Could the Greens flip these ‘sleeper’ seats in Victoria?

Ahead of the looming Victorian state election in November, much of the focus has been on One Nation’s potential impact. Could the Greens be going under the radar? There’s good reason not to ignore them, especially with the very real possibility of a hung parliament after the votes are tallied.

Recent opinion polling has been strong for the Greens. Having recorded 11.5% of the vote at the 2022 state election, the party is seeing estimates of 14% in the latest DemosAU and Freshwater polls, while RedBridge gave them 16% in a poll released on Sunday. Resolve, which has consistently had the Greens at 12% for the past four months, showed a three-point increase to 15% earlier this week.

Let’s set the stage for the Victorian Greens. The party currently holds three lower-house seats: Richmond, Melbourne and Brunswick. They lost Prahran to the Liberals in a 2025 by-election, but have a strong chance of retaking it through the preferences of Labor voters (Labor did not run in that by-election, and a former Labor MP who ran as an independent directed his preferences to the Liberals).

Excluding Prahran, there are six seats the Greens have a chance in, especially if polling continues to trend positively. Northcote is the most obvious pickup on paper, with Labor’s Kat Theophanous holding it by a margin of just 0.2% against Greens candidate Campbell Gome (who is running again), with the party mobilising more than 200 volunteers at the weekend to knock on every door in the seat for its “biggest campaign day ever”.

Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 1268493

The other five seats — Preston, Pascoe Vale, Footscray, Essendon and Albert Park — can be described as “sleeper” flips to varying degrees.

Preston is held by Labor on a 2.1% margin against the Greens. That makes it seem like it should be an easier flip, but the Greens only received 15% of the primary vote in 2022, which was 2.2% behind the Liberals and just 1.4% ahead of independent candidate Gaetano Greco, who passed away in 2025. If social media posts from first-term Labor MP Nathan Lambert going after Greens candidate Loki Sangarya are anything to go by, the Greens are still the main challenger in this seat, although the Liberal and One Nation votes in Preston will likely both be higher than in neighbouring Northcote.

Pascoe Vale is held by Labor on the same margin, 2%, with Angelica Panopoulos again running for the Greens. Traditionally working-class, it has the third-highest share of South European ancestry of any seat in the state, and could see a notably high (for the inner suburbs) level of support for One Nation. The combined socialist vote of 9.7% in 2022 could make things interesting: both the Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alliance are running again, with a likely close finish on preferences. The tight result in 2022 came as somewhat of a surprise, thanks to preferences from Liberal voters boosting the Greens, but the federal campaign for the seat of Wills has given the party additional hope that it can perform strongly in the area.

Footscray feels like just about anyone’s guess at this point. The Greens have reason to be bullish, though, after their strong result in the overlapping federal seat of Fraser last year, where they had a 6.4% primary vote swing towards them and made the two-candidate-preferred count for the first time. In addition to Labor MP Katie Hall and Greens candidate Elena Pereyra, there are notable challengers, including One Nation’s Alexander Lopez, the Victorian Socialists’ Jasmine Duff, and independent Jess Marsh, endorsed by the Voices of the Inner West group.

This will likely be the Victorian Socialists’ best seat. They have a large campaign presence and have previously received more than 20% of the vote in multiple booths in the suburb of Footscray, which could subsequently boost the Greens through preferences. From conversations with people on the ground, Footscray is nearly impossible to confidently predict right now.

Essendon is probably the unlikeliest of these seats to flip to the Greens, yet it could still be a sleeper. It is the only one of these six seats to have a retiring incumbent in Labor’s Danny Pearson, and the Labor candidate to replace him, Kat Theodosis, is from outside the electorate, a move that reportedly led to a “revolt” within the local branch. Independent candidate Oscar Yildiz is running here instead of in Pascoe Vale (where he came second in 2018), but there is every chance a traditional top-two contest still occurs between Labor and the Liberals.

Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 1267880

However, if things went especially wrong for Labor in the midst of a statewide negative swing, Greens candidate James Williams would have a sneaky chance of overtaking them to make (and possibly win) the two-candidate-preferred count against the Liberals, with the Greens hoping to build on the 15% primary vote they got last time.

Albert Park is the final seat that could flip, although it would also be a tough ask for the Greens to defeat Labor, whose incumbent member Nina Taylor holds the seat on an 11.2% margin against the Liberals. Middle-aged voters who are middle- to upper-class — a demographic not trending towards the Greens at the moment — make up a large part of this seat, which also overlaps with the federal seat of Macnamara (where the Greens lost 4% last year).

But there are still paths to victory. Other than beating the Liberals after preferences if Labor were to fall out of the top two, Greens candidate Sonya Semmens could still defeat Labor directly if conservative voters’ preferences broke strongly enough. Notably, the Victorian Electoral Commission initially conducted a Labor/Greens two-candidate-preferred count in 2022 (which the Greens led 53-47) before reverting to the traditional count once votes were clearer.

One thing holding the Greens back from victory in these seats is the preference flows from conservative voters. Last weekend, Pauline Hanson signed a pledge committing One Nation to put Labor last on how-to-vote cards — a move that, if followed by voters, helps the Greens in certain seats. But the bigger question is what the Liberal Party will do with its preference recommendations. In 2022, the Liberals ran on “put Labor last”, which helped the Greens to win Richmond. If they were to repeat such a move this year — and some of their candidates have already expressed the same sentiment — it would give the Greens a massive boost in all of these target seats.

It’s unclear whether the Greens will continue their current positive polling trend, but it is clear that they have a wide range of possible gains at this state election — and they could be right under Labor’s nose.