Election 2020: Change on a Dime – Judith Collins’ Last Minute Twist to Regain ACT Vote

CAMPAIGN JOURNAL: Judith Collins turned her campaign into a penny on the last day before the election.

She abandoned a failed attack on the Greens’ wealth tax and tried to collect votes from the right that appear to be splitting between ACT and the New Conservatives.

The tax barely received a mention on Collins’ final day of campaigning. National also stopped putting money behind a series of Facebook ads attacking politics, having spent between $ 4,000 and 4,500 on a three-day social media blitz against it.

Instead, the party is spending more than $ 25,000 to continue a series of ads reminding supporters that they owe “two blue ticks” and that the party’s vote is the more important of a voter’s two options.

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Thursday’s 1 News-Colmar Brunton poll, which ran through Oct. 14, suggested the attacks weren’t working.

The Greens even gained two points, while Labor was down one. It is all a matter of margin of error, but it was a clear sign that a strategy failed to loosen the left bloc’s control over the electorate.

Meanwhile, ACT held steady at 8 percent, with the New Conservatives at 2 percent – that’s 10 percent of the right-wing vote that has fled National.

After last night’s debate, Collins suggested that right-wing voters were confused.

A barb was addressed to the New Conservatives: “It makes no sense to waste the vote on a minor party that is not going to enter the Government.”

Other comments expressed concern about the proportion of votes indented for ACT. Collins claimed that people did not know the niceties of MMP.

“Someone told me the other day in Hamilton, ‘I’m going to vote for my candidate and so you would like me to vote for ACT because that will help you, won’t it?’

Collins said he told the person: “He won’t, only the party will vote for Nacional.”

It’s an argument he’s made repeatedly in the past 48 hours: “two blue ticks,” and the only way to guarantee a loss for Labor is to vote for National.

It was a launch to the fractured right vote, rather than to the center.

On the final day of her campaign, when Jacinda Ardern was touring one crowded mall after another, Collins packed her schedule with supporting events: a media-only stand-up, followed by a luncheon with members of National in East Coast Bays, and 15 minutes with “human fences” partying on the North Shore.

If there were swing voters at those events, they were swing voters who were thinking of splitting with ACT or the New Conservatives, not voters who will lean left to right.

At the Collins supporters luncheon, in a room packed with paid party supporters decked out in blue T-shirts and balloons, he again reminded voters that “two blue ticks” was the surest strategy to ensure a Labor defeat.

The room was bubbling, party members love Collins, but it’s worrying National that he has to remind his own to vote for the party.

“They are two blue marks, in all circumstances, they are two blue marks,” Collins said.

There was an elegiac air to Collins’s first appearance: a funny pit stop at the intersection of Dominion Road and Southern Motorway. She was there to “search” for the Ardern light rail project, which was promised but not delivered within this timeframe.

But the appearance became something of a pre-post-mortem, with Collins giving frank answers to pressing problems in the national campaign.

It was not a farewell, he joked that he thinks he will continue as national leader after the elections because: “it is very difficult for someone to nominate the prime minister.”

But Collins had clearly given some thought to voters like the man from Hamilton he mentioned after the TVNZ debate, who thought voting for ACT was useful to National.

He said voters weren’t getting National’s message. He repeatedly blamed the second confinement for confusing things, although it is not clear how.

“I think people possibly got confused about the whole lockdown thing, not everyone is on the Wellington Beltway and not everyone is as politically versed as we are,” Collins said.

“I don’t think we are in tune with the political messages as we would like to think.”

It’s an interesting problem for National, a party that, for a decade, has monopolized the vote of the center right, reducing ACT to a one-seat issue.

The fragmentation of the vote is something the Labor Party has had to grapple with for years, and what it has gotten pretty good at, with its Memorandum of Understanding, its Budgetary Responsibility Rules and its green policy “scraps”.

The modern Labor Party is adept at handling a powerful challenger to its left. National hasn’t had that problem with the right since ACT voting collapsed after John Key’s first term.

Collins said concerns about gun law reform, supported by National in the first place, have led voters to choose ACT.

“I think the guns were important – the issues related to the change of leader and that sort of thing,” Collins said.

After multiple elections backing ACT with its teacup deal at Epsom headquarters, Collins on Friday tentatively left open the idea that National would reconsider the deal.

“We always think about these things,” he said.

“Those are matters for the board and the leader, as well as for me as a leader, it is not something we just decide ourselves.”

But party chair Peter Goodfellow, who attended Collins’ luncheon, suggested he would be interested in some deal with ACT continuing.

“There will always be some supporters who end up supporting ACT,” he said.

He suggested that keeping ACT alive reduced the possibility of wasting votes on the right. Some ACT supporters would never come to National, so keeping the smaller party alive kept those votes from going to waste.

“There are always some people who will either vote ACT or not vote for someone else and then not vote at all. To the extent that those votes are not cast, I am in favor, ”Goodfellow said.

Goodfellow, who has been president for more than a decade, will test his own leadership at the party’s General Meeting of Shareholders next month when he stands for re-election.

Nobody knows what kind of party National will be when the AGM arrives.