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So this chart is based on some pretty dodgy psephology. To start with, Labor's primary vote has declined from 43.4% to 33.3% from 2007 to 2019. How many seats in the country have a higher Labor primary vote today than in 2007? I doubt there'd be more than a dozen. https://twitter.com/kloussikian/status/1327008470751617024
Labor's primary is partly lower because they're out of power. They won a sizeable majority in 2007. Of course their vote was higher then. But it's also lower because the total major party vote has continued to decline. The majors polled over 85% in 2007, but under 75% in 2019.
While the primary vote gap was 10.1%, the 2PP gap is only 4.2%. So yeah, Labor lost in 2019, it was a bad election, but be careful of judging these primary vote drops as a sign of terminal decline. You've gotta compare seats against the national vote to see their trend.
So the seats on the bottom half of that regional list had a primary vote swing smaller than the national swing. No evidence that those areas in particular are moving away from Labor.
Next, what makes a seat regional? There are large rural electorates, or those seats which contain one major town (such as the electorates in Queensland that cover Gladstone, Mackay etc) but then there are a bunch of seats covering the Hunter, Illawarra, Geelong.
Hell, they've included Macquarie! Which covers the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury. And the Central Coast seats, and the seat of Newcastle, which covers an inner city core with a high Greens vote. They then group these together and call them "bush seats".
Next, they have not factored in redistributions. Throsby changed significantly in 2010 when they added parts of the Southern Highlands. This caused a 6.7% drop in the Labor primary immediately. The 2016 redistribution cut the Labor primary by another 0.6%.
If you factor in those redistribution changes, the 16% cumulative primary vote swing in Throsby/Whitlam looks more like 9%.
The same is true in Macquarie. At the 2007 election, for one election only, Macquarie lost the Hawkesbury and gained parts of Central West NSW, which were better for Labor. When this was reversed in 2010 it reduced the Labor vote by 6%. They claimed a 5.98% swing against Labor.
Of course Labor has gone backwards in some regional areas. They've lost some seats just because they are at a low ebb (eg. Tasmanian seats), and in others like those in Central/North Queensland and the Hunter there has been a serious decline relative to the country.
But they are massively overstating the number of seats by lumping in a bunch of non-capital city urban areas and ignoring the long-term decline in the major party primary vote and redistribution effects. Just total garbage analysis.
I didn't quibble with the "progressive seats" list, but as @ShaunRatcliff points out, they have included a number of seats here that Labor has not historically been competitive in - eg. Higgins, Kooyong, Wentworth.
And as another example of how primary vote isn't particularly informative: the Labor primary in Higgins has declined 5.7% but the 2PP margin has halved from 7% to 3.9% even though Labor is at a low ebb, thanks to a massively increased Greens vote.
