Where did Labour gain its extra votes?

• mickysavage
• 7 years ago
• Categories: election 2017, jacinda ardern, labour, Politics

I am a keen fan of reviewing campaigns to work out what worked.  That way next time you know what to do to ensure that the country has progressive leadership.

Labour’s overall gain in the election was significant, up 10.7% points.  But which parts of the country surged and which parts did not do so well?

As part of my post election catharsis I prepared a spreadsheet giving a rough and ready indicator of areas where the increase was most significant and other areas where it was not so good.  It is surprisingly clear what happened in the country.

The measure is a crude one.  It is the change in Labour’s proportion of the party vote from 2014 to 2017.  It is crude in that it contrasts proportions and takes no account of turnover.  And the figures are preliminary with a number of special votes to be counted.  In fact I would not be surprised if Labour and the Greens both gain a further seat.

I then tallied the figures across geographical regions.  I treated the Maori electorates separately as clearly something happened there.

Basically the figures suggest the increase in the vote in South and West Auckland was disturbingly small, Wellington was good, Christchurch really good, provincial areas were good especially in the South Island, the University electorates all showed significant improvement in party votes and the Maori electorates performed out of their skin.

Here is the table:

Auckland South	3.70%
Auckland West	7.40%
Waikato	9.50%
Auckland Istmus	9.90%
Auckland North	10.30%
Central North Island	10.50%
Wellington	11.30%
Canterbury rural	11.80%
Northland	12.20%
South Island rural	12.30%
Christchurch	13.70%
Dunedin	15.20%
Maori	18.50%

A few comments:

1. The South Auckland electorates barely moved.  Perhaps the Labour vote has been maxed out and there is going to be no more persuasion occurring.  Turnout clearly should be the strategy and voting levels are not great.
2. The West Auckland results are disappointing.  If it was not for a healthy boost from Helensville (11.9%) the result would have been very mediocre.
3. Waikato’s results were relatively well distributed.
4. Auckland Istmus’s results were boosted by very good results in Auckland Central (15.4%) and Jacinda’s own electorate of Mount Albert (13.7%).  The rest were a mixture with the electorates away from the city centre (Mt Roskill, Maungakiekie and Tamati) performing more poorly.
5. Auckland North’s results were all healthy.
6. Central North Island were all reasonably healthy with the East Coast performing best (12.6%).
7. Wellington’s results were all pretty good with Wellington Central (13.3%) and Rongotai (12.9%) being stand outs.
8. The rest of the electorates performed strongly with Christchurch Central and East and Dunedin North and South all performing well.
9. Nelson performed exceptionally well (16.5%).
10. But the pick of the seats were the Maori seats.

As for reasons for Auckland’s relatively poor performance I suspect that elevated real estate prices has made too many of us closet tories.  But organisationally it needs more dedicated resource.  If Labour wants to win in 2020 then it needs to make sure that Auckland is organised and ready to go.