The final election results have been released. Pontifications and guesses can now cease although someone should do an analysis of all the shyte some commentators said and show how wrong they were.
I put up a post three years ago where I predicted that the Greens would get an extra MP at National’s expense. I had a look at the results from the previous election and following up a suggestion from Swordfish (dang he is good) saw that there was a healthy bounce back for the left after specials. Then looking at the number of special votes and extrapolating I thought the chance of an extra Green MP at National’s expense was pretty good. And so it happened.
This time there has been some serious number crunching going on. The basic premise, that people wanting to vote left tend to be young and less organised than those who vote right is a correct one. And this time there has been a huge number of special votes to be counted, no doubt many by people enrolling for the first time and voting at the same time.
And so it came to pass that the final results were revealed and they showed a gain for the left of two MPs, one for Labour and one for the Greens at National’s expense.
This is a significant change. On election night results Labour+NZ First+Greens formed only a bare majority. Thanks to puppet party ACT and National’s Epsom gerrymander the right had the advantage. The following table sets out the extent of the change.
| 2017 Analysis | |||||
| Election night | Election night % | Final | Final % | Change | |
| National | 998,813 | 46.03% | 1,152,075 | 44.45% | -1.58% |
| Labour | 776,556 | 35.79% | 956,184 | 36.89% | 1.10% |
| Greens | 126,995 | 5.85% | 162,443 | 6.27% | 0.41% |
| NZ First | 162,998 | 7.51% | 186,706 | 7.20% | -0.31% |
| ACT | 10,959 | 0.51% | 13,075 | 0.50% | 0.00% |
| Total | 2,169,802 | 2,591,896 |
And now a Labour/Green/NZ First Government would have an operational majority. One that could sustain the loss of a couple of MPs and given the septic nature of Parliament this is always something that has to be factored in.
And the way the negotiations are going could be telling. National is showing signs of desperation and a willingness to sacrifice anyone and anything to regain power. But I am getting the strong impression that a decade of National abusing and denigrating Winston is going to make him turn left.
We live in interesting times …
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