In a co-authored piece for The Conversation, Dr Ian Cook continues his week by week analysis of key election issues for Western Australia.

It wasn’t exactly bad news for the Coalition government out of the West this week. But it wasn’t exactly good news either.

This week, The West Australian published results from a YouGov Galaxy poll showing that the Liberal Party is staying just ahead of Labor in two of its marginal seats in WA: Pearce and Swan. And it’s making no progress in winning Labor’s most marginal seat: Cowan.

Perhaps the worst news for the Coalition was that they didn’t bother polling voters in Hasluck, which the Liberals hold by 2.1%. According to this poll, support for the Liberals has fallen by around 5.5%, so it’s no surprise that they saved their money by not polling the seat.

Both Pearce and Swan are sitting on a two-party preferred of 51 to the Liberals and 49 to Labor. But the two-party preferred distribution assumes that UAP and PHON voters give their second preference to the Liberals. Whether they will do so is not that clear.

UAP and PHON are different sorts of parties – as revealed by a story about a WA PHON candidate owning his semi-naked Instagram posts from 2018 – so predicting how UAP and PHON voters will direct second preferences is never easy.

The report in The West also said that the polling indicated that the Greens primary support has taken “a pummelling”:

primary support for the Greens has fallen from 15% in 2016 to 11% in Swan, 7.6% in 2016 to 6% in Cowan, and remained steady in Pearce at 11%.

The Greens in WA are sorely missing Scott Ludlam.

It was also a mixed week for election night tragics in WA after Clive Palmer’s High Court bid to make Eastern staters wait until 7.30 WST failed. This means that we won’t make everyone else wait for us to finish voting before they start to see results. But it also means that the High Court doesn’t accept that Western Australian voters have been jumping on the bandwagon of whichever party is leading after the vote counting over east.

The full article can be read in The Conversation.