News / State Election
Poll shock: big swing to Labor in Brunswick
Greens’ margin in Brunswick would be slashed to less than 2%
Mark Phillips
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Labor is within striking distance of winning back Brunswick at this year’s state election, according to recent polling.
The YouGov poll conducted in June and July showed Labor’s Gabe Steger and Adam Pulford of the Greens separated by just 1.6% after the distribution of preferences in a big turnaround from the result at the 2022 election.
The poll also shows the Greens wresting the seat of Pascoe Vale from Labor for the first time.
According to the poll, Pulford would receive 50.8% of the two-party preferred vote to Steger’s 49.2%. This would represent a 12.7% swing in Labor’s favour if replicated at the election on November 28.
The Greens hold the seat by 13.7% after Tim Read won a second term in 2022 with a two-party preferred result of 63.5%.
Read, who is retiring from politics for health reasons, first won Brunswick in 2018 by a margin of just 0.6%.
While the poll shows Labor still trailing, it suggests that the retirement of the popular Read may have a bigger impact that anticipated.
It shows the Greens attracting 33% of first preferences in Brunswick, down from 43.6% in 2022, to Labor’s 30%, which is up from 28.5%. The Liberal vote would be unchanged at about 11% but the poll also has One Nation – which did not run in 2022 and has not announced a Brunswick candidate this year – at 8%.
The poll, which uses a technique called multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP), extrapolated the predicted outcome for all 88 lower house seats in the state from an online survey of 4003 people between June 16 and July 10. It has a margin of error of 1.8%.
While there are questions about the accuracy of MRP at a local level, YouGov says it is the same technique that it used to successfully forecast the result of the 2025 federal election and the South Australian state election in April.
The poll was commissioned by an Aboriginal advocacy organisation, Common Threads.
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Buoyed by the poll result, Labor says its volunteers knocked on 1000 doors in the electorate on Saturday morning.
Steger was joined by the Member for Wills, Peter Khalil, and several dozen volunteers for Saturday’s campaign event.
Steger, who was chosen as Labor candidate in April, said he remained the underdog in a seat which was also solidly Green at last year’s federal election.
“Certainly, coming into this, I knew that [he was an underdog],” he said at the weekend.
“But I also think that there’s this idea that there’s no such thing as a safe seat anymore.”
Steger said he was confident that Labor would run a strong campaign in the final three months before election day and had been encouraged by increasing numbers of people volunteering to help.
“There is a really great tradition of Labor campaigns in the area, and I’m really eager to activate that.
“I’ve had people come up to me who haven’t been involved in campaigns here for a long time, and have been talking about the excitement and the energy around it.”
Privately, the Greens are downplaying the poll as while the MRP technique is good for detecting national and statewide momentum, its accuracy at predicting the outcome of local races is questionable.
They have also been expecting that Read’s retirement would shave a few percentage points off their primary vote.
Pulford did not comment directly on the poll, but said he was focused on the campaign to keep Brunswick Green and on policies like free and frequent public transport, rent caps and renewable energy.
“People in Victoria want change,” he said.
“They are fed up with Labor’s in-fighting and lack of vision, but they don’t want to see our state handed to the chaos of One Nation and the Liberals either.”
In Pascoe Vale, the poll shows the primary vote is neck and neck between the Greens’ Angelica Panopoulos on 26% and incumbent Anthony Cianflone of Labor on 25% with the Liberal candidate – who at this stage has not been announced – on 18%. One Nation, which also does not currently have a candidate in Pascoe Vale, would get 14%, it forecasts.
But the polling assumes the Liberals knock Labor down to third place on preferences and Labor preferences would then flow to the Greens to deliver a two-party preferred result of 56.4% for Panopoulos.
In 2022, Cianflone won Pascoe Vale by 2%, making it Labor’s fifth most marginal seat according to veteran analyst Antony Green’s election pendulum.
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