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OPINION: One of the problems with being an expert or a reporter is the fundamental inability to understand why millions of people do what they do.
For the most part, we are all stumbling around in the dark, with occasional illumination in the form of polls or election results.
But since it’s boring to talk only about these scientific measures of society, we cling to individual anecdotes.
Our taxi drivers say something, someone else says it in the media, we see someone say it in a tweet, and suddenly we find a trend, even though we have only spoken to three people in a country of 5 million.
RYAN ANDERSON / Stuff
There is no evidence that Jacinda Ardern’s victory can be substantially attributed to national voters strategically backing Labor.
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These trends sometimes end up being confirmed in the data, particularly if they are talked about in the media in a way that people start to identify with them.
But that doesn’t mean we should trust all of them the moment they are formed, especially when the people promoting them are using them to save face.
This is the case with the theory currently circulating by some Federal Farmers presidents and others that a large contingent of the rural vote supported Labor to prevent the Green Party from being necessary to govern.
At this point, there is no evidence that this has happened on a sufficient scale to seriously change the outcome of the elections.
But the theory is very useful to people in the sector and on the political right who need to explain why a government supposedly at war with the regions got so much support from them, and to pressure Labor not to give the Green Party a single shot. inch of power. .
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were people who voted this way strategically and will be on their way to email me right now. There could even be thousands of them.
But if there are tens of thousands it’s another perspective entirely: the kind of numbers needed to really change an election. (It’s also entirely possible that a large chunk of the Green Party vote came from Labor voters who voted strategically, of course.)
Is might be the case. But at this point there is no real evidence for it.
University of Auckland political scientist Dr Lara Greaves said voting intention was often much less complicated than people would like to think.
“Most people probably voted for Labor because they wanted to vote for Labor,” Greaves said.
She is part of the team running the New Zealand Election Survey, a gigantic post-election poll that explores the intentions of voters. (The survey is being conducted for the 2020 election today and has been running for decades.)
Greaves says that the idea that many voters are switching from National to Labor is not that surprising, as most voters do not rate themselves as particularly ideological.
Supplied
Dr Lara Greaves from the University of Auckland said that most of the people who backed Labor would have backed it because they liked the party.
“The ideological distance between the two parties is not huge. It is not a huge leap for most people.”
Generally, when we see cases of strategic voting that work, it is after a party leader has given voters an explicit instruction: consult the Epsom and National agreement. In this election, National Leader Judith Collins explicitly told voters who did not like the Green Party not to vote for Labor.
This is not to say that all new Labor voters love the Green Party, or even want them to be in government.
Given Labor’s focus on “stability” in the final weeks of the campaign, it is possible that many people explicitly wanted to support a simple majority government.
Labor campaigned from the center and will probably rule fairly close to it. There is a reason the prime minister has said she will head a government for “all” New Zealanders multiple times.
But all New Zealanders will include the clear majority of the country that supported nominally progressive parties in the elections.
There is some data on why voters backed Labor, of course, but it is much more boring. We have constantly seen voters worry a lot about Covid-19. We’ve also seen voters consistently back Labor on the issue, both in the health response (generally strong territory for Labor) and the economic response (generally stronger for National).
Voters also often punish parties deemed unstable, such as National.
We will have more data soon to help us analyze this choice in more detail, but the broad strokes are pretty obvious.
