2020 election: the national MPs who will be kicked out if the polls are accurate and how it will make the party less racially diverse.

ANALYSIS: As hundreds of thousands of votes roll in and the polls remain largely static, many MPs will worry about whether or not they will have a job on October 18.

Based on Thursday night 1 News / Colmar Brunton In the survey, a large number of current MPs would be on the brink of disappearing: New Zealand’s top nine MPs, the current 13 national MPs and Jami-Lee Ross.

With a slightly different poll result, more or fewer national MPs could walk away, as could the entire Green Party caucus, or its last-place MP Golriz Ghahraman.

The raw numbers hide a lot of complexity.

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You can see the fact that 13 national MPs have decided to resign in the elections and think that that means that no national MP currently in Parliament is going to lose against their will.

But many of those retiring MPs are in “safe” domestic seats, which means they will be replaced by rookies. And National will likely win two seats where MPs left the party or left Parliament: Botany, where Jami-Lee Ross left the party, and Rangitata, when Andrew Falloon resigned from Parliament.

Based on the 1 News / Colmar Brunton Poll published on Thursday, National would have only 41 deputies after the elections.

Due to the alchemy of MMP, you can’t just count to number 41 on the list and assume that everyone above that line is in and everyone below is out.

This is because electoral deputies count as part of a party’s roster allocation. For example: Christopher Luxon is way down at 61st on the list, but Botany will almost certainly win, so he will come to Parliament and take the place of a deputy on the list who does not win his seat.

In fact, if National had all the voters it currently has, there would be no any list of deputies. That means Paul Goldsmith, ranked No. 3, would be out, as he traditionally doesn’t try to win Epsom, and every MP on the list is below him. (Actually, there would be an “excess”, with National awarded several more seats than would be allocated from the party vote, meaning Parliament would be larger.)

However, this is unlikely: The party’s vote turn against National likely means that it will lose quite a few electorate seats as well.

It’s hard to make assumptions about which constituencies National is likely to lose. Each electoral contest is different and some deputies with narrow margins could still achieve victories by presenting themselves more as local champions than as representatives of the National Party.

National’s Hutt South MP Chris Bishop, for example, has campaign ads that clearly seek to distance himself from the party and instead present it as a strong local voice.

For the sake of argument, suppose that every national MP with a majority of less than 5000 votes loses his electoral race, apart from two seats which I will mention in a minute. Suppose also that National wins the new Takinini electorate, which is quite favorable to the party.

This would mean that National would lose Hutt South, Northcote, Auckland Central, Whanganui, Tukituki, Wairarapa, Nelson, and the east coast.

Two narrow-margin seats are left off this list: Northland, which was a very different race in 2017 when Winston Peters was the starter, and Maungakiekie, which has gotten much more NL-friendly thanks to the redrawing of the boundaries.

If National lost all those electorate seats, it would lose ten current MPs: Alfred Ngaro, Harete Hipango, Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, Paulo Garcia, Parmjeet Parmar, Agnes Loheni, Lawrence Yule, Brett Hudson, Dan Bidois and Jo Hayes. Several MPs who lost their electorate seats would still be on the list, such as Bishop in Hutt South and Nick Smith in Nelson.

Despite all the losses, due to all the retirements, there would still be some significant new blood in the party.

Luxon would win Botany, Jake Bezzant would win Upper Harbor, Nicola Grigg would win Selwyn, Penny Simmonds would win Invercargill, Simon Watts would win North Shore, Tim Costley would win Otaki and Rima Nakhle would win Takanini.

This would make the National caucus significantly less racially diverse. Only two of the ten MPs who come out involuntarily in this scenario are Pakeha. Only two of the new MPs entering (Nakhle and Bezzant) are not Pakeha.

This is not due to any kind of malice on the part of the National Party as a whole, but rather the fact that their safe seats are typically in very Pakeha parts of the country, and each local electorate in those areas typically elects candidates from Pakeha. . Selywn, National’s safest electorate, is the fifth most European in the country. Other safe domestic seats like Waimakariri, Waitaki, and Kaikoura are also among the most European in the country.

In terms of gender balance, it wouldn’t change much. About a third of the party would be women, and about a third of the party are women now.

The above analysis is entirely conjecture based on a single survey, although it was a survey that is in broad agreement with others. Election night could look quite different, particularly if the Green Party falls below five percent, as that would mean a lot more “wasted vote,” giving both the Labor and National parties quite a few more MPs.