“Sophomore surge” is the tendency of incumbents to win more votes in their first bid for re-election relative to their preceding (and successful) candidacy as a challenger, as they acquire the advantages accruing to incumbents: name recognition and public-funded resources chief among them. Sophomore surge seems particularly pronounced for independents and in postal voting, a form of voting becoming more widely used in Australian federal elections. Incumbents are granted privileged access to a copy of the electoral roll that identifies postal voters inter alia (per §90B of the Commonwealth Electoral Act). Incumbents’ access and major party experience in exploiting this information is the source of this particular form of incumbency advantage, denied to new entrants to the electoral marketplace.
