pn569. No Evidence National Voters voted Labour to keep Greens Out

Henry Cooke in Stuff says there's  no evidence  that a significant number of National voters voted Labour to keep the Greens out. The article shows how journalists' opinions often becomes news, and how fact is sometimes supposition.

Election 2020: There is no evidence National voters backed Labour to keep the Greens out 

OPINION: One of the problems with being a pundit or reporter is the fundamental impossibility of understanding why millions of people do what they do.

We are all mostly stumbling around in the dark, with occasional illumination in the form of polls or election results.

But because it is boring to only talk about these scientific measures of society, we latch on to individual anecdotes.

Our taxi driver says something, another person says it in the media, we see someone say it in a tweet, and all of a sudden we have found a trend – despite the fact we have talked to only three people in a country of 5 million.

There is no evidence Jacinda Ardern’s victory can be substantially blamed on National voters strategically backing Labour.

These trends sometimes do end up being borne out in the data, particularly if they are talked about in mass media so much that people start identifying with them.

But that does not mean we should trust all of them the moment they get formed, particularly when the people promoting them are using them to save face.

This is the case with the theory currently being circulated by some Federated Farmers branch presidents and others that a large contingent of the rural vote backed Labour in order to keep the Green Party from being needed to govern.

At this point there is no evidence this happened at sufficient scale to seriously change the election result.

But the theory is very useful for 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 Labour to not give the Green Party an inch of power.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure there were people who did vote this way strategically and will be on their way to write an email to me right now. There could even be thousands of them.

But whether there are tens of thousands is another prospect completely – the kind of numbers needed to really swing an election. (It is also completely possible that a large number of the Green Party’s votes came from Labour voters voting strategically, of course.)

This could 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 a lot less complicated than people would like to think.

“Most people probably voted for Labour because they wanted to vote for Labour,” Greaves said.

She is part of the team that runs the New Zealand Election Study, a giant post-election survey that explores voter intentions. (The survey is being conducted for the 2020 election currently and has been running for decades.)

Greaves says the idea many voters are switching from National to Labour is not at all that surprising, as most voters don’t rate themselves as particularly ideological.

University of Auckland’s Dr Lara Greaves said most people who backed Labour would have backed it because they liked the party.

“The ideological distance between the two parties is not huge. It is not a big jump for most people.”

Generally when we do see cases of strategic voting working, it is after a party leader has given voters an explicit instruction: See the Epsom deal and National. In this election, National Party leader Judith Collins was explicitly telling voters who did not like the Green Party not to vote for Labour.

This is not to say all the new voters for Labour love the Green Party or even want them to be a part of the Government.

Given Labour’s focus on “stability” in the final weeks of the campaign, it is possible a lot of people explicitly wanted to back a simple majority government.

Labour campaigned from the centre and will likely govern pretty close to it. There is a reason the prime minister has said several times she will lead a Government for “all” New Zealanders.

But all New Zealanders will include the clear majority of the country who backed nominally progressive parties at the election.

There is some data on why voters backed Labour, of course, but it is a lot more boring. We have consistently seen voters care a whole lot about Covid-19. We have also consistently seen voters back Labour on the issue – both on the health response (usually strong territory for Labour) and the economic response (usually stronger for National).

Voters also generally punish parties seen as unstable, as National was.

We will have more data soon to help us pick over this election in more detail but the broad strokes are fairly obvious.

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