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OPINION: The US presidential election may still be very close, but one thing is clear: The experts and pollsters who predicted that Trump was not in a position to win will return to the drawing board.
In any case, “Trumpism” is unlikely to go away even after you leave, even in New Zealand.
Unconditional Trump supporters in the United States may represent as little as 12 percent of registered voters in the United States. But polls have consistently underestimated Trump’s numbers compared to actual election results.
Evan vucci
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, may be about to disappear, but ‘Trumpism’ will continue to be a political force. Could it ever take hold in New Zealand?
The Real Clear Politics pre-election polling average saw Joe Biden rise 7.2 points nationally, but as of November 5 he was leading just 2.1 points. Perhaps there really is a “hidden Trump vote.”
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Meanwhile, in New Zealand, with Jacinda Ardern in charge of the country’s most diverse cabinet, the prospect of a leader like Trump may seem remote. However, in online surveys conducted by Things and Massey University in 2017 and 2020, we found a significant minority in support of Trump.
Kiwis for Trump
In mid-2017, 13 percent of respondents said they would have voted for Trump if they could, compared to a scientifically proven poll in mid-2016 that found 9 percent support for Trump.
How to explain the difference? Trump’s victory in November 2016 may have slightly boosted that support. The Stuff / Massey poll is reader initiated and unrepresentative, and may have overrepresented disgruntled conservatives. Or people may be more willing to indicate their support for Trump online than over the phone.
Nonetheless, there was a measurable level of support for Trump in New Zealand.
In the mid-2020 poll, we asked respondents whether they expected Trump to win or lose in the November election. This time, 11 percent said they expected him to win (after weighting for gender since the sample had a male bias of 61.2 percent).
The Stuff / Massey poll sample also had a conservative bias, with 36.8 percent saying they supported National, higher than where the party was voting at the time, and well above the result on Tuesday night. the 26.8 percent elections.
But let’s say roughly one in ten New Zealanders is a Trump supporter. Under New Zealand’s electoral system, that’s well above the 5 percent threshold for a party to win parliamentary seats.
Of the 55,147 who answered the question in the mid-2020 poll, 6,833 said they expected Trump to win. So who are these Kiwi Trumpers? And what do they really think?
Even demographic spread
They are evenly distributed among age groups, but slightly higher (15.4 percent) in the 18-24 range. This may reflect a well-known phenomenon in which populist leaders increase young people’s satisfaction with democracy or, to put it another way, help reverse the trend toward political disconnect in democracies.
New Zealand men are more than twice as likely to support Trump as women, a gender gap much wider than that found in the US after the 2016 election.
Kiwi Trumpers are evenly distributed among low- and middle-income groups, with support declining only slightly in high-income groups.
Perhaps surprisingly, 15.6 percent of Pasifika’s respondents and 20 percent of those who checked the “gender diversity” box expected Trump to win, up from the overall result of 11 percent.
A whopping 92% of Kiwi Trumpers said we should leave statues of figures from our colonial past where they are, compared to 49.8% of those who expected Trump to lose.
ROSA WOODS / Things
National Leader Judith Collins. National is the preferred party of Trump supporters in New Zealand.
National is the favorite holiday
However, very few Kiwi Trumpers identified with the archipopulist Winston Peters. Only 4.9 percent of them said he is the leader of the party they feel closest to, perhaps because of his coalition with Labor after the 2017 election. They were more attached to National’s Judith Collins ( 46.6 percent) and ACT Party leader David Seymour (30.2 percent).
Only 20 percent of National supporters overall said they expected Trump to win. But this subset of national supporters made up 56 percent of the entire Kiwi Trumpers cohort. Another 23 percent of Kiwi Trumpers supported ACT. So the National Party is the Kiwi Trumper’s favorite party.
Supporters of the far-right New Conservative Party were just 1.2 percent of our sample, and that party won just 1.5 percent of the vote in the October elections. But a clear majority of them (69 percent) supported Trump.
In general, Kiwi Trumpers view society as more disgruntled and politicians as less trustworthy than the average New Zealander.
About 47.5 percent of Trump supporters endorsed conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 virus. For them, it was “an invention of dark forces that want to control us” (11 percent) or “a biological weapon created by one of the world’s superpowers” (35.5 percent).
Only 7.7 percent of Trump’s opponents flagged any of those statements. And overall, 85.8 percent of the sample agreed that the virus came from a natural source.
Furthermore, only 11.7 percent of Trump supporters agreed that the New Zealand government was taking the right approach to deal with the economic impact of Covid-19, while 62 percent of opponents of Trump agreed.
And 84 percent of Kiwi Trumpers preferred that the government take a “cautious and skeptical” approach to climate change, compared to 23.8 percent of opponents.
DAVID BLANCO / THINGS
Populist but not preferred: Trump fans weren’t drawn to NZ First frontman Winston Peters.
Could a Trump emerge in New Zealand?
Unsurprisingly, 54.6 percent of Kiwi Trumpers were in favor of New Zealand developing a closer alignment with the United States, compared to just 6.2 percent of Trump’s opponents. The vast majority (80.9 percent) of those surveyed preferred that New Zealand aim for greater independence from both the United States and China.
National’s Judith Collins made favorable comments about Trump during a pre-election debate, perhaps mindful of support for him within her base.
Suppose, then, that the National Party elected a Trump-style conservative “non-politician” as its leader, someone who divided rather than unite, and who put economic freedom before health and human lives.
Given that this inference is based on an unscientific poll, he or she could potentially energize an existing base of one-fifth of National’s supporters, while winning over other parties further to the right.
Traditional conservatives and center-right liberals within National would be appalled. But desperate to change the government, they may have nowhere to turn.
On the other hand, everything could end badly. Those voters who switched from National to Labor in 2020 may not want to return. And in New Zealand politics, the winning party is the one that wins those centrist voters.
Grant Duncan is Associate Professor at Massey University’s School of People, Environment and Planning.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
