Post Mortem Mapping – Blue Ocean, Tiny Islands Of Red

Post Mortem Mapping – Blue Ocean, Tiny Islands Of Red

Wellington – Yesterday’s election marks a new low tide for the Labour party in support.

Outside a handful of seats (mainly in South Auckland) National picked up a larger share of the party vote than Labour.

This is graphically exposed in Keith Ng’s visualisation of the results available on www.electionresults.co.nz and www.scoop.co.nz.

To see a sea of blue click on the Labour v National option and there are just a few tiny islands of red.

Traditional Labour heartlands such as Dunedin South, Hutt South, Mana and the whole of Christchurch gave more party votes to National than Labour.

The picture slightly improves when comparing Labour/Green v National/ACT, though ACT is now seemingly a totally irrelevant political force.

Clicking on that graph brings back more of Wellington, Dunedin, parts of Christchurch and more of West Auckland.

But provincial New Zealand and much of the urban centres is a wide ocean of blue.

To get a graphic idea of the swing click on the ``change in Labour/Green v National/ACT and the tide was running out on the left everywhere but in West and South Auckland.

Labour supporters still cared enough about the party to bring back some MPs against the tide with Damien O’Connor winning back West Coast/Tasman and MPs hanging on to seats in Christchurch, Palmerston North and Dunedin.

Labour voters clearly did not show up and many of them, when they did, threw their hand to New Zealand First. This was possibly due to strategically thinking that getting Winston Peters over the line was the best way to make life difficult for National or they just didn’t think much of the party.

National will also be concerned that it failed to turn out more of its supporters and the absolute decimation of all its potential coalition allies
ACT was close to getting a second MP (and who knows what specials might bring) but still polled less than half of the party vote of the Conservative Party.

The Mana Party too will be disappointed, it is achingly close to a second MP, but that 1 percent of the disenchanted and disenfranchised voters it needed to galvanise into action remained firmly at home.

The Greens have surged, but as ever you get the feeling they should have done that little bit better.

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