Dan Andrews won easily – and this is why

DAN Andrews’s election win on Saturday was nothing short of extraordinary. You’d even call it a miracle if that wasn’t in violation of the strictly enforced state atheism of the People’s Republic of Victoria.

While no one seriously thought Matthew Guy could win, the scale of Labor’s victory and the Liberals’ annihilation stunned all but the most radically pre-programmed Andrews acolytes. Even Labor mates of mine, including well-connected ones, were nervous on election eve. I heard talk that campaign HQ was edgy and a Labor-aligned pollster predicted minority government.

This may have been a deliberate strategy to shake soft Labor voters out of complacency – but the sentiment seemed in line with the conspicuous absence of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the sparse media appearances of Andrews himself.

Personally, I thought Andrews would get more of a backlash for his Covid-19 mismanagement and be left with a slender majority or, at worst, minority government. My best mate, who lives in Melbourne, noted that things were eerily quiet during the campaign, raising the prospect that voters were silently polishing their brickbats.

“It turns out,” he laughed on Sunday morning, “that Victorians really are just a bunch of mad lefties.”

He should know. He’s one of them. And he’s right. Given the result, in which Labor only really lost skin to the far-left Greens, and went down to hand-to-hand combat with the teals in once blue-ribbon electorates, Victoria is clearly now both politically and culturally a leftist state. Melbourne is the Portland, Oregon, of Australia.

So how did what was once the conservative capital of Australia, the state that produced Robert Menzies, become a Green-tinged fiefdom of the Socialist Left?

In truth, there’s a host of reasons, and they all came home to roost on Saturday night.

The first and most obvious reason is that the Victorian Liberals are useless. Guy was obliterated by Andrews in 2018 and yet the party was so devoid of new talent that it put him up again in 2022.

The second-most obvious reason is Labor’s superior online campaigning, and voter targeting – something emulated by former Labor operatives for the teals with devastating effect at a federal level.

But it’s not just online sleight of hand. The fact is that whether you agreed with it or not, Andrews had a clear and bold vision for Victoria. The Libs had essentially nothing.

Do you reward good governments and punish bad governments, or simply vote for whoever offers the best hope for the future? In my experience, always the latter.

Dan Andrews is the left’s Donald Trump. The only question becomes not whether you prefer him over the other bloke but simply whether you love him or hate him. More remarkably, Andrews is a populist for the upper-middle-class left, who would normally consider themselves above such mob mentality.

And so, while working-class seats raged with discontent and middleclass seats dabbled with teals and Greens, it all ultimately came back to Dan Andrews. Because Dan Andrews is the only game in town.