Low polls? Every Labour man for himself
They’ve looked at polls from both sides now. From up and down, and still somehow a coterie of Labour activists fail to recall the illusion they created in the run up to the last election.
It was that the surveys are missing key parts of the electorate, be it old people, young people, cellphone users, itinerants or the missing million who hadn’t voted.
But media-commissioned polls are a snapshot on the basis of the best methodology that can be constructed (or afforded). They are not some sort of mainstream mediacorporate nexus designed to keep the Left from power.
Which is why Labour leader Andrew Little’s attack on the One News-Colmar Brunton poll, as ‘‘bogus’’ - with its sham connotations - was so ill-advised.
Opinions are divided in the caucus over whether he should even have engaged - and thus highlight - the poor 26 per cent result.
But given he did, he might have got away with ‘‘rogue’’. Occasionally there are polls that step outside the expected range of results. That’s precisely what the margin of error, normally expressed as a level of confidence at the 50 per cent level, accounts for.
That was, sort of, the point Labour was making by releasing the latest data from its pollster, UMR, with a warning over its finding National was on just 40 per cent.
In other words, polls can be seriously wide of the mark at times. UMR’s probably was, and so was the TVNZ poll.
But it didn’t stop some activists adopting a sort of post-truth polling stance, asserting the UMR poll much better matched their view of reality. Sigh. Ice cream castles in the air.
Yet there were excusable reasons for Labour’s angst and denial.
Last week was a bad one for the Government on the issue of the hour - housing - and its blunder that allowed a 17-hour debateathon on the Opposition’s terms smacked of disarray.
Labour was, no doubt, expecting a better reward than a poll sending it back to the depths of its 2014 election night result.
It also came at a bad time for the party as it contemplates that most fraught of MMP political processes: the shape of its party list and who will be high, low and shafted.
It all comes down to the party vote, of course, but with a twist for Labour.
It has pledged to gender balance its caucus by 2017.
When the policy was signed off in 2013, then-president Moira Coatsworth said the target would be achieved by calculating the gender mix at various different levels of support and taking into account the likely electorates Labour would win.
But a party vote of 26 per cent, in line with the TVNZ poll, delivers a very different scenario and a political death sentence for many an aspiring male candidate than the 35 per cent-plus yardstick the party is assuming.
The problem starts with the imbalance in winnable electorates.
At the moment Labour has 27 electorates, but only 10 are held by women and 17 by men.
Throwing in a few seats it thinks it can win, such as Christchurch Central (lawyer Duncan Webb) and Auckland Central (Jacinda Ardern) doesn’t necessarily help
Neither did the Otaki selection meeting help by picking Rob McCann over pre-meeting favourite Penny Gaylor.
So applying the 50 per cent rule strictly, Labour faces a possible scenario where Little takes the top list slot and the next nine winnable slots go to women.
That is being ruled out by Labour’s top table, because winnable places will need to be preserved for Trevor Mallard, as Labour’s nomination for speaker, and its policy brains trust David Parker (if he wants another term).
That doesn’t necessarily presuppose a top five place for both, because unless Labour gains enough seats to win the Treasury benches its nomination for speaker is academic.
Even so, it will no doubt raise questions among the activist base. Why adopt a gender balance plan if you are going to make exceptions based on the ‘‘need’’ to elect existing male MPs?
But there is another issue complicating matters; Labour’s shameful lack of any MPs of Asian or Indian ethnicity in the current caucus.
Of course none of this is a problem if the polls improve. At 38 per cent everyone is in, everyone is happy, At 26 per cent its every ‘‘man’’ for himself.
No wonder Little and his team are hyper-sensitive to bad polls.