There’s a case for encouraging popular but defeated MPs to throw their hats back into the ring

The Rudd government lost seventeen House of Representatives seats to the opposition in 2013, and it’s mostly those electorates, now held by the Abbott government, that Labor will have its closest eye on next time. Not surprisingly, they are at the marginal end of the pendulum; in fact, all of them are held by less than 5 per cent (though redistributions between now and 2016 may change the margins.)

But it’s likely they will prove harder to shift, on average, than their margins suggest. The reason lies in the way new MPs develop personal votes, a phenomenon known as “sophomore surge.”

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