Tony Abbott had just been elected, but the warehouse party celebrating Adam Bandt's victory last night in Melbourne was full of happy left wing people. The DJ was mixing old-school dance classics and supporters of all ages were merrily dancing, even as TV screens on the wall showed seats falling like dominoes against the ALP, the crowd's two-party-preferred electoral choice. I posted a selfie of my friend Lauren and I bathed in a green glow on Facebook, and my best friend from high school commented: "How can you possibly smile on a night as dreadful as this?"

The smiling, the happiness, the vigour of the dancing was due to Bandt's history-making second term to parliament. Bandt has been the sole Green in the lower house since the last election; the innercity seat had been the preserve of the Labor party for 100 years when Bandt won it from them with preferences in the 2010 election. Australia's preferential voting system often throws up victories where the majority of voters don't get precisely what they want – but receive, at least, that which they can stand.

Many commentators, particularly in the Labor party, believed Bandt's 2010 victory to be this kind of preferencing fluke in a lacklustre election. Such had happened before: the Greens' Michael Organ had won the rusted-on Labor seat of Cunningham in a cranky by-election in 2002, but lost it again when local tempers were restored with a lot of ALP massaging in 2004. But the Bandt victory yesterday was no fluke – and his campaign can provide simple and reassuring hope to left and centre-left voters across the country in the years that lay ahead.

Bandt won because he had more and better organised human resources – and that was due to old fashioned, human-to-human campaigning. I should know: it's my local electorate, and I was one of the hander-outerers, proud to wear the "I'm with Adam" campaign t-shirt with the satirical cartoon of his face on it as I spent 10 hours at the Docklands booth yesterday, pounding the pavement in my most comfortable pair of cowboy boots.

Bear in mind, I'm not a member of the Greens – nor were, I'd guess, the vast majority of volunteers who ran Bandt's campaign yesterday, or those staffing the office in the months previously. We were people who had a tangible relationship with the candidate. I met him as a student politician almost 20 years ago and, despite being in a different faction, I admired the calm charm with which a man who speaks with passion, detail and a relentless commitment to honesty can unify an audience.

Bandt has brought this skill into public life since, which was certainly why amongst the party revelers last night, the portrait of Melbourne was so representative. Yes, this is a traditionally progressive seat, but it's also the seat with the highest proportion of housing commission residents anywhere in Australia. It has a refugee population, a very posh innercity community, an ageing local working-class, self-ghettoising hipsters and the lower-middle-class "aspirationals" of the Docklands developments.

These are diverse communities for a campaign to speak to and of course, as a left-wing party, the Greens have never enjoyed the favour of the commercial media to facilitate political communication. Murdoch papers in particular seem to take salacious delight in their depiction as long-haired, dope-smoking, tree-huggers – even though Bandt and his colleagues are none of these things, even when I knew him at university.

Bandt's brilliant young strategist, Sam La Rocca, is honest about how Bandt built the networks to promote the message of the campaign without Murdochian pacts. He told me last night that their re-election strategy began from Bandt's first day in office. "We welcomed constituents in," he says, "we relied on our dedication to actually helping our electors to be our media. We had a target of at least one solved case for a constituent per day – over three years, that's a thousand local families who have direct experience of who Adam is and what he can do for them if they elect him as an MP."

La Rocca took a similarly reasonable and simple, locally-based approach to social media, eschewing the self-conscious attempts to brand a net identity, like Labor did with the awkward "#thisislabor" campaign. "Our interaction with social media was to give people reason to promote us. The campaign didn't direct social media – social media helped us to be included in a conversation with the community that itself directed the campaign." This is perhaps why 40% of Liberal voters with beliefs antithetical to those of the Greens preferenced a candidate they directly knew, or had at least heard from friends and neighbours would help you out if you needed him.

And this is why, as a committed left-wing person, I am not despairing when reading last night's results. As I write this, news has come through that for all the bluster of the Liberals' campaign, Abbott's victory was delivered with with a swing of 1.2%. The results are still pending in the seat of Indi, where the formerly blue-ribbon, safe Liberal seat of Sophie Mirabella has turned marginal due to the efforts of Cathy McGowan, a local independent who ran her campaign along Bandtian lines.

There's little doubt that Rupert Murdoch's newspapers deliver prime ministerial victories in Australia. It is perhaps no coincidence that every election victor since 1996 in this country has been the beneficiary of Murdoch's endorsement. But that these backings at their most fervent can now only deliver a 1.2% is yet another suggestion in a broader dialogue that the days of the political influence of old media may be numbered.

That, on the other hand, low-tech human campaigning and a sophisticated understanding of how social media actually works have delivered the left-wing Green Bandt his second victory, and a secure one, is worth celebrating. The future these tactics suggest, however, as a natural complement to the left-wing politics that can benefit from their use ... well, now, that's a good reason to party.