SA-Best

In the March 2018 South Australian election, SA-Best contested thirty-six seats in the South Australian House of Assembly and put forward four candidates for the upper house. The party charged candidates $1,000 to be considered for pre-selection, and a further $20,000 for running in the lower house, or a further $40,000 in the upper house, as well as fund their own local campaign.[7] Any successful candidate would have been compelled to pay five per cent of their salary to the party.[8]

The thirty-six House of Assembly seats contested were: Badcoe, Chaffey, Cheltenham, Colton, Croydon, Davenport, Dunstan, Elder, Elizabeth, Enfield, Finniss, Gibson, Giles, Hammond, Hartley, Heysen, Hurtle Vale, Kavel, King, Lee, Mackillop, Mawson, Morialta, Morphett, Mount Gambier, Narungga, Newland, Playford, Port Adelaide, Ramsay, Reynell, Schubert, Taylor, Unley, Waite, and Wright.[9][10][11][12][13][14] Antony Green of ABC News noted that Labor needed a notional swing of 3.1 percent to win a majority, since the Liberals held a bare notional majority after the redistribution. However, Green speculated that if SA-BEST repeated Xenophon's past performance at Senate elections, it could do well enough to make those calculations (and presumably any effort to calculate a statewide two-party vote) meaningless.[15]

The party failed to secure any lower house seats,[16] although there was a close contest in the historically safe Liberal seat of Heysen.[17] Xenophon unsuccessfully contested Hartley and although he came second on the primary vote ahead of Labor's Grace Portolesi by 202 votes, the preference distribution of the eliminated fourth-placed Greens candidate turned Xenophon's 99-vote lead over Portolesi into a 357 vote deficit. Third-placed Xenophon was therefore eliminated, with Hartley reverting to the traditional Liberal vs Labor contest.[18][19] The party came second on primary votes in ten seats; the strongest results were in Chaffey, Finniss, and Hartley, where the party received over 25%.[19][20][21] SA Best did, however, secure two upper house positions, with the successful election of Connie Bonaros, the campaign manager, and Frank Pangallo, Xenophon's former media advisor.[22][23]

According to NXT deputy leader Stirling Griff, the infamous "Bollywood ad" was his idea and actually improved private opinion polling. In the same interview, Griff indicated that the polling showed negative advertising by the Australian Hotels Association against the party resulted in a five per cent loss of their primary vote.[2]