Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to George Darroch,
that’s because their vote reflects either National or Labour weakness, and they tend to gain from their disaffection.
It's hard to be sure if that story is true. Greens are not strongly correlated to Labour, but they are to National, negatively.
I see a bunch of possible explanations:
1. The traditional one, popular with the Labour "vote stealing" group. Greens pick up disaffected Labour voters when Labour moves Right, but Labour picks up National voters to cover this.
2. There is an appreciable fraction of people swinging between National and the Greens
3. Green voters are more likely to be apathetic. When National is doing well, they feel more inclined not to vote.
4. There is no causal link, and we are just seeing that the Greens had a substantial upswing simultaneously with a downswing for National. This was around the time of the last election. It's a coincidence. -
Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Australopithecus,
What would persuade him a Labour led government would best achieve his goals?
Labour and the Greens approaching him and negotiating in good faith, I'd think. It's the only thing that would convince me that it would be a good idea. Essentially they give a blueprint of their bottom line when it comes to Peters, and some indication of what they think his role would be. It's more important for the Greens to do this than Labour, really. Considering that their history is that he deliberately excluded them from a Labour-led govt once before. They're in a position to do the same to him, but of course he could pick a National led government instead.They need to have it on the table exactly what he would absolutely stickle on, and what there's wiggle room for, and give him the same information about them. It would be an extremely productive exercise, a true look at how they might work as a government. If that breaks down totally within a month due to irreconcilable differences, then that's very, very powerful information that NZF voters should know, if they would actually prefer a Labour led government in reality.
If Winston genuinely is as against asset sales as he claims, as he has always claimed, as he indeed formed his party over when he split from National in disgust, then NZF and Greens have the power between them to finally actually do something real about it.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I can't see much to support his claim that the polls are way too kind on the Greens. I can only think he's talking about reasonably long time ago. But he's right about his own support being consistently underestimated by polls, and National's being overestimated.
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Colin Craig needs every fraction of a percent he can get.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
It must over time (of the constant belittling of him from KeyCo.) have a small effect as to which way you could turn.
I doubt he likes Key, but that would make it all the sweeter to have him on his knees, begging for forgiveness. He could also be in a position to pinch out the other parties completely. Why not, when one has the power? Why put up with ACT (who he openly despises), and MP (whose seats he has said shouldn't even exist). He could take pity on Dunne as he sees fit, but I'd think he'd find it more conducive just to shut the guy out.
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On the question of "What will Winston do?", the data I think would be most relevant that could be collected is "What do NZF voters want him to do?". If a strong and clear majority want him to go with National, that makes it very much more likely. Because he'd lose a lot of support if he didn't do it.
Also, on the high level of probability that "Winston decides", it's always got to be pointed out that he can't get too ridiculous in his demands, because there's no constitutional barrier in NZ to a Labour/National alliance. This would pretty much sweep all the minor parties into complete irrelevance. So the whole "tail wags the dog" argument is bunk. If the actual political will in NZ was centrist between Labour and National, then they could rule outright with near certainty, nutting out some compromise position between them. It might even be less of a compromise than what Labour would have to cede to the Greens, or what National would have to cede to NZF.
I don't think it will happen, but only because Winston surely knows this. It's a threat that can always be used to bring his demands back to reality.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to bmk,
In reality what might be happening is Labour is taking 2% off National while Greens are taking 2% off Labour.
Good point. Or there could be movements in and out of non-voting between choices. I can imagine that's not that uncommon. You stop being a tribal Labour voter, but have to take quite a lot longer to screw yourself up to saying you'd vote Green.
But we can't know if that's the case, or whether Greens are actually not that far from National that Labour is stepping stone. A direct movement is a simpler explanation. Also, we could be overthinking it all. The correlation might just be because the Greens polled very well going into the election, and National polled poorly. These event were synchronized, but it could be mostly coincidence. Greens campaigned strongly, and National was mired in teapots.
Labour's only clear correlation is with National. Whether this is direct, or via people flowing in and out of a non-voter pool, we can't tell. But it does indicate that they compete for the same people in the middle. I've been saying for a bloody long time now that the purely poll-driven strategic choice for Labour is to move right, for this reason. What they lose probably goes to the Greens, so the bloc gets stronger (and makes the Right weaker simultaneously), but I don't even think the movement is linear. Labour's support fluctuates far more in total than Green support so it's definitely not one-for-one. I think this was what they were doing under Shearer.
But this puts me in a personal quandary, because I don't want a right wing Labour party in power. So while I can see that it's to their advantage, it's not what I want for them. I think quite a lot of the Labour membership has felt this way too, which is where the whole conflict between rank and file and the leadership has come from. The leadership wants to win, and moving right is a winning strategy. But the rank and file want it to represent them. When they ended up winning, by rolling Shearer, they got more of the the Labour party that they want, but possibly not the Labour party that will win 2014. But it might be a stronger party altogether by 2017, able to capitalize on the slow decline in Key's popularity. This could be much better than having a narrow 2014 win with a significantly more right wing Labour, which has to fight for every tiny little change. That's a recipe for either a strong right wing move by them again, or a one-term government.
What is surprising is that there's even a chance of an upset this time around. National are doing exactly what Labour did when threatened by Brash. Play the man. It's actually a sign that they've lost control of the game. They may win, but it's down to the luck factor of how much they can damage Cunliffe's credibility. It's very dangerous political territory, because mudslinging can become tit-for-tat, and any mud that sticks to powerful reigning politicians is always more damaging.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to JonathanM,
And wow, thanks too. That's a great infographic. Any possibility of having the non-vote relationships there too? I'm really interested to see if there's any correlations between not-voting and the fortunes of any particular parties. My guess is that there would be a negative one for the Greens and NZF, and a positive one for National. But data beats guesses any day.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to JonathanM,
Hah, so my eyes were not fooling me! Greens and NZF are positively correlated!!
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Sacha,
Not sure exactly. It looks like a scatterplot of Left vs Right totals, which are obviously going to be strongly negatively correlated. There is also a left and right probability density shown by the colored histograms.
Now I'm hitting total guesswork: I think the light blue band is an outright Right win, the light red one an outright Left, and the white area being one where it depends on the parties that aren't clearly either Left or Right (I'm guessing NZF, maybe Maori too?). The proportion of the dot cloud in each region would be the chance of a result in that region. So no chance of an outright Left. Looks like maybe 45% outright Right, and 55% where it depends what the uncommitted do.
The Right histogram is partially light, partially dark. The proportion of dark is the chance of an outright Right win. The Left one is only light, there is no chance of an outright Left win - it doesn't intersect with the light red region.
I think the corner is cut off the graph because that whole region is impossible - along that line the Left-Right totals are 120, representing the highest possible values which would exclude any non-Left/Right parties.
Cool graph. Would like to hear if I've guessed right.
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