A bit of fluttering on twitter recently as an apparently leaked Labour internal poll shows good news for the left. The figures here from twitter account 120Aotearoa.
That’s a National/Act/NZ First government, assuming that Winston Peters isn’t lying when he says NZ First have categorically ruled out a coalition or confidence and supply agreement with Labour. Either NZF getting 5% = a right wing government, or NZF getting 5% means a liar in a centrist, climate fudging, poverty tinkering government, just not as bad as the other lot.
How is that good news for the left? I ran the figures through the MMP seat allocation calculator. Moving just 1.2% of NZF’s party vote to Labour means the left gets to form government. This is what it looks like,
That’s a Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori government. Bonus is that NZF stay out of parliament.
I don’t have a political science background so take all this with a grain of salt. I do however understand a lot about fighting from the underdog position and central in that is that you just don’t give up when things appear bad. You also understand the power of framing and narrative.
My view on polls is that they’re basically a game that the MSM and political parties play in order to influence elections. They piss me off and I wish we would ban them, but I expect that would create another set of problems as parties continued with their internal polling which would inevitably be leaked.
But the way that polls get reported doesn’t serve us or democracy well. MSM headlines still frequently report on Labour or National as if MMP doesn’t exist. And predicting election results from a single poll is a nonsense.
The polls this year appear to be a bit chaotic, but remember, they’re a snapshot of a particular segment of the population over a week or two. They’re not election results.
We can follow the trend instead. Here’s the wikipedia entry on Opinion polling for the 2023 New Zealand general election, but again, there are technical issues here that aren’t particularly well understood by the general public (myself included).
That big downward trend in the red line is the readjustment from the unusually high vote in the first year of the pandemic that gave Labour an outright majority (the first time under MMP).
Here is the polling trend from the 2017 election when everyone was sure Labour were going to lose. They went on to form government.
The point here isn’t to hope for another Jacinda Ardern. It’s that we never know what can happen and we should be out there giving the left the best chance we can.
The election isn’t over, by any means. It’s tight and as James Shaw is saying repeatedly, it may come down to a few thousand votes. The stories we tell about the election and polling affect the end result.
Now is not the time to give up, now is the time to work harder at winning.
It’s also not the time to be telling people that the left has lost the election. *Looks hard at the father of Waitakere man who apparently wants the left to lose the election* No, I’m not linking to that utter fucking insanity.
Don’t share defeatist bollocks. It tells swing, undecided and habitual non-voters to not bother voting left.
More good news in that leaked poll is that the Greens’ increased vote appears to be holding, and is higher than ACT. In this poll that happened with both Labour and Green increases, which is exactly what we want. More left wing voters shifting from Labour to Green, and more centre and swing voters coming to Labour. In 2020 the Greens got 7.9% of the vote and 10 MPs. If they get 12% on election day, that’s 15 Green MPs. No reason why it can’t be more.
What I’m doing here is presenting a narrative of how we can win. This is more important than attachment to our predictions. I don’t know who will win the election, but I know that it’s still possible for that to be the left. It’s a very tight election, no-one know who will win, and I think we should be looking at the motivations of people making predictions and asking what purpose they serve.
In addition to the prominent issues like the cost of living crisis, people want to vote for competency, the winning team. Talking about how the centre left can govern well despite the limitations matters. Talking about what a good result looks like matters. Here’s my preference,
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