The incumbent Nationalist Party government won re-election, with Prime Minister Billy Hughes continuing in office.

It was held several months earlier than constitutionally required, so that the government could capitalise on the popularity of Hughes after his return from the Paris Peace Conference.

[1] According to Robert Garran, who was both Solicitor-General of Australia and Hughes' personal secretary at the conference, there were three main problems that confronted him upon his return – profiteering, high prices, and industrial unrest.

[3] Con Wallace, MP for West Sydney, agreed to give up the ALP nomination to allow Ryan to win a safe seat.

[8] There was a long history of support for preferential voting in Australia, but the immediate trigger for the new legislation was the decision of farmers' organisations to run candidates of their own in opposition to the Nationalist Party.

[9] The Corangamite by-election in December was the first held under the new system, and resulted in the Victorian Farmers' Union candidate winning from Nationalist preferences.

Hughes promised to appoint royal commissions on profiteering, the living wage, and taxation, and to call a constitutional convention for 1920.

[17] The ALP was ill-prepared for the election – six weeks before the polling date, it had no party manifesto, had preselected few candidates, and the state branches in Victoria and New South Wales were "virtually bankrupt".

[23] The Nationalists claimed Hughes had safeguarded the White Australia policy at the Paris Peace Conference, while the ALP said he had endangered it by failing to stop the Japanese from acquiring the South Seas Mandate.

[29] He was willing to make concessions on repatriation policy and other related issues, but repeatedly stressed that the RSSILA's agenda could only be enacted if the Nationalists won, for which a formal endorsement was necessary.

[30] Dyett was unwilling to compromise his neutrality, and consequently the RSSILA "gained almost every concession they sought, yet maintained their independence by holding out to Hughes the prospect of returned soldier support while never granting it".

[32] One issue in the campaign was the anti-war poem "The White Man's Burden", written by John Keith McDougall in 1900 during the Boer War.

It contained lines critical of soldiers, describing them as "sordid killers who murder for a fee", "hog-souled and dirty-handed", and "fools and flunkeys".

The poem was republished on a number of occasions during World War I – in January 1915 by the Labor Call, the official ALP newspaper in Victoria, and later by McDougall's opponents at the 1915 Grampians by-election and 1917 federal election.

[36] Hughes frequently quoted the poem in his campaign speeches, stating that returned soldiers faced a choice between "those who stood by you, or those who spoke contemptuously of you as 'sordid killers'".

However, a week before the election, a group of about 20 ex-soldiers kidnapped McDougall from his property in Ararat, before tarring and feathering him and dumping him in the street, bound and blindfolded.

Eleven of the remaining twelve seats were won by candidates endorsed by or aligned with the farmers' organisations in each state; they subsequently formed the Country Party.

The closest margin of victory was in Ballaarat, where Nationalist Edwin Kerby defeated the sitting Labor member Charles McGrath by a single vote.

[50] Senior Labor MP William Higgs publicly blamed the election result on interference from the organisational wing, and was expelled from the party in February 1920.

According to Gavin Souter, the author of an official history of parliament, the most notable result of the 1919 election was the emergence of the Country Party as a force in federal politics.

[56] According to Crotty (2019), the concessions Hughes made in an attempt to gain the returned-soldier vote "ensured two of Australia's major wartime legacies: a powerful, united and well-connected veterans' organisation, and a repatriation system that was perhaps the world's most generous".