The cricketer refused to think that his candidacy was simply there to make up the numbers, and he told Bolte as much. The start of the election campaign coincided with the 1954–55 grade cricket finals. Loxton took 7wickets and scored 129 runs to help Prahran claim the title for the first time in 32 years, and was hailed as a local hero. It capped off a season in which he topped the competition batting averages and took the most wickets. In a close-run contest, the cricketer defeated the sitting ALP member Bob Pettiona by only 14 votes on the two party preferred count. He was aided by preferences from the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), which had broken away from the ALP during the 1950s, claiming that it was too soft towards communism; fears of left-wing influence was causing great concern in Australian society at the time. Loxton polled 35.70% of the first preferences, well behind Pettiona's 47.25%, but received almost all of the DLP's 13.66% of the vote as preferences to end with 50.04%. The result helped bring Bolte's Liberals to power, and they stayed in office until 1982, by which time Loxton had retired.