Voters in electorates held by Liberal members of Parliament are more likely to support same-sex marriage than voters in Labor electorates, a Fairfax Media analysis shows.
Taken together, voters in Australia's 60 Liberal-held seats supported same-sex marriage by an above-average 63.3 to 36.7 per cent.
Voters in the 69 Labor seats were less keen, voting in line with the Australian average at 61.7 to 38.9 per cent.
Voters in the 16 National Party electorates gave the "yes" case well below average support at 56.8 to 43.2 per cent.
Eclipsing the Liberal-held electorates in support for the "yes" case were those held by the Greens, independent Andrew Wilkie and the Nick Xenophon Team, which recorded "yes" votes of 83.7 per cent, 73.8 per cent and 64.7 per cent.
In part, that's because "yes" votes followed education and ethnicity.
Voters in the electorates that returned big "yes" votes were far more likely to be university educated than those in seats that said "no".
In the electorate of Sydney, which returned the biggest "yes" vote in NSW, 43.8 per cent of electors had a university degree. In the electorate of Melbourne, which recorded the biggest "yes" vote in Victoria, 44.8 per cent had a university degree.
By contrast in the 12 NSW seats that recorded a majority "no" vote, only 25 per cent had graduated from university. In the two Victorian seats that recorded a majority "no" vote only 20 per cent had graduated from university.
But not all of the seats that delivered high "yes" votes were strongly populated with university graduates.
In NSW, the electorates of Richmond near the Queensland border and Shortland on the Central Coast were among the 10 seats with the biggest "yes" votes. But each had unusually low proportions of university graduates, making up just 17 and 15 per cent of electors. Perhaps offsetting this, each had a very high proportion of electors born in Australia - 76 and 85 per cent.
In Victoria, the electorates of Ballarat and Dunkley in Melbourne's south-east were among the 10 biggest supporters of the "yes" case but were made up of only 18 and 17 per cent of university graduates. Each had high proportions of Australian-born voters: 82 and 72 per cent.
In each of the 10 biggest "yes" voting electorates in NSW and Victoria the most common reported ancestry was "English".
In none of the 10 biggest "no" voting electorates in NSW was English the most common ancestry. In five it was "Australian", in two Chinese, in two Lebanese, in one Vietnamese, and in one Indian.
In the two Victorian electorates that voted "no", the most common nationalities were Australian and Chinese.
Only 28 per cent of electors in the NSW electorates that voted "no" were born in Australia. In the two "no" voting Victorian electorates 47 per cent were born in Australia.
All up, only 17 of Australia's 150 electorates voted "no". If voters had been choosing between candidates whose only point of difference had been same-sex marriage, the incoming government would have a majority the like of which Australia has never seen.
A better analogy might be a referendum. To have force, a vote for change needs to carry the day overall (which the "yes" vote did 61.6 to 38.4) and to carry the day in in four of the six states.
"Yes" carried the day in every state and territory, from the Northern Territory where it gained 60.6 per cent of the vote to the Australian Capital Territory where it gained 74 per cent. Victoria was the state with the biggest "yes" vote (64.9 per cent) followed by Western Australia (63.7 per cent), Tasmania (63.6 per cent) and South Australia (62.5 per cent). NSW and Queensland were the states with the lowest "yes" votes: 57.8 and 60.7 per cent.
