‘Teal’ vote looks like dead duck

Data suggests the supposed ‘‘teal’’ section of National-leaning Green voters is tiny. Both National leader Simon Bridges and failed Green Party leadership aspirant Vernon Tava have suggested there is a contingent of Green voters who are sick of the Greens’ Left-leaning stances on nonenvironmental issues, and their refusal to consider going into government with National.

Tava is publicly mulling forming a party to pull these voters in, and is confident this party could reach 5 per cent. But data from the New Zealand Election Study, a long-running analysis of voter behaviour, suggests the overwhelming majority of current Green voters lean Left.

A survey of 3445 respondents following the election asked a huge variety of questions. Their votes are validated and the results weighted to the wider voting public.

One of the questions asked of all these voters is whether they would prefer National or Labour to lead the government. Fully 84.42 per cent of those who party-voted Green said they would prefer Labour to lead the government. Just under a tenth (8.47 per cent) picked National, while 5.02 per cent didn’t know and 2.09 per cent didn’t want either party to lead.

Furthermore, these voters overwhelmingly rated themselves as left-of-centre politically – far more than Labour voters did.

Roughly three-quarters (74.63 per cent) of Green voters rated themselves as left-of-centre on a 10-point scale. Another fifth (20.1 per cent) either ‘‘didn’t know’’ or put themselves in the centre. Just 5.26 per cent rated themselves as right-of-centre.

This compared with just over half (50.58 per cent) of Labour voters who rated themselves as left-of-centre.

New Zealand Election Study co-author and Victoria University political scientist Jack Vowles said he didn’t think the Greens had much to fear. ‘‘We looked at this fairly closely in our 2014 election book and for the vast majority of Green voters ‘left’ and environment are closely linked,’ he said. ‘‘I think this is another case where (if successful) a party supported by National would be more likely to cannibalise its own support and the next step would be to look at centrist and centre-Right National voters who have environmentalist leanings.’’

‘‘TOP [the Opportunities Party] is the closest to what a blue-green party might have looked like and, from other data, it looks as if they drew equally from Left and Right, but hardly at all from 2014 Green voters. Most of the Green loss from 2014 to 2017 was to Labour – again confirming a Left identification among Greenprone voters.’’

The Green Party won 6.27 per cent of the total party vote in 2017, meaning a small slice of its vote would not be enough to hit the 5 per cent threshold for entering Parliament.

It could, however, act as a ‘‘spoiler’’ to get the Green Party beneath the 5 per cent threshold and booted out of Parliament – which could benefit the National Party if its party vote remains higher than Labour’s.

This is because the ‘‘wasted vote’’ – any vote that doesn’t result in seats in Parliament – benefits the largest party the most.

In other words, if both NZ First and the Greens are voted out of Parliament next election and just Labour and National remain, National wouldn’t need to win over any friendly parties for a coalition – the party would just need to be larger than Labour.

National could also gift Tava an electorate seat, as it does with the ACT party in Epsom.

Another caveat concerns the size of the Green vote in 2017 – it was a lot smaller than in 2014, when the party won 10.7 per cent.

While the research suggests most of this vote moved to Labour, a more sizeable contingent of the larger Green vote at the 2014 election wanted National to lead the government – a fifth (20.66 per cent). That means there could be a slightly larger environmental-leaning vote floating around that would considering a National-led government an OK outcome. But it is still seems to be far below the all-important 5 per cent.

‘‘Most of the Green loss from 2014 to 2017 was to Labour – again confirming a Left identification among Greenprone voters.’’ New Zealand Election Study coauthor Jack Vowles