Age, income and housing cleave a divide in how Australians vote

Australia Broadcast Center

06-05-2025

While we know that (almost) every Australian over the age of 18 voted in Saturday's federal election, we don't know who they voted for.
This makes it impossible to know exactly why the Coalition suffered such a brutal defeat.
To make up for that, we're going to do the next best thing.
We can compare the demographics of each electorate with how those electorates voted to see what patterns emerge in the data.
While no single trend can explain the election result on its own, taken together they tell a story of a Coalition that in 2025 appealed to a shrinking segment of the nation.
The age gap
Let's start with age — an obvious differentiator between voters who are more likely to be conservative or progressive.
Here is every electorate in Australia, arranged so that those with higher proportions of voters aged under 40 are on the right.
Put simply: older electorates are on the left, younger on the right.
Australia's electorates ordered by the proportion of the population between 20 and 39.
They're all bunched together (for now), but the colours already tell a story.
The electorates where the Coalition had success, like Lyne and McPherson, mostly lie on the left side of the chart, where there are higher proportions of older voters.
Meanwhile, Labor-held seats like Brisbane tend to be younger.
(Seats that remain in doubt, like Melbourne, haven't been assigned a colour.)
Let's spread them out a bit by adding the Coalition's primary vote on the vertical axis.
The closer a seat is to the top of the chart, the more voters in that electorate put the Coalition first on the ballot sheet.
Electorates with more young voters tended to prefer Labor to the Coalition.
Adding in a trendline, a clear pattern emerges: younger areas are less likely to vote for the Coalition.
Younger voters have always been more progressive than older voters, so this is perhaps unsurprising.
But the disconnect here is stark — very few Coalition-held electorates have more than 30 per cent younger voters in them.
Renters show similar pattern
Let's take a look at renters now — electorates with a higher proportion of renters are now closer to the right of the chart.
While the individual electorates have moved around a bit compared to the last chart, the pattern is similar.
Seats with more renters tended towards a lower Coalition primary vote.
Electorates with more renters tended to prefer Labor to the Coalition.
The Coalition only won a couple of seats that have more than one-third renters.
We can't know for sure how renters themselves voted based on this data.
But what it does tell us is, despite heavy criticism of Labor's handling of the housing crisis over the past three years, the Coalition hasn't convinced voters in areas that have more renters that it has the answers either.
In inner-city seats with high proportions of renters, like Griffith, Grayndler and Sydney, both Labor and the Greens were ahead of Liberal candidates on first preferences.
Of course, there are multiple different factors at play — for example, younger voters and renters are both more likely to live in the same kinds of areas.
It is often said that after young people buy a house, they tend to gravitate towards conservative politics.
But that step — a crucial marker of adulthood and economic security — has fallen increasingly out of reach for younger generations.
"The old logic — that people naturally drift right as they age — is breaking down," says Intifar Chowdhury, a lecturer in government at Flinders University.
"This is widening the gap between people who have a slice of Australia versus people who don't."
And it appears to have shrunk the current support base for economically conservative parties.
Liberals no longer the party of affluence
Once the heartland of conservative politics, high-earning electorates tell a more mixed story.
The trendline is flat, where, in past decades, it would have been tilted towards the Coalition among voters making above the median wage.
The proportion of high income earners had little relation to the Coalition's primary vote in each electorate.
Many affluent formerly Liberal seats like Kooyong, Wentworth and Warringah had already fallen to the teals…
…while in Bradfield the race is too close to call as independent Nicolette Boele challenges to take another inner-city seat from the Liberals.
To see how this compares to the last election, let's switch to looking at the change in the Coalition's primary vote since 2022.
Electorates with less high income earners tended to swing further from the Coalition.
Seats that sit above the zero per cent line have lifted their Coalition first-preference vote, and those below it have moved away from the Coalition (towards Labor or others).
Lower-income electorates — like Lyons in Tasmania and Spence in Adelaide — swung hard away from the Coalition.
While some affluent areas switched back towards the Coalition, these were mostly seats that flipped to the teals and Greens in 2022.
Aside from Goldstein (which Tim Wilson will win back from teal Zoe Daniel) and possibly Kooyong (where the result is still in doubt), the Coalition holds few seats on the right side of the chart.
Many outer suburban seats, like Bonner and Macquarie, which generally sit closer to the middle, have swung away from the Coalition in successive elections.
"There was little difference in what the parties were offering those middle suburban electorates," says Jill Sheppard, senior lecturer in politics at Australian National University.
"And when there's no difference between you, you're just voting on confidence [in the leader]."
Geopolitical tensions
Not everyone votes for economic reasons.
Since 2022, there have been numerous conflicts playing out around the world that have resonated here too.
Here are the electorates ordered by the proportion of their population that identifies as Muslim — a demographic that is more likely to have strong views on the war in Gaza.
Electorates with more Muslim voters tended to swing further from the Coalition.
Rather than looking at the Coalition's vote overall, it's more interesting to see how their vote has changed since 2022.
That's why the vertical axis now shows the change in Coalition primary vote since then.
While most Australian electorates have small Islamic communities, there are a few where they have a significant say in who is elected.
Of these, four of the five electorates with more than 12 per cent Muslim population have swung away from the Coalition.
But while Labor is on track to win all of these seats, it lost support in them as well.
Let's switch to the the change in primary vote for minor parties and independents since 2022 to see where it went.
Electorates with more Muslim voters tended to swing towards minor parties and independents.
Independent candidates — like Ahmed Ouf in Blaxland and Ziad Basyouny in Watson — made big gains in these areas by representing the views of Muslim voters.
The regions aren't enough
One group that continued to favour the Coalition is voters living far from the city.
The chart now shows electorates' distance from the nearest capital city — with the farthest-flung electorates on the right.
There's not a strong trend in any one direction here.
But electorates like Durack, which covers a massive part of WA, and New England, in central NSW, bucked the national trend and swung towards the Coalition.
Electorates that were further from the cities tended to swing less far away from the Coalition.
Leichhardt, right at the far northern tip of Queensland — and on the far right of the chart — went the other way, and fell to Labor.
If we look at the the change in Coalition primary vote since 2019 – i.e. over the past two elections — the trend deepens.
Electorates that were further from the cities tended to swing less far away from the Coalition over the past two elections.
Seats closer to our big cities have moved significantly away from the Coalition, showing the compounding effects of consecutive losses.
With roughly a quarter of Australians living outside the cities, winning over rural voters is not enough for a majority in parliament.
Of the 101 electorates that make up the nation's cities, only Hawke and Gorton have swung towards the Coalition since 2019.
These two seats in Melbourne's west are high-growth areas, filled with new housing developments and the heavily mortgaged families moving into them.
"What seems to matter more to these voters is social conservatism and economic prosperity," says Dr Sheppard.
Despite movement towards the Coalition, these seats are still in Labor hands.
Taken together, these trends describe a party representing older generations, those who live in the regions, and those who own their homes.
By only appealing to its existing base, says Dr Chowdhury, the Coalition suffered "a diabolical failure of campaign research".
"The Coalition was pitching to the people they already had. That's not how you win an election."
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