Election 2020: How Chlöe Swarbrick Won the Campaign of Her Life and Turned a Blue Seat Green

Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick has become the second Green MP to win an electorate seat, and the first to do so without the help of Labor. And he did it in a seat that Jacinda Ardern failed to turn red twice: Auckland Central. He tells Henry Cooke how his unconventional campaign succeeded.

Chlöe Swarbrick is late. She runs from one interview to another in Auckland, and while her campaign manager is texting StuffThere seems to be some kind of rugby match at Eden Park.

But even when she’s stuck in traffic, a volunteer from her team suddenly appears outside her K Road office to drop off. Stuff Soon a few more are coming over for coffee and comparing how little sleep they’ve got. One is comedian Tim Batt, who, at 33, says he feels like the old man on the team.

Most of these people don’t seem to have a direct reason for being in the office on Sunday, but it serves as their center of gravity. I felt the same at the beginning of the campaign, back in August. Most political careers aren’t really fun, but this one was. And it seems to have created a community.

Swarbrick rushes in, joking about how serious he is, with the kind of energy you get when you’re too excited to eat.

It’s Sunday, October 18, and Swarbrick, 26, has just become the second Green MP in history to win a local election race, and the first to do so without the help of the Labor Party.

Indeed, despite the fact that the seat was won over by National, it was Labor, dominant in the rest of the country in the elections, that Swarbrick won for this seat. Candidate Helen White, who took on the role of failing to beat Nikki Kaye in Auckland Central from Jacinda Ardern in 2017, was just 498 votes behind with all non-special votes counted, while National’s Emma Mellow sat down 1,000 more votes. behind her. (There is a chance that White will win in special votes, but Greens generally do much better in special votes.)

“He was constantly, maniacally, updating the page,” Swarbrick says of his election night experience. He was ahead from the start, but fell about 100 votes behind White for a period, before opening up a wider lead.

“Honestly, this is all I ever wanted to do. This is what politics is supposed to be. “

She quotes her colleague Green MP Jan Logie: “She loves to campaign because at that point in a campaign before the election results come, the whole world is possible. Everything is possible.”

Due to electoral laws, much of the office has been hastily dismantled. Swarbrick posters have been ripped from windows. Folded banners, some faceless, lean against a wall. The wifi had been renamed “Vote Green Twice” just before the deadline, which would make that name illegal.

Voting for green twice has often seemed stupid to green fans. It divides the left vote into electoral contests, which leads to job losses for the deputies of the national electorate.

Since Jeanette Fitzsimons won Coromandel in 1999, the party has campaigned almost exclusively for the party vote as it has never had much of a chance of winning the plurality of votes needed to win a seat, even in left-wing constituencies like Wellington Central.

But Swarbrick was eager to run a two-tick campaign, building on a strong connection she has in Auckland, which began with her insurgent mayor campaign in 2016, which in turn led to her being picked up by the Green Party, but not selected. for Auckland Central in 2017.

“I ran in 2017 to be the Green Party candidate in Auckland Central. This is the campaign we’ve always wanted to run, ”says Swarbrick.

In 2017, she was still a rookie, a bright spot in a disastrous election campaign for the Green Party. In this legislature, it has become something of a household name, especially tenant households.

Behind the novelty of his youth and brief stint as an “OK Boomer” memes star, he has pushed very hard behind the scenes for drug law reform and mental health victories, all while building a great deal. fan base on social media. The only politician with more followers on Instagram is Jacinda Ardern, a key asset in an electorate with more voters in their twenties than anyone else.

So in early 2020, when Swarbrick was selected for Auckland Central and asked the Green Party for their blessing to run a two-tick campaign, she got it. But this was clearly not a decision supported by the whole party,

“We discussed the idea of ​​two-tick campaigns a long time ago as part of the Green Party’s overall campaign strategy,” says co-leader James Shaw.

“Because we were in a reasonably precarious position, we said that we would focus on the party’s voting campaign, but we would make the option available if electorate candidates thought it would contribute to the party’s vote.”

Swarbrick and co-leader Marama Davidson submitted proposals to run in Auckland Central and Tāmaki Makaurau (the Maori headquarters he takes in Auckland) and these were accepted. Davidson came in a distant third place in Tāmaki Makaurau.

But as soon as the two-tick campaign got underway, two narratives emerged in the mainstream media and in the pundits. One argued that it would split the vote on the left and deny a victory for Labor, again allowing Kaye to fill the job. Another suggested Labor should cut some kind of deal to win Swarbrick, thus giving the Green Party a safety net if it fell below 5 percent. Others simply dismissed the possibilities of Swarbrick.

Swarbrick never pushed for a deal with Labor, even if some Green-aligned folks definitely wanted one, and she says she’s very glad the victory is entirely her own.

“I am absolutely happy. We didn’t want caveats or asterisks next to it. The Greens won this one with campaigning and hard work. “

Other stories from the campaign soon emerged. Labor’s White did not fire in interviews or discussions with the media, apparently asking for votes simply because he was on Jacinda Ardern’s team, rather than offering genuine reasons. Kaye decided not to race again, and her replacement Emma Mellow had a difficult draft career and a catastrophic ride at Ponsonby with Judith Collins late in the season.

Swarbrick’s Green Party vintage crew neck sweater became one of the most desired clothing items in New Zealand, and it quickly sold out when the replicas were finally produced. And mainstream experts began to take her seriously, eventually New Zealand Herald Simon Wilson made a direct appeal to left-wing voters to back her.

Swarbrick’s campaign was led by Leroy Beckett, who is a veteran activist and apparently very young at 25. He led Phil Goff’s victorious re-election campaign in 2019 and prior to that was a key figure behind the campaign for Zero Carbon. Bill.

Beckett hangs around Swarbrick, always aware of the next appointment and whether or not he’s had enough rest.

“We had nothing when we started this campaign. It was not a campaign from the last elections that we reactivated again, ”says Beckett.

Because it wasn’t the latest version of the eternal campaign running for Labor and National candidates, it looked quite different. The fundraiser included an art auction and a cookbook. The campaign organized a stand-up comedy show and a drag show.

Hundreds of postcards, each with its own different message, were handwritten to deliver to constituencies, particularly apartment blocks where traditional doors cannot be knocked on. Swarbrick campaigned on national green platforms, such as the guaranteed minimum income, a big issue in an electorate with a large number of homeless and million-dollar houses, but also on local issues such as commercial rent relief through Auckland’s second shutdown.

Swarbrick tried to create a community, and that seemed to work: 1,000 people signed up to volunteer and about 400 people took to the streets for it, including many teenagers who couldn’t vote for themselves. At the end of the campaign, 10,000 people were called or knocked on their doors, a huge number in an electorate with around 26,000 ordinary votes.

He beat Swarbrick the seat. But interestingly, it didn’t seem to grow the party’s vote in a huge way – only 1,000 more people marked Green for the party vote in this election, giving the Green Party about a fifth of the party’s total vote. Better results were posted in Wellington Central, where co-leader Shaw won nearly a third of the party’s total vote with a traditional one-tick campaign.

Swarbrick doesn’t take the bait when I ask him how he feels about winning a seat that Ardern failed to win twice. Those were different circumstances, he says, and they were. In many ways, Swarbrick was given an advantage thanks to the dynamics of the race, with no incumbents to compete against and no big star from the Labor or National Party. She is unlikely to face such an easy election in 2023, although she will be the incumbent.

You just have to look at history for warning. The only other time that the Greens won a seat, they lost it after only one term: to Nacional.