JD
We on the right-of-center, the ROCs, are expecting our split vote strategy to deliver the goods come election day, but maybe we shouldn’t be too complacent.
For the overhang strategy to work, we need National to hold onto as many electorate seats as possible and Napier is a prime example of why that might not happen.
Katie Nimon won Napier in 2023 with a majority of 8,909 votes, enough to make Napier a safe National seat, you might think – but not so much when you dig into history and facts.
Prior to MMP, Napier was a Labour stronghold, with a significant, left-voting Māori population and a plethora of freezing works, horticulture and other ‘working-class’ jobs. So, that was to be expected.
Seven-time Labour incumbent, Geoff Braybrooke, held the seat until 2002, with some majorities above 10,000 votes. He was replaced by Russell Fairbrother. These were traditional Labour MPs, working-class backgrounds, but not particularly famous other than as politicians. This was in the era before personality politics took over.
In 2005, this changed with the rise of National candidate Chris Tremain, son of a famous All Black and owner of a large realtor business. Famous for being famous in Hawke’s Bay, Tremain unseated Fairbrother, despite Labour under Helen Clark winning the overall election – a major upset in a safe Labour seat.
Then, in 2014, Tremain retired for ‘personal reasons’ and Labour, fielding a similarly ‘famous’ candidate, Stuart Nash, great-grandson of Sir Walter, Labour prime minister 1957–1960, won back Napier, despite Labour overall being thrashed by John Key in a National landslide. Another major upset.
Holding on for three terms, then, in addition to the Nash scandals and resignation, Labour came up against two other overwhelming factors in 2023.
One was the ‘blue-wave’ effect caused by its mismanagement of the economy, and the other was Nimon herself, scion of the Nimon Transport dynasty. The Nimon name had been emblazoned on the side of buses and other vehicles across Hawke’s Bay for 116 years – a very positive advantage in today’s cult-of-personality and name-recognition politics.
The result: Nimon won with a swing of almost 15,000 votes, fourth biggest in the country and the obvious basis for the expectation that Napier will again vote National in 2026. But will it?
Setting aside Nimon’s ‘fame’, compared to the lesser-known Labour candidate in 2026, let’s look at some other factors.
Historically, across nationwide elections, there has been an ‘incumbency factor’, where the sitting MP seeking re-election commands on average seven per cent more votes than the nationwide party vote numbers might suggest.
And so we come to the major risk factor: the fact that National’s polling numbers show that the party vote number has fallen to 28/29 per cent, if several polls are averaged.
Taking the optimistic 29 per cent figure, and adding the seven per cent incumbency factor, we see that Nimon’s share of the electorate vote would fall to approximately 14,390 votes, assuming a similar number of total electorate voters to 2023. (Fair assumption, as the 2026 enrolled voter number is practically identical to 2023.)
In 2023, Labour’s virtually unknown replacement, after the disgraced Nash resigned from parliament, Mark Hutchinson still scored 12,474 votes.
Given all other factors surrounding the 2023 election, we should probably assume that these 12,474 votes are ‘baked on’ to Labour and won’t be going anywhere else, despite Labour’s own fall in the polls.
This, plus the likely reduction in Nimon’s vote, means Labour only have to swing an extra 1,917 votes, 15 per cent above the 2023 number to take the seat back – swings that have been easily exceeded in most of the Napier elections since 1996.
This brings us to ‘wasted’ electoral votes. Since 1996, an average of 1,151 electoral votes has been given to NZF/ACT candidates who had no chance of winning: de facto wasted votes.
In 2023, the actual number was 2,944, and it could well increase in 2026 as the dissatisfaction with National manifests.
With the real closeness of Napier, which is much more than last election’s 8,909 vote Nimon’s win would suggest, these 2,944-plus votes are most likely critical to National holding this seat.
We ROCs can’t be complacent and assume last time’s big majority automatically locks in National seats this time.
With the Napier scenario playing out across another nine or 10 marginal National seats, we have to recognise that the pressure on National voters to party vote ACT or NZ First must be reciprocated by a demand that ACT/NZF voters also electorate vote National, or the split vote/overhang strategy doesn’t work and the unholy left alliance group, the LAGs, sneaks in.
And finally, if we can only get our collective ROC act together and pursue this split-vote strategy properly in future, from day one in the campaign rather than tacked on late in the piece when the situation looks otherwise lost, we could ensure the ROCs run the country in perpetuity.
