Voting to keep the left out of power: there is one way, and one way only, that this can be achieved with certainty – tactical voting. Even within this framework you have to be careful how you cast your vote to create the maximum advantage for the right and maximum destruction on the left. I will attempt to explain the means by which this can be achieved.
Before that it is worth noting the results of the just-released Taxpayers Union/Curia poll. Of all the recent polls, this one, in my view, more accurately reflects where things stand politically. The Opportunity party has receded and is now back where it belongs, at under five per cent and it appears Green voters have returned to their original home. I think NZ First is underestimated and will record a much higher number than the 8.4 per cent in this poll. National must look in its own backyard to find out why it is still stuck under 30 per cent. It appears, also, that people are waking up to the fact it would be more tax and spend from the left, which the majority don’t want.
There is more than a whiff of insanity in the air from the seedbed of all nonsense, the Greens, turning to communism as the answer to our supermarket woes. Evidently a government run KiwiMart is going to sort out the duopoly with a pricing commissar restricting what the duopoly can sell their products for. This is straight out of the New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani’s playbook. As usual, the wannabe finance minister on the left, Calamity Chlöe has her figures out by millions, if not billions. Chloe is once again proving that, when it comes to economics, she’s very green.
In essence, the way to vote tactically is to give your electorate vote to National and your party vote to either ACT or NZ First. If the 38 per cent party vote National received at the last election was divided up equally between ACT and NZ First, then the outcome of the 2023 election would have been Labour 34 seats, Greens 15 and the Māori Party six seats: a total of 55 seats.
However (and these are the important numbers that prove tactical voting is the right option), on the right using the exact same strategy, NZ First would have won, get this, 32 seats, ACT 35 and National with no party vote at all. This would have delivered a massive overhang of 43 seats. That represents a landslide win, with the right holding 110 seats in an expanded 165-seat parliament. A staggering 55 seat majority. This is the result from using real numbers from the last election.
I have provided you with this piece of information from a podcast available on YouTube: the Anglo Saxon has done two podcasts on the subject of tactical voting and they are well worth a watch. He has more information on the difference between how voting tactically, and not doing so, affects the minor parties. David Farrar of Kiwiblog does not recommend this, as National would have no list MPs but the figures provided by the Anglo Saxon put that argument well and truly to bed. The Māori Party are trying to play this game to their advantage but they need to realise it is a game open to everyone.
Personally, I am in no doubt that this is the method we should employ. It doesn’t really disadvantage National as they are the largest party in the parliament. What it does do – and this is important – is give ACT and NZ First more clout when it comes to post-election negotiations. It means the ‘I’ that Christopher Luxon is so fond of using when discussing the country’s direction might need to become a little more of a ‘we’. This is no bad thing, as much of the ACT and NZ First thinking is more conservative in nature than the liberal views from National’s ranks.
