The battle for Northcote was alway going to be fierce - the Greens have been eating away at Labor's inner Melbourne vote for some time.
But the death of Fiona Richardson in August has brought forward the fight from the November 2018 state election.
While a date has yet to be set for the mid-term poll in Northcote, both parties have named their candidates.
Labor's Clare Burns, a union official and speech pathologist, has already started her campaigning, while the Greens on Monday announced Lidia Thorpe, the chair of the Victorian NAIDOC Committee, as their candidate.
Ms Thorpe hopes to become the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to Victoria's parliament.
"I hope to make my party and my people proud," the Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman said.
Both Ms Thorpe and Ms Burns have lived in the Darebin area for the past two decades.
Ms Richardson held the Northcote seat since 2006, had a six per cent margin and was well-liked by constituents.
She became Australia's first family violence prevention minister, but died aged 50 in August, just a day after revealing her battle with multiple tumours.
Political experts say the by-election will be an interesting test of the Andrews Labor government's ability to fend off the Green shift.
"The state government's been trying to market itself to Greens voters, things like euthanasia, coming out in support of refugees and so on," Deakin University politics lecturer Geoffrey Robinson told AAP.
"If you look at the federal election, the Greens won those booths in Northcote quite easily.
"But this will be a test in a sense of Labor's ability to appeal to essentially inner city voters, how they're trying to continue to appeal to those voters by differentiating themselves to federal Labor a bit."
Monash University political scientist Zareh Ghazarian imagines some in the Greens are "quietly confident they could win this election."
"They performed quite well at the last election," he told AAP.
"If they were to maintain that and get a swag of preference deals that favours them, there's nothing stopping them from winning that seat."
Parliamentary Speaker Colin Brooks is expected to issue a writ for the by-election by Friday, with the state electoral commission confirming the poll could be held as late as November.
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