last year, compared to 6% for the rodent-themed joke group RATS).
Unsurprisingly for a joke group, AI Party have no intention of being elected. A challenge from LIFT can’t be discounted but seems a long shot. The most interesting scenario would be if REVIVE claimed another four points from SPARK and finished on a similar primary vote: the outcome would then depend on the order of elimination and how voters direct preferences between the candidates.
ISD groups
Although AMITY is certainly outperforming GLOBAL in social media engagement, GLOBAL’s Archit Menon dominated audience polling after the ISD debate, with 68% of viewers calling Menon the winner. In fact, Social Justice’s Chloe Roberts scored 22% of the audience, with AMITY’s Redwan Reham clocking 20%. Whether the debate performance transfers to voters at large is unclear – an ISD debate hasn’t been held in several years.
Pelican understands that social media has not been GLOBAL’s priority, and the group is confident its message will resonate with voters during campaign week. Although unchallenged last year, GLOBAL’s OGC and NUS candidates performed well, suggesting it is capable of running strong in-person campaigns. Being a new group, AMITY’s capabilities are an unknown quantity. And although GLOBAL has a legacy of several years to appeal to, its own candidate used the debate to criticise its performance this year.
For what it’s worth, GLOBAL dominated the latest PellyPoll – but having been elected unopposed for the last two years, there is no data with which to make any sort of prediction. The ISD Presidency could indeed be a close and unpredictable race.
The rest of Council
With so many groups all running OGC candidates, it is hard to make an assessment of how they will perform. Only one candidate can win each office-bearer contest, meaning the most popular group tends to pick up every position (with the exception of the ISD). On the other hand, thirteen candidates win positions as OGCs, and the exact distribution of these positions between the groups depends on the complex and unpredictable flow of preferences as the worst-performing candidates are eliminated.
The most visible campaigns on campus are SPARK, REVIVE, and Social Justice. You would certainly expect the former two to pick up several OGC seats each. Again, the latter has historically performed poorly but has typically held either one or two OGC seats. Depending on how the in-person campaign goes next week, LIFT could also expect to find itself with representation on Council.
AMITY and GLOBAL are explicitly targeting international students and this focus will lead to a strong performance in this voter demographic. Their OGC candidates can be expected to benefit from this attention, and depending on exactly how their campaigns go, both could find themselves places on Council.
It’s difficult to gauge THUNDER’s position. Its social media engagement isn’t as promising as GLOBAL or AMITY, but its Pelican interview has attracted nearly as much attention as REVIVE’s. The group claims to be focused solely on OGCs, but with its campaign skills yet to be demonstrated, and with few flyers visible on campus, it’s unclear just how much momentum is behind the group. A strong campaign will be absolutely necessary for THUNDER to win itself representation on Council.
Independent candidate Olivia Stronach has attracted significant attention for a solo candidate, with her interview garnering substantial views on the Pelican website. Although this profile was shared with the other independent OGC candidate Ieeshwardhan Singh, Pelican has not been able to locate any campaign material from Singh either online or on campus, so this attention is likely as not directed entirely at Stronach (unless Singh has a very strong word-of-mouth campaign). With social media engagement similar to AMITY and GLOBAL despite being a lone candidate, and with the coveted number one spot on the ballot, Stronach seems a strong contender for a spot on Council.
The contest for the NUS will be likewise complex and hard to predict. Preferences for NUS positions are often dealt away as part of inter-group deals, and it often takes a back seat in campaigning compared to Guild positions. Further complicating the picture is the influence of an additional independent, Faisal Bakhrayba, who told Pelican he has made a preference deal with AMITY.