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Party and Electorate Votes

October 11th, 2005 at 5:57 am by David Farrar

An article in the Dominion Post asserts that National lost the election because its local candidates were more popular than the party.

Ir is true that National got 40.4% of the electorate vote and only 39.1% of the party vote, but it is simplistic and wrong (in my opinion) to paint this as a reason they lost.

The party vote is generally a contest between eight parties while most electorate contests are between just two candidates. Thus it is quite normal and ordinary for a large party to have a higher electorate vote than party vote. Now if it is 10% higher as National did in 2002 that is a problem, but a 1.3% difference is not a big deal. You can not assume that those people were potential National party voters – they may be minor party supporters doing the sensible thing and not wasting their electorate vote.

What is unusual is that Labour did have less electorate votes than party votes – 40.4% to 41.1%. In 34 seats they got more electorate votes than party votes, but got less in 35 seats. However if you remove the seven Maori seats and the four party leader seats of Tauranga, Epsom, OB and Wigram you find in fact Labour elsewhere got 10,874 more electorate votes than party votes.

Another factor is exceptional candidates can attract wide cross-party support. Nick Smith in Nelson gets 8,000 or so more candidate votes than party votes. Now most of them are never going to vote National, they just think Nick is a good local MP.

Related posts:

  1. Electorate Split Voting Statistics
  2. Electorate Polls
  3. Votes per MP
  4. McCarten’s advice to the left on how to win with fewer votes
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 5:57 am and is filed under Election 2005. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Party and Electorate Votes”

  1. Berend de Boer Says:
    October 11th, 2005 at 7:35 am

    But it is interesting to see that ACT and UF do better in their electoral than in their party votes in most of the electorates.

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  2. tim barclay Says:
    October 11th, 2005 at 7:55 am

    National lost the elction because the Labour vote was amazingly firm. Probably fueled by a residential housing boom. National could have played the CGT thing a bit harder, in retrospect. Happened last time with a sharemarket boom. Plus there was a perception that National simply was not ready. I cannot disagree with that but never again will National be left so vulnerable as it was in 2002.

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  3. weizguy Says:
    October 11th, 2005 at 8:27 am

    “An article in the Dominion Post asserts that National lost the election because its local candidates were more popular than the party.”

    “Another factor is exceptional candidates can attract wide cross-party support. Nick Smith in Nelson gets 8,000 or so more candidate votes than party votes. Now most of them are never going to vote National, they just think Nick is a good local MP.”

    Aren’t they the same thing.

    Nick Smith is more popular than the National party in Nelson.

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