Greetings and welcome to Polls Down Under, the newest poll projector and aggregator on the block. We’re kicking off our preview series by taking a look at One Nation, what a successful night would look like for them, their key seats, and some baseline numbers to set the stage.
The Baseline
One Nation ran candidates in 5 seats at the 2022 state election: Bendigo East (5.7%), Macedon (3.6%), Morwell (6.1%), Narracan (6.0%), and Pakenham (3.4%). They’ve since added a sixth data point: Nepean, at the 2026 state by-election, where their candidate Hercus pulled 24.5% on primaries, well over double what any of their 2022 seats managed.
We can’t take a lot from the 2022 numbers on their own, since they’re all single digits. But Pauline Hanson and her team clearly picked smart ground: every one of those five 2022 seats, plus Nepean, is now a seat our model rates as competitive, with the party polling over 20% statewide. That’s not luck so much as a seat-selection strategy paying off exactly where it was aimed.
Projection Numbers
Our projection has One Nation as the most likely winner in 5 seats right now: Frankston, Melton, Morwell, Narracan, and Sunbury. This is based off which party wins the most of 10,000 simulated outcomes for each seat individually, not first preferences or the raw two-candidate-preferred count.
That “5 seats” figure is each seat’s most probabilistic outcome in isolation, so One Nation could be the favorite with only a measly 33% chance of winning. It doesn’t capture what a good or bad night looks like across the whole state at once, since seats don’t swing independently of each other in reality. For that, we look at the full spread across all 10,000 simulated elections together. The median outcome has One Nation on 13 seats, with a realistic range from 8 on a weak night up to 19 on a strong one.
| Party | Favored (seats) | Median | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| One Nation | 5 | 13 | +8 (median well above favored) |
| Labor | 34 | 28 | −6 (favored above median) |
| Coalition | 37 | 33 | −4 (favored above median) |
That’s a real, consistent pattern, and it comes down to what the “favored” count actually measures versus what it misses. It only asks, seat by seat, who’s ahead right now, and it can’t see that seats move together rather than independently. One Nation’s real strength at the moment is being a strong second place across a large number of seats rather than the outright leader in most of them, sitting on 35-45% against a leader in the low 40s. A per-seat tally can’t credit any of that; it only counts outright wins. Victoria is mid-realignment right now, and those close-second seats don’t move independently of each other. A good night for One Nation tends to be a good night everywhere at once, so the median simulation captures that correlated upside. Labor and the Coalition show the mirror image: some of their “favored” seats are only barely-ahead margins, the kind a shared bad night could sweep away all at once, so their favored count runs a little hot compared to their own median while One Nation’s runs cold.
Latrobe Valley and Surrounding Area (Morwell, Narracan and Pakenham)
Today we will be looking at just one region which One Nation will look to assert themselves, the Latrobe Valley and Surrounding Area. These are places the party’s actual support, both historical and modelled, is strongest.
Morwell is the standout. Sitting in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria’s coal and power industry heartland and one of One Nation’s real 2022 baseline seats, their projected primary vote is 39.2%, clear of everyone else, and our simulation gives them 60.9% of modelled outcomes. It’s still a three-way contest underneath that (the Nationals at 17.3%, Labor at 4.1% are both technically live), but neither is close to One Nation’s position.
Narracan, also Latrobe Valley and also a real 2022 baseline seat, is tighter, a real toss-up. One Nation leads on primaries (36.2%) and on the two-candidate count (51.4% to the Liberals’ 48.6%), but the simulation has it at 48.3% to the Liberals’ 38.1%, up for grabs and not settled.
Pakenham sits just outside Latrobe Valley, but we grouped it with Morwell and Narracan as they all sit very close to each other. This is the seat where One Nation leader Warren Pickering is running, and, fittingly, it’s also our most divided projection of the three, with some models giving the seat to ONP. One Nation lead on primary votes, 32.9% to the Liberals’ 28.7%, but preferences will hurt them here harder than in the last two seats we discussed. On projected TCP, we have the Liberals ahead 55.1% to 44.9%. In our simulations, that gives the Liberals a 45.1% win probability against One Nation’s 35.5%. A leader typically outperforms their party’s generic swing in their own electorate, which our model already accounts for with a small, disclosed bonus specific to this seat, but even with that, we believe this will be an uphill battle for them. It is hard to predict how well a grassroots promotion of the party will do here until the last vote is counted.