Scrimshaw Spotlight: Western Australia Recap And Analysis

What Does McGowan's Smashing Victory Mean?

(This article is being written during a live election count and exact numbers will be fluid, so if late counting changes a swing on the margins, deal with it.)

One of the things about my role as a more hands off political analyst who cares about 4 countries, more than a dozen subnational jurisdictions, and also has extremely strong opinions about Aston Villa football (seriously, get well soon Grealish, I can't watch Villa anymore without you) and curling is that people often love to tell me that the events that led to an event were localised, and therefore not broadly translatable. I always laugh at this argument, because it is almost always wrong. This rush of "local knowledge" can be legitimately useful like 5% of the time, but it's mostly rubbish, and these things are more about broad factors than people admit. And this is where we are in Western Australia right now.

West Australian Labor are going to win something like 52 of 59 seats in the next Parliament, according to the ABC's current prediction. That includes projected gains in deep blue Liberal territory in places like Churchlands, Carine, South Perth, and Bateman, which (especially Churchlands) shocked everyone on the election night panel. The government is currently getting a swing of around 11% (22% on margin, for North American readers) statewide, and projected swings of 13.5%, 13.5%, 14.5%, and 18.4% in those four blue-ribbon Liberal seats. You know who isn't surprised by this? Me. My dad once told me a saying he picked up in his years as a civil servant in Canada that applies here, SSDD - Same Shit, Different Day.

Wealthy social liberals start voting for left wing parties more than state average swing isn't a goddamn story anymore, because it is happening in Canada, and the US, and the UK, and Sydney, and Melbourne, and do I need to keep going? I can, if you need me to. This is the same shit every single time we see a new election anywhere in the world, and it is hilarious to continuously see people so in the weeds of their local politics that they miss the fact that this is the logical consequence of the (*all together now*) Global Fucking Realignment that we're all living through. Because, my God, if the WA Liberals are getting smashed more than average in their white collar rich suburbs with the pro-renewable energy, anti-coal dude as their leader, holy crap they're fucked.

Remember, the whole idea in the US is that a less Trumpian Republican could win back some of the discontented social liberals who have abandoned the party in recent years, but this is another in a long list of evidence points that suggests that Trump wasn't much of a factor at all in a broad, macro sense. Again, Milton and Putney and Wentworth and Warringah and Macnamara all happened too, and now Western Australia is on pace to give us another example (or 5). And none of this is a surprise, or particularly hard to understand. When I said I expected Labor to do better than many expected to a (political, but does not know shit about Aussie politics) buddy about 20 hours before the results started, he texted me back "Conservative parties dying among socially liberally rich whites but militarize the ones they keep?", entirely because I was just beating the same fucking drum I always do, which is this shit is super fucking predictable.

It's funny, the people who seem to understand this best are the people who are not deeply in the weeds of politics. My reputation was partially made by tipping a 4/1 British election bet in Putney in 2019 to a smart, politically engaged but not nerdy friend, who couldn't have picked out Putney for his life, but who instantly got the case I made, which was that a super socially liberal, Remain voting area wouldn't reelect a Tory member of a government dedicated to the hardest of Brexits. Putney won, he made enough money to offset some longer shots that didn't quite come through and still profit, and he helped us quite a bit with promotion. My buddy who I quote above found me because of that Putney bet, and now can manage a greater understanding of the politics of a place that he doesn't know shit about because it's the same shit everywhere.

The alternative headline for this piece was Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before, but I can't in good conscience make a headline pun for The Smiths' 14th best song or whatever it is. But I do in some ways feel bad, because I've been making this point for months now. We saw shock on the timeline on January 5th as Democrats won Georgia, mostly because the vaunted Suburban Reversion didn't come, but that shouldn't have shocked anyone. It didn't shock anyone who read my first ever piece for Political Salad as (what I guess would be called) a guest writer. You can see the argument for why it would happen in this spotlight of Southlake, Texas I did a few weeks ago. You can see this up and down my writing, because for as much as these results will be written up as a validation of Mark McGowan's specific skills, they're about a lot more than that. Yes, getting a swing that big in the first place is about your state specifics, but that swing being variable in the same way every left wing political party is seeing variability in swings is about global factors.

In American terms, this is running a Charlie Baker-style moderate and having your worst results in Cambridge and the wealthy areas like Cape Cod. It's an unconscionably bad result for the WA Liberals, but the 2 seats projected already told us that. It's also a horrible night for the GOP, because it shows that this isn't about getting rid of a Trumpian populist and suddenly roaring home with well-off white social liberals. Again, the WA Liberal leader was anti-coal and pro-renewable energy and he got smashed hardest amongst white social liberals. So much for an ideology boost in suburbia.

If this was just one election, then it could be written off as local factors. Two elections, and a moderately interesting sample to watch. But now, it's the same shit every time we get an election. Every single time. It's not about local factors, it's not about Trump, it's a Global Realignment. Obviously Saturday's result is great news for Mark McGowan and WA Labor, but it should also give heart to Democrats - the suburbs aren't about to revert.