Division of Adelaide

The Division of Adelaide is an Australian electoral division in South Australia and is named for the city of Adelaide, South Australia's capital. The 76 km² seat is centred on the Adelaide city centre and spans from Grand Junction Road in the north to Cross Road in the south and from Portrush Road in the east to South Road in the west, taking in suburbs including Ashford, Clarence Park, Enfield, Goodwood, Kent Town, Keswick, Kilburn, Maylands, Northgate, Norwood, Parkside, Prospect, Rose Park, St Peters, Toorak Gardens, Unley and Walkerville.

The division of Adelaide was one of seven single-member seats established when the seven-member statewide Division of South Australia was abolished following the inaugural 1901 election. For the first 40 years after Federation, it was one of the few Federation seats in the state that regularly changed hands between the Australian Labor Party and the conservative parties. Despite the bellwether-like swinging tendency, unusually the only time Adelaide was obtained by an incoming government was in 1931.

However, Labor held it for all but six years from 1943 to 1993, including a 23-year Labor hold during the Robert Menzies era. For most of the time from 1943 to 1987, it was a fairly safe Labor seat. Labor's hold on the seat loosened slightly in the late 1980s due to pro-Liberal demographic change; it was briefly lost to the Liberals at a 1988 by-election, but regained in 1990.

The seat had only originally represented the Adelaide city centre and nearby inner north suburbs up to Regency Road in Prospect for most of its first century. However, a pre-1993 boundary redistribution pushed the seat to the south, adding Liberal-friendly suburbs to the south of the Adelaide city centre for the first time while removing Labor suburbs in the north-east, resulting in Liberal Trish Worth holding the seat for eleven years, albeit on slender margins.

Kate Ellis regained Adelaide for Labor in 2004 on a 1.3 percent margin from a two percent two-party swing. Ellis has held the seat since, with the margin increasing to 8.5 percent in 2007, before falling to 7.7 percent in 2010 and to 4.0 percent in 2013, before increasing to 4.7 percent in 2016.

In 2016, the major party vote was suppressed in all eleven state seats in the presence of Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) candidates in all eleven South Australian seats. Though Labor picked up a two-party swing in all eleven, the NXT presence produced a result where Kingston ended up as the only South Australian seat to record an increase, however small, to the primary vote of a particular major party. Additionally, Adelaide was the only seat of the state's eleven where the Greens vote increased, while also producing both the highest Green vote and the lowest NXT vote in the state. This is in contrast to 2007 where the Xenophon Senate ticket polled higher in Adelaide than in most other seats.