Victorian election was lukewarm all round

Source: http://polling.newspoll.com.au.tmp.anchor.net.au/image_uploads/141124%20VIC%20Election%20-%20Final.pdf

The Victorian Liberals had already hit their lowest figure in October 2012, twelve months before Abbott won. There was a slight recovery when Napthine became leader, but this had mostly dissipated by the time Abbott became Prime Minister in September 2013.

There was a decline down to August this year, but it would be heroic to attribute all of this to Abbott when the problems with Geoff Shaw were raging throughout most of that time.

So, if there were an Abbott effect it is pretty hard to discern.

Another argument advanced is that the union base of the Labor Party ran a particularly effective door-knocking campaign in a number of seats, and this made the difference. According to former ALP State Secretary Nicholas Reece, they made 500,000 phone calls, door-knocked 170,000 homes with half the calls and a quarter of homes in 6 marginal seats.

I suspect Mr Reece is talking his book, because when you look at these marginal seats the swings are not out of the ordinary.

According to Antony Green, on the night the average swing to Labor on first preferences was 1.8%, so prima facie you need to do better than that to be able to claim a success. It turns out that of the 6 seats nominated, three do worse than the average swing, so we can say either that the campaign made no difference, or that the Liberals lifted to match it.

That leaves three seats where the unions may have had an effect, and the swings here were impressive – 3.4%, 6.0% and 8.0%. However, two were actually held by Labor, but notionally Liberal because of redistributions, and the other was held by Liberals, but also suffered a major redistribution.

So the results are really only large in seats where a new group of voters was up for grabs, and seem to rely heavily on incumbency in the first place. In two of the three it's just as likely that being the local member, with all the resources this entails, made the difference over a challenger. This table lists the seats.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/vic-election-2014/results/