Australia’s voters are now split three ways, but not by party

August 12, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Kos Samaras is a political pollster who tells us every month that the Liberals are up a bit, Labor’s down a bit and One Nation continues to be strong. But now he’s dug a lot deeper and found a very different story to tell.

Samaras works on the RedBridge/Accent polling in The Australian Financial Review. But he adds a powerful statistical technique called multi-level regression with stratification to estimate the traits of voters in specific subgroups.

This shows not how people have changed their vote in response to some development but how they are using the three main parties to sort themselves into three different groups.

So forget left versus right or workers versus bosses. What’s happening, Samaras says, is voters are aligning themselves with the bloc that reflects their economic experience. “These three blocs are now sharper, more separated and more demographically distinct than at any point since the 1940s.”

The Labor bloc, he finds, is now overwhelmingly an inner- and middle-ring metropolitan formation. It is university-educated and it rents or has recently bought a home.

It’s overwhelmingly under the age of 45. It’s heavily first- and second-generation migrant. It is anchored in the public sector and the care economy. It is dominant among Gen Z and Millennial voters. And it skews female by a clear margin.

These are not the voters of the Whitlam-era Labor Party nor the Hawke-Keating party. They are something new, Samaras says. The........

© Brisbane Times