2020 New Zealand general election & referendums (17 October)

[Pericles]

Colmar Brunton also put out some referendum numbers. On cannabis, No is leading 51%-41% (a trend to Yes since their last poll). On End of Life choice, Yes is leading 60%-33% (a trend to No since their last poll).

Also, with that Newshub poll, here's how Newshub was off in the last election. They overestimated National by 1.4%, overestimated Labour by 0.4%, overestimated the Greens by 0.8%, underestimated NZ First by 0.1%, and overestimated ACT by 0.1%. So hypothetically applying that to this poll, that results in 45.4% Labour/62 seats, 29.7% National/40 seats*, 7.3% ACT/10 seats, 5.5% Green/8 seats, and 3.6% NZ First/0 seats. The wasted vote there seems way too high though. One other comment, in an amazing ironic coincidence, Labour's poll numbers are exactly the same as what the final polls gave National in 2017. Colmar Brunton gave National 46% in 2017, now it gives Labour 46%, Newshub gave National 45.8% in 2017, now it gives Labour 45.8%. I'm starting to wonder if Labour will end up on 44.4% of the party vote lol.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyway, for my prediction. Hopefully this is pretty accurate, I'm going a bit bold with some stuff.
Labour-46%
National-30%
ACT-8%
Green-6%
NZ First-4%

Though Labour and ACT are a high 46% and 8%, so maybe one rounds up to a higher share. I think this would result in a bare Labour majority. Labour has had a better ending to the campaign than National and has been on-message in appealing to those wavering soft National voters.

I think the cannabis referendum will sadly fail, the 10-point margin in Colmar Brunton sounds about right. Anecdotally, there is a big age divide. Pretty much all the young people I know support it, but the older generations are opposed. End of Life Choice is too far ahead to fail, I have seen a lot of late attacks on it but so many people have already voted that even if the attacks work they have come in too late. I think Yes gets something like 57% or 58%.

With the electorates, this will be interesting to watch. People do vote a bit on the local candidate there, but it is pretty correlated with the party vote. Given National got 41 electorates to 29 for Labour last time, I expect Labour to make significant gains. It will be interesting to see the extent of these gains, and how much some National candidates can run ahead of the party vote. Currently, I'll predict this-
Labour gains Auckland Central, East Coast, Hamilton East, Hutt South, Maungakiekie, Nelson, Otaki, Takanini (new electorate), Tukituki, Waiararapa and Whanganui to end up with 40 electorates. It could be a bit lower, or maybe the swing is even bigger and they really start biting into the National base. There are a lot of very safe National seats though (Labour has some even safer ones though. National's best electorate in 2017 in terms of the party vote was Hunua with 62.95%, Labour got 71.04% in Mangere. And remember, National beat Labour by 7.56% in the overall party vote then.)

*I hope National's party vote ends up with a '2' in front of it. 29.9% would be emotionally more satisfying than 30.1%.

[Pericles]

How quickly will results roll in?  I don't believe New Zealand uses exit polls so for those of us on West Coast of North America, poll closes at 11PM Friday, so by 2AM will we have a good idea of final results?

Very quickly we expect, as the advance votes can already be counted.

[Pericles]

From another forum:

Here is a loose timeframe for the counting process, from NZH:

Early votes will begin to be counted at 9am (9PM tonight UK) tomorrownow today at secure electorate headquarters around the country.

Once voting closes tomorrowtoday, the manager of each voting place opens the boxes and counts the votes.

Preliminary numbers will start being released soon after 7pm (7AM UK) tomorrow (Around 720 PM apparently); 50 per cent of the results are expected to be available by 10pm and 95 per cent by 11.30pm.

The official count begins on Sunday and will include special votes, which can come in up to 10 days after election day.

The chief electoral officer will declare the official results 20 days after election day, on Friday, November 6.

So if Labour gets 58-61 seats, we might not know if it is a majority or coalition until after US election is known.

Labour+Green+NZ First only had 61 seats on Election Night 2017 (it was ultimately 63 seats), so the special votes can make a difference. Jacinda Ardern even admitted it would have been very hard to form a government on the Election Night results. Maybe with lots of New Zealanders having returned from overseas, the amount of special votes and so the change they bring will be less.

[Pericles]

Any chance there will be an exit poll or are those illegal in New Zealand?  Most countries usually have exit polls when polls close.  Here in Canada we don't, but our ballots are counted super quick and usually after one hour you have a good idea on whom he won.

Exit polls are illegal, but the early results are pretty similar to an exit poll.
By the way, the strict laws on avoiding election coverage today are pretty funny. Here is a tweet they made, this is at foreign MPs (actually Angela Eagle lol. She deleted it so idk what she said).https://mobile.twitter.com/ElectoralCommNZ/status/1317225839604346880
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2020/10/electoral-commission-targets-foreign-mps-discussing-nz-election-on-social-media.html

[Pericles]

I waited until today to cast my vote, some people like to do it the traditional way. Hopefully enough so turnout is higher than it has been recently.

[Pericles]

Is there a reporting bias in New Zealand normally?

Not really. Sorry I can't update live much, I'll give my thoughts in detail later if I can't tonight.

[Pericles]

This is more beautiful than I'd ever dared hope.

[Pericles]

Also of note: Labour finally oust Nick Smith (a landslide fluke* who stayed in office so long that he ended up as Father of the House) at Nelson.

_{*First elected for Tasman in Labour's annus horribilis - defeating one of the Douglasites in what had been Bill Rowling's constituency - before following many of his electors to the expanded Nelson in 1996 when Tasman was abolished due to the cut in constituencies necessitated by the new electoral system.}

Not that big of a fluke, Labour won the party vote in Nelson in 2017 and he benefitted from a split left vote.

[Pericles]

Not that big of a fluke, Labour won the party vote in Nelson in 2017 and he benefitted from a split left vote.

I mean that his initial victory was a fluke: that the fluke was him

Oh yeah, that seems accurate.

[Pericles]

This landslide really is an incredible result, still it's very well-deserved. Labour will need to deliver more on policy in its second term, but they certainly deserved this opportunity. It looks like Jacinda would rather govern alone than with the Greens, maybe the Greens are given a small ministerial portfolio rather than being turfed out of government entirely. This victory is truly historic, I believe it is Labour's highest share of the vote since 1938 and the second-highest they ever recorded. I think it's the second-highest number of MPs any party has ever had in New Zealand, though it doesn't look like Labour can match or beat National's 67 MPs in 1990. Hopefully with the special votes Labour gets an outright majority of the vote, so their majority isn't just a product of minor parties falling below the 5% threshold. A few National electorates are very close, so those candidates will be worried, in particular National's health spokesperson Dr Shane Reti who is only leading by 162 votes. This is of course the first majority government under MMP, and so it is uncertain how that dynamic will play out. Labour's landslide appears to have swept across the entire country-winning the party vote in 68/72 electorates. The changeover in electorates is greater than I expected. There don't appear to be any big rural or suburban trends, though I'll have a detailed look through the results and other analysis and see if any interesting correlations emerge.

The National Party has of course had a disastrous result. It's hard to trace a single event as being the cause of it, it was a case of death by a thousand cuts. Or as Gerry Brownlee put it, National had an "absolute shocker year". National could never have won the election against Jacinda Ardern this year (post-Covid I mean, we'll never know whether Simon Bridges could have won in a September election where Covid didn't happen). Judith Collins herself isn't the villain of the story from National's perspective, her approval ratings were much better than Bridges' and she seemed better at being Opposition Leader than Muller. So maybe Bridges or Muller would have lost by even more. However, the disunity was incredibly costly. In retrospect, the 'original sin' was electing Simon Bridges as National Party leader in 2018, despite the decent party vote numbers he was very disliked by the public and so once the polls turned the cycle of disunity was unleashed. Maybe they should have elected someone like Amy Adams or Steven Joyce instead (I actually kind of agree with Mike Hosking who has consistently thought they should have elected Joyce).

National shouldn't rush into another leadership contest, and they don't have anyone obviously better to take over from Collins. They need a prolonged period of reflection first. National also now has a much harder job to win back power in 2023. Big swings are of course possible, 2017 comes to mind as an example of a party winning government after having lost in a landslide 3 years earlier (though Labour was the second-largest party in 2017, it's hard for National to win from that position). A much greater share of National's caucus is white men, and it is a more conservative caucus (particularly on social issues). So the image they are presenting to the country could be less appealing. I remember when National was supposed to be the monster opposition, they now have 3 years to regret blowing that opportunity and making the challenge so much harder.

It looks like there was a notable polling error. Maybe that was a late swing of tactical voters to Labour from National supporters who preferred a Labour majority to a Labour-Green government, maybe the polls underestimated how much of Labour's lead was already banked (and so there was a slight swing against Labour at the end but too late to matter), or maybe the pollsters were always getting the composition of the electorate slightly wrong.

This leads onto what the referendum results might be. End of Life Choice passing seems virtually inevitable, given the size of its lead. The seemingly high turnout and the left's great result imply that the electorate may have been quite left-wing and lots of young voters turned out. Maybe that's enough to get Yes over the line for cannabis. Most likely it still fails, perhaps by a narrow margin, those soft National voters that swung to Labour this time don't seem to like the idea of legal weed.

[Pericles]

I see that National won the party vote in Epsom, but what were the other three that they won in?

Tamaki (38.4%-36.9%), Taranaki-King Country (37.5%-36.5%), and Waikato (38.6%-38.5%). It's possible some of those are overturned on the special votes, the 38 vote margin in Waikato especially is very vulnerable (it's a 5,387 National majority on the candidate vote though). Epsom is 39.9%-33.9% on the party vote, that's too big of a margin so sadly it won't be a clean sweep for Labour.

[Pericles]

I made this graph based on the preliminary results, to see what the correlation there was between education levels and the swing from National to Labour.

There is no statistically significant correlation. Labour didn't get an extra boost with lower-educated or higher-educated voters, it was a pretty uniform landslide. The graph does change slightly if the outlier on the bottom left (Mangere) is removed, but not by much.

Maybe then, there was a very small correlation, so that Labour gained slightly more with lower-educated voters. It is hard to tell for sure from this.

Unfortunately, I don't have data for all the general electorates on this, I left out some of the new ones or ones with big boundary changes. I also left out the Maori electorates, because the dynamic is different there.

It may be that whiter electorates and those with a lower Labour party vote in 2017 swung more to Labour, but I haven't yet run the numbers on those. Anyway, here are the swing percentages I got (nationwide, it was a 15.0% National-Labour swing)-
Auckland Central-12.4%
Banks Peninsula-N/A   
Bay of Plenty-18.8%
Botany-19.4%
Christchurch Central-15.6%
Christchurch East-15.5%
Coromandel-13.3%
Dunedin-N/A   
East Coast-14.3%
East Coast Bays-20.0%
Epsom-14.1%
Hamilton East-15.8%
Hamilton West-17.2%
Hutt South-16.4%
Ilam-17.5%
Invercargill-14.9%
Kaikoura-18.5%
Kaipara ki Mahurangi-17.3%
Kelston-13.2%
Mana-14.7%
Mangere-4.8%
Manurewa-13.6%
Maungakiekie-N/A   
Mt Albert-9.8%
Mt Roskill-13.8%
Napier-14.9%
Nelson-19.9%
New Lynn-14.5%
New Plymouth-15.7%
North Shore-18.5%
Northcote-17.7%
Northland-15.3%
Ohariu-18.8%
Otaki-16.9%
Pakuranga-18.8%
Palmerston North-15.2%
Panmure-Otahuhu-N/A   
Papakura-9.6%
Port Waikato-N/A   
Rangitata-17.9%
Rangitikei-17.8%
Remutaka-17.0%
Rongotai-11.0%
Rotorua-16.1%
Selwyn-19.7%
Southland-18.4%
Taieri-N/A   
Takanini-N/A   
Tamaki-17.9%
Taranaki-King Country-16.6%
Taupo-17.5%
Tauranga-16.7%
Te Atatu-15.2%
Tukituki-15.7%
Upper Harbour-18.2%
Waikato-17.2%
Waimakariri-21.1%
Wairarapa-17.1%
Waitaki-18%
Wellington Central-9.9%
West-Coast Tasman-11.8%
Whanganui-16.4%
Whangaparaoa-N/A
Whangarei-16.5%
Wigram-16.3%

[Pericles]

National will be holding its first caucus meeting after the defeat, with 20 fewer MPs (while they lost 21 from the 2017 result, Jami-Lee Ross had already been expelled from the party in 2018). They have clearly learned nothing, MPs are already leaking.

National MPs have told Newshub:

"We're going into a tough caucus and it will be a very full and frank post-mortem."
Another says it is "highly, highly unlikely she'll [Judith Collins] lead us into 2023."

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/10/nz-election-2020-national-mps-already-leaking-predicting-leadership-coup-after-devastating-defeat.html

There are rumours that Christopher Luxon is the planned replacement, and fury at liberal MPs Chris Bishop and Nicola Willis who orchestrated the Muller coup and were both returned to parliament.

Judith Collins at least has the right idea, saying she'll deliver a stern warning to caucus that "No party can win until it stops looking at itself." She has also promised a thorough review of the campaign and the causes of National's defeat.

A minor point related to that is National's pollster David Farrar said that Labour got 51% of the advance vote and 44% of the Election Day vote, and National got 26% and 30% (not sure if that adds up to National getting 26.8% of the vote, even pre-specials). That suggests that National's campaign blunders in the last week weren't important. There might not have been an anti-Green tactical vote for Labour, though people thought Labour was  winning for a long time so maybe they just didn't wait for the final polls to make up their minds. The polling may have either been consistently wrong, or underestimated the advance vote somehow.

[Pericles]

LMAO, AM Show Host Duncan Garner is going vegan for a year. This is because he promised a few months ago he was so confident Labour would not win a majority that he promised to go vegan if they did. And well... At least he kept his word.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/10/duncan-garner-i-m-going-vegan-and-it-s-a-terrifying-ordeal.html

In actual news, Gerry Brownlee is staying on as an MP, but other National MPs may still resign. National's official line is that they're waiting for the review rather than "navel-gazing", which I guess is sensible. Judith Collins will announce her frontbench only after Labour's new cabinet is formed, and there is no certainty yet about whether Brownlee will stay on as Deputy Leader or any other positions in it (such as whether National's finance spokesperson Paul Goldsmith will be fired over his budget hole blunder).

[Pericles]

Preliminary referendum results (these are not the final results, there are still special votes to come in).

End of Life Choice;
Yes-65.2%
No-33.8%
'Informal votes'-1.0%

Cannabis legalisation;
No-53.1%
Yes-46.1%
'Informal votes-0.8%

Well, looks like cannabis legalisation has failed sadly. It might be closer in the final results, but that gap is a bit too large. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

[Pericles]

Lol Jacinda only reveals now that she voted Yes on cannabis. It was disappointing that she didn't make any effort on it, maybe the result would have been different.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300145410/live-referendum-results-how-did-nz-vote-on-euthanasia-and-cannabis

[Pericles]

A deal has been agreed between the Labour Party and the Greens. The Green Party co-leaders will be ministers outside of cabinet, and will support Labour on confidence and supply. The parties have also agreed to a level of policy cooperation, particularly on climate change and homelessness. This is a sensible move to include the Green Party's talent in government. It isn't a full coalition, which makes sense because Labour won a majority, and might be best for the Greens given the arithmetic so they can actually show some independence from Labour.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300146558/election-2020-green-party-votes-to-be-part-of-next-government-with-labour

By the way, an interesting feature of the agreement is clause 17, "Beyond these stated areas of cooperation, it is also the Government’s intention to  work with political parties from across Parliament (including the opposition) on issues that affect our democracy, including the Electoral Commission’s 2012 recommended changes to MMP, electoral finance law, and the length of the Parliamentary term" Hopefully this means that the party vote threshold is lowered to 4% and parliamentary terms are extended to 4 years (though because the latter was twice rejected in referendums decades ago, it would probably need to go to a referendum and be rejected again).

[Pericles]

By the way, an interesting feature of the agreement is clause 17, "Beyond these stated areas of cooperation, it is also the Government’s intention to  work with political parties from across Parliament (including the opposition) on issues that affect our democracy, including the Electoral Commission’s 2012 recommended changes to MMP, electoral finance law, and the length of the Parliamentary term" Hopefully this means that the party vote threshold is lowered to 4% and parliamentary terms are extended to 4 years (though because the latter was twice rejected in referendums decades ago, it would probably need to go to a referendum and be rejected again).

I sure hope it's rejected. Having 3-year terms is one of the best features of NZ (and Australian) politics, and more countries need to follow that model. I already hate that Sweden switched to 4 years in the 90s (and unsurprisingly its politics have become markedly worse since).

If there's strong evidence suggesting 3 year terms produce better outcomes I'm open to changing my mind. My impression was that 4 years would be better so governments could settle in and have more time to actually govern, and it strikes the right balance (3 years being too short, 5 years like the UK or more being too long).

[Pericles]

Jacinda has announced her new cabinet, and the majority Labour government begins. I think we should shift discussion that's not directly about the election to that NZ political discussion thread.

[Pericles]

Great election results. It looks like Labour got the most party votes everywhere except Epsom. Once this is confirmed with a new map I need to update my sig lol.

[Pericles]

It seems there was a big age divide in the cannabis referendum. It isn't really surprising, but the scale of it is interesting nonetheless. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/16-11-2020/new-zealands-cannabis-referendum-results-were-defined-by-age/

[Pericles]

Also, this is a good breakdown of the results. I'm surprised Simon Bridges only won by 4%. How the electorates lean based on the party vote is also interesting.

[Pericles]

Only found out yesterday that the often quoted (almost exact) 50% share for Labour is referring to their list vote, the constituency vote was actually slightly lower at "only" 47%.

I think its pretty unusual for the winner at least to have those figures that way round?

Where did you find those numbers? I'd like to see them. It makes some sense, people are more attached to their local MP than the party brand so National has a higher floor in the electorates. Maybe it's also an old lingering FPP mindset, so maybe people are splitting their votes the wrong way.

[Pericles]

Wow, some amazing person put the electorate votes for each party in each MMP election up on Wikipedia. I made these two graphs from the data.



This basically illustrates how opposition parties have lower floors in the party vote than in the electorates. I don't have the 2020 electorate vote numbers though, if CumbrianLeftie has numbers for National and Labour that would complete the comparison.

Also, random thought about the 2020 results but I'm surprised about Takanini. This new electorate was supposed to be National-leaning, instead Labour won it 55%-30% in the party vote (basically the same as nationwide) and 53%-32% in the electorate vote. Here is the electorate profile. It's a younger electorate than average, it's pretty ethnically diverse-actually plurality Asian. Education levels seem pretty similar to NZ overall. It's possible that Asians swung to Labour at a higher rate than expected. Labour's immigration stance appeared to depress its 2017 vote among that demographic and so maybe that not being much of a factor gave Labour an additional boost, or there is some other explanation. I might need to research this further.

[Pericles]

So here are the final National-Labour swings, in each of the general electorates that remained very similar or the same since the last election (this does make the analysis less reliable). The nationwide swing was 16.0% by the way.

Auckland Central-13.2%
Bay of Plenty-19.7%
Botany-21.0%
Christchurch Central-16.1%
Christchurch East-15.8%
Coromandel-17.1%
East Coast-15.3%
East Coast Bays-20.7%
Epsom-16.3%
Hamilton East-16.8%
Hamilton West-18.5%
Hutt South-17.1%
Ilam-18.3%
Invercargill-15.3%
Kaikoura-18.9%
Kelston-13.7%
Mana-15.5%
Mangere-7.1%
Manurewa-15.0%   
Mt Albert-10.3%
Mt Roskill-16.0%
Napier-15.5%
Nelson-15.4%
New Lynn-15.2%
New Plymouth-16.4%
North Shore-19.5%
Northcote-18.1%
Northland-16.3%
Ohariu-19.3%
Otaki-18.5%
Pakuranga-20.3%
Palmerston North-15.8%   
Papakura-11.6%
Rangitata-18.3%
Rangitikei-18.6%
Remutaka-17.4%
Rongotai-11.4%
Rotorua-17.0%
Selwyn-20.5%   
Tamaki-19.3%
Taranaki-King Country-17.7%
Taupo-18.7%
Tauranga-17.7%
Te Atatu-16.3%
Tukituki-16.7%
Upper Harbour-19.3%
Waikato-18.1%
Waimakariri-21.2%
Wairarapa-17.8%
Waitaki-18.2%
Wellington Central-10.6%
West-Coast Tasman-12.4%
Whanganui-16.8%
Whangarei-17.3%
Wigram-16.6%

Most of the correlations were weak.





There was one that was very strong, but this is unsurprising.


Now for some trivia from these. The most educated electorate of these is Epsom, which had an average swing but interestingly was the one electorate to party vote National while still not electing a National MP lol. The least well educated electorate is Mangere, which was a huge Labour landslide as it always is but also had the weakest swing of all of them. Mangere also has the lowest share of its population being 65 years or older. The oldest of these was Otaki, which was a Labour gain. The electorate with the highest Asian share seems to be Mt Roskill, which is a Labour seat with an average swing. I'll let you have a look and see if you find anything interesting and worth questioning perhaps.