Get Woke Go Broke?

We have seen this happen all over the business and sports world. Think about the famous Gillette advert that basically insulted and emasculated all men. Their sales went down. Think about Kellogg announcing loudly that it will stop advertising on Breitbart. Their sales went down. Think about the NBA, with all their millionaire players kneeling and postulating to the tune of the Black Lives Matter movement. Their viewership for the playoffs was down over 50%. Yes, they tried to blame COVID, but that is a fatuous claim. COVID doesn’t stop people watching TV.

And so, with our disastrous election result, some have said that one of the reasons National did so badly was because they were too ‘woke’ and they lost support. Clearly, National did lose voters to ACT. If you add the vote shares of the two parties, National and ACT together,  they represent about 35%, which is where Judith Collins was hoping her vote share would be. Under normal circumstances, this is probably approximately where National’s core support would sit. The remaining 10% to 15% who determine election outcomes are swing voters who vote National often but are not died-in-the-wool centre-right voters.

As for the New Conservatives, their vote share of 1.5% may have come from National, but it didn’t make much difference. They only just beat TOP, so are not a real contender for electoral greatness.

But let’s go back to this ‘woke’ stuff. When Todd Muller took over the National leadership, he brought in a leadership team of so-called ‘wets’. As we know, he crashed and burned, and my own opinion is that he is largely responsible for the public desertion of the National party. The truth is, nice guy though he may be, he wasn’t up for the job.  At just 53 days, Muller is the shortest-serving leader of any political party represented in Parliament in New Zealand’s history. That is not a record to be proud of.

On his demise, the senior ‘wets’ were decimated. Amy Adams and Nikki Kaye left the party in a fit of pique after a leadership clearout only a few weeks earlier. Everyone knew this made National look disorganised, a party in crisis, and this was also after the Hamish Walker debacle. The writing was on the wall for National already, and the election campaign hadn’t started yet. It was going to be very difficult to come back after this.

National had eliminated most of its ‘wet’ wing, and yet some analysts are saying that core voters left National because it is still too woke. But let’s think about that. In my own constituency of Hutt South, Chris Bishop is commonly referred to as a ‘wet’. Bishop is a hardworking local MP, very visible in the community and picks up local issues and resolves them. He deserves to be the local MP just because of his hard work and dedication to the constituency. Ginny Andersen by contrast is completely invisible. She may have put up posters everywhere claiming that the new Melling Bridge (yet to be consented or drawn up) is “fully funded by Labour”, but she had nothing to do with that. Chris Bishop did all the work in bringing it to everyone’s attention, campaigning for the bridge while she did nothing. And yet the people of Hutt South rewarded him for his hard work by voting for an invisible lazy list MP who had done nothing for the community. So why was that?

It makes no sense to say it is because he was one of National’s ‘wets’. Ginny Andersen is hardly a staunch conservative by comparison. If you didn’t like Bishop because he was a member of the National ‘wet’ brigade, why on earth would you vote for Ginny Andersen, who is even ‘wetter’ than Bishop?

Some people on this blog say they refused to vote for Bishop because he voted for the abortion bill. Okay, I admit, I didn’t like that. But are we saying that voters deserted him because of that… when Ginny Andersen voted for it too?

Did some of those hard core National voters who were opposed to the abortion bill move to ACT? Maybe… but David Seymour voted for the abortion bill as well, so that doesn’t make much sense either.

I read Cameron Slater’s article about how he voted. He couldn’t bring himself to vote for his local National MP, so he left that part of the voting paper blank. He didn’t vote for the Labour candidate though… but voters in their thousands did just that.

I think the ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ argument works very well in business, where people do not want to be lectured in adverts, or for sports fans who don’t need a left-wing politics lecture every time there is a game on, but I am not sure it works in politics in quite the same way. National, with the demise of Nikki Kaye and Amy Adams, and the downgrading of Todd Muller and Simon Bridges, are less ‘woke’ than they used to be. It makes no sense to me that voters, looking for a less woke alternative, would turn to Labour, but they did so in droves. There may be many reasons, but I am not sure that wokeness is one of them.

Whatever the reasons, National needs to figure it all out, and make the necessary changes. Personally, I think the Todd Muller/Nikki Kaye debacle was the thing that did it for most people. I felt really angry watching Nikki Kaye on the TV1 panel on Saturday night, shedding crocodile tears for her former colleagues who have now lost their seats. If she had a shred of integrity about her, they might not be in this position, and the Greens might not now hold an electorate seat. All I can say is good riddance. “Get Woke Go Broke” has certainly applied to her.

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