Turning the tables: How the Australian Labor Party won in 2025

At a time when incumbents were losing power across the world, the Labor Party's decisive victory in Australia's 2025 federal election was a striking exception. But given the rocky start, how did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government manage to engineer such a dramatic turnaround? Campaigner, pollster, and political data scientist James Booth explains how astute messaging, narrative reframing and strategic positioning amid broader global developments helped secure a resounding win and shore up the party's support.

In the aftermath of a global inflation surge, incumbents were losing elections throughout 2024. In Australia, most voters couldn’t say what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s first term Labor government stood for.

The government had invested significant political capital in a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament (a proposal aiming to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a greater say on laws and policies affecting them), which was badly defeated at the ballot box. By the end of 2024, voters thought the government was too focused on elite progressive cultural concerns at the expense of the pressing issues affecting daily life. Satisfaction with the Prime Minister had dropped from the high 50s to the mid 30s. Horse-race polling had Labor losing and in decline.

Trump announced his tariffs in February 2025. Albanese and the government responded strongly, and nudged the question voters were asking from "how do we punish the incumbent?" to "who do you trust in an unstable world?"

By May 3rd, Labor had won with their biggest margin in approximately 50 years. Defying the structural changes hitting every centre-left party around the world, their gains were broad across every state, better and less educated electorates, and high and low migrant communities.

This is what they did.

1. Direct, tangible cost-of-living offers – not to fix the pain but to show the government got it

Energy bill rebates. A 20% reduction in higher education debt. Labor's net trust advantage on managing the cost of living moved from -2 in December 2024 to +11 by April 2025. When asked why, voters were most likely to cite “perceived commitment” and “competence” rather than values or ideology. None of their policy offers were going to reverse the pain of surging inflation voters had lived through. Instead, they were table stakes for the government to show they got it. In their narrative framing, Labor was very careful to never say they had provided a fix – they argued that Australia was in the process of turning the corner.

2. A forward looking stability offer based in old school social democracy

Labor didn't ask voters to take a leap. They asked them not to take a gamble. Against a backdrop of Trump's chaos, their slow and steady social democracy offer – Medicare protection, steady nation-building, long-term investments – made stability a forward-looking rather than conservative proposition. Among voters who considered the conservative Coalition but ultimately chose Labor, "I voted for stability" dominated over "I voted for change."

3. Moving the cost-of-living question onto the left’s issue terrain

Labor reframed the cost-of-living contest away from macroeconomic conditions – where the party was exposed to anti-incumbent sentiment – and toward a “costs of health and education” terrain. This shifted the question from "things are expensive and the government is responsible" to "who will best protect Medicare and keep the cost of education down?"

4. Making a “cuts” contrast stick in the real world

The conservatives’ signature offering was a plan for nuclear energy transition, budgeted at $600 billion. Labor’s core contrast message was that the conservatives would cut healthcare, making things more expensive when Australia could least afford it. To make this attack stick in the real world, the campaign relentlessly attached the cuts narrative to the opposition’s nuclear promise. By election day, voters who had heard about the nuclear policy said it made them less likely to vote Coalition. In polling verbatims, voters repeated back the language of Labor’s ads, saying that the money for nuclear would have to come from somewhere, and the conservatives always cut services.

5. Refusing to take the culture war bait

Late in the campaign, conservatives tried to inflame controversy over Anzac Day indigenous “welcome to country” ceremonies to generate a culture war. Labor Minister Jason Clare responded by smothering the issue and making the conservatives the ones who were distracted and out of touch: "Remember where all of this began on Friday… I don't think any of us want to find ourselves on the same side of this argument as neo-Nazis." Prime Minister Albanese said it was up to individual organizations to decide whether to open their event with a welcome to country, but noted the ceremonies were a “matter of respect.” Brief, principled, closed. No extended engagement, no apologies. The issue died within a news cycle. "Too focused on issues like the Voice" was the most common concern voters gave about Labor – but by the end of the campaign, this was a minority of an already-losing Coalition electorate.

6. Dominating share of voice on every platform

Labor had an all-of-the-above, go-everywhere tactical playbook. Eyeballs were eyeballs. By the end of the campaign, they achieved a share of voice advantage on every tracked platform – public TV, commercial TV, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, podcasts, streaming. Like social democrats in many countries, Australian Labor has never faced a faster moving information ecosystem for distributing its message, nor a less coherently attached working class base. But in 2025, they found success in going back to the political fundamentals, and offering the kind of security that only social democrats can provide.