Metres down the road from where Dame Jacinda Ardern quit, Christopher Luxon begins his own final push
National leader Christopher Luxon began the penultimate day of the election campaign a few metres from the site of one of the defining moments of the 2023 election.
He was opposite Napier’s glorious Soundshell, shaving the head of Sam, a member of the Young Nats, National’s youth wing.
The photo-op was the second in a pattern of stops Luxon’s campaign bus has made on its journey from Wellington to Auckland in the campaign’s final days. Each day, Luxon has been presented with something half-done and asked to “finish the job”.
On Wednesday, it was a half-shorn sheep; on Thursday, it was Sam, whose head had been half-shaved. Both are flesh-and-blood manifestations of National’s closing campaign ad: a half-shorn sheep with a caption reminding voters not to “leave the job half done” and “stick with the plan”.
Perhaps the most powerful symbol of the photo-op wasn’t Sam’s half-shorn head, but the fact Luxon was down the road from the auditorium where, nearly four years ago, Dame Jacinda Ardern announced she’d be stepping down as Prime Minister and Labour leader.
By chance, Luxon was in Napier with his caucus that day too. There was jubilation as they watched Ardern announce her resignation on their phones. They knew then that the election, whose date Ardern announced in the same speech, had a good chance of going their way. The age of Ardern and Labour dominance was over and something new was being born.
But whatever that new thing was never quite took hold and so today, as the parties make their closing arguments to the public, the election outcome looks far less clear than it did that day four years ago.
This election is impossible to predict – a fact nicely visualised by the wrinkles in National’s campaign photo-ops.
Shearing a half-shorn sheep in Masterton, Luxon got most of the job done but couldn’t quite shear a final Jonah Lomu-esque tuft of wool from the tip of the sheep’s forehead. He wisely handed the shears back to the professionals to finish the job. In Napier, Sam’s thick, luxuriant mop proved resistant to Luxon’s battery-powered shears. This time, Luxon finished the job, but it clearly took longer than expected.
It turns out that even on a highly managed campaign tour, finishing the job is harder than a simple photo-op.
Luxon heads into the final day with the race essentially tied, according to all major polls, including a 1News-Verian poll and the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll released this week (Curia also does National’s internal polling).
We don’t have a good idea who will win, or how they’ll win.
Labour and National have obvious paths to power. The things that need to go right for Labour to win are obviously working.
Opportunity, whose polling has been about 6% in these last polls, seems more likely than not to enter Parliament, which is a prerequisite for any plausible scenario in which Labour wins.
Te Pāti Māori looks likely to hold on to enough of its seats to trigger a decent three or four-seat overhang on the left.
Both of these things look good for Labour and will make National nervous.
Labour has a clearer and more obvious path to power and, on current polling, might be slightly more likely to come out on top.
Another indication Labour might be in for a good night is the high early vote, indicating the turnout might be high this year. A high turnout tends to be a harbinger of success for Labour and the left.
But the awkward thing about recent polling is that Labour’s path to power is easier to see in polling than National’s. The fact its path is more obvious doesn’t necessarily make it more likely.
National has more paths to power than Labour. The most obvious is if Opportunity fails to make it into Parliament. There’s a shrinking but still decent chance that Opportunity misses the 5% threshold. The numbers in the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll puts this probability at about 21% – not to be sniffed at. If that happens, then National is likely to win.
National’s other path involves it triggering an overhang by winning more seats through candidate votes than its party vote would entitle it to.
It seems likely that National will achieve an overhang, but no one knows how big it will be – and it may need to be quite big to make a difference. It’s difficult to poll and model for. It’s also a difficult feat to accomplish at the scale National needs. A successful vote-splitting campaign not only needs large numbers of National party voters to flee for NZ First and Act, it also needs right leaning voters in marginal seats across the country to turn out against the left and hold on to as many seats as possible.
If the left’s rising vote share flips some of these seats in Labour’s favour, even by tiny margins, then the strategy will have failed, no matter how many party votes Act and NZ First receive.
One of the quirks of this election campaign is that National’s potential overhang, despite being one of the most important determinants of who wins or loses, is unpredictable in current polling. We don’t know if National will have a big or small overhang – or no overhang at all.
It’s rare going into the final days of an election to have so little idea of what the outcome will look like.
This quirk could also make for quite a long night on Saturday. New Zealand’s relatively high levels of early voting and the primacy of the party vote in our system means we usually get a clear picture of which way the election is going soon after polls close on election night. The fact overhangs may play such an important role in deciding the outcome could mean a much longer night as individual electorate races go down to the wire. The election could be so close that we don’t have a clear outcome until the final count is published three weeks after polling day.
National started the voting period on a high, fresh from the resignation of Labour candidate Kerrin Leoni after she’d been pictured campaigning with gangs. But it went swiftly downhill from there. National spent the last weekend of the campaign in an untidy fight with split-vote campaigners Don Brash and Harry Mowbray, as well as New Zealand First and Act, which had given their approval to the ads featuring Brash.
It only got worse this week as news broke of NZ First candidate Michael Laws’ sexist remarks about an Opportunity candidate. Luxon ruled Laws out of serving as a minister in any government he led, but the damage was probably done. Campaigns are battles for attention, and Laws and NZ First inadvertently sucked up the energy.
Luxon’s tour up the island has gone well, although each stop has been in an electorate National holds and most of the stops have been in places the party can expect to hold, even if Saturday goes badly. The reception on the ground has been positive. The crowds (partly curated by the National Party) have been of adequate size and enthusiasm. Obviously there’s no Jacindamania-equivalent energy, but the energy isn’t bad either.
While plenty has been said of Luxon’s shortcomings as a politician, particularly in formats like broadcast interviews and Question Time, shoe-leather campaigning – walking down the street and chatting with people – is a political format that Luxon, a natural extrovert, excels at. He’s mastered the art of the 30-second conversation, is good at finding common ground with people, taking the mick out of himself and grabbing a selfie.
Hipkins and Labour had planned a road trip of their own, but rearranged their schedule at the last minute to re-emphasise campaigning in Auckland, where polling suggests the party has not managed to regain the ground it lost in 2023. Labour needs to get the vote in West and South Auckland to be competitive.
Labour has been less visible in the final days of the campaign. Ordinarily, this would not bode well for the party but its lack of visibility has arisen from being crowded out by the coalition tearing itself apart about the overhang and then Laws.
Hipkins spent most of his penultimate stand-up attacking Luxon and Laws, rather than promoting or defending his own policies – you could hardly wish for a better end to the campaign against an unpopular incumbent Government. National wants to make the campaign about Labour and its friends. That appears not to be working.
Luxon makes his way to Auckland tomorrow, via Hamilton, while Hipkins will make his way through Wellington before finishing his campaign in Upper Hutt.
The next time you’ll hear from them will be on election night, although there’s already jostling behind the scenes about how much, or little, both men will be able to say, with each side reckoning a clear result may be weeks away.