OPINION: The past month has certainly made it feel like it’s election year. Labour and the Greens have had folk hop waka or abandon the race entirely. We’ve seen a revolving door of ministerial portfolios and, if Christopher Luxon is to be believed, Labour’s headed for a “coalition of chaos”, not a million miles away from the “chaos caucus” that some US media have used to describe the 2023 Republican congressional caucus.
Luxon, too, has had his own personnel troubles: you can bet Labour will be reminding voters about the historical and contemporary missteps of Sam Uffindel, Barbara Kuriger, Stephen Jack, Maureen Pugh and others come election time.
But will this make any difference? A US poll in late April stated that 71% of Republican voters said they would vote for Donald Trump, and 63% would do so even if he were convicted of a crime. In short, the US electorate appears now to be so polarised that red and blue pot plants would receive about half the vote each, even if they were criminal pot plants.
But I rock myself to sleep at night whispering, “We’re not America, we’re not America.”
What do we know about consistency and change in political party support in this country? Indeed, that’s almost the title of a recent article in the New Zealand Journal of Psychology that draws from the longitudinal New Zealand Attitudes and Values Survey to look at stability and change in partisanship between 2011 and 2020, covering four elections and three election cycles. Participation in the survey has grown considerably – from about 7000 in 2011 to 42,000 in 2020. We researchers thank you for your service.
You only have to Wikipedia the results of those elections to see that we are not like the US. The US has a weird electoral system that means you can become president even if you receive less than half of the popular vote, though even then the difference between winner and loser is sometimes pretty slim.
But here in Aotearoa, Labour jumped dramatically from abysmal 2011 and 2014 poll numbers below 30% to 50% in 2020, mainly at the expense of National. We are not electoral stick-in-the-muds.
In the US, it’s not easy to tell from election to election if it’s the same almost 50% voting for the red pot plant each time. It could be that everyone flips but the overall proportion of red-pot-plant voters looks the same. Over here, were the 50% who voted Labour in 2020 the same 25% who voted red in 2014 plus 25% from National?
This is where longitudinal research, tracking the same people over time, allows us to look under the voting hood. Nicole Satherley, lead author of the NZ study, took the 5213 NZAVS participants who responded to at least eight of the nine annual surveys between 2011 and 2020 and used a sophisticated statistical analysis of how positive (or negative) they said they felt towards National and Labour each year to look for distinct groups of voters based on the direction and consistency of partisanship.
On the one hand, the largest group of voters are what Satherley calls the “core National class”, about 50% of the NZAVS sample, who generally like National more than Labour but started liking Labour a bit more in the 2018-20 period.
The “core Labour class” is smaller, about four in 10 voters, who increased in their liking for Labour as National votes were dropping.
On these numbers, National should always win, if not for two other factors. The first is the one in 10 of us who are part of the “switcher class” – they kinda liked National in 2014, had a bob each way in 2017, and were strongly Labour-loving come 2020.
The second is that New Zealanders, unlike Americans, can much more happily stomach liking a party but not voting for it. In 2020, more core National class voters just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for their party identification.
