Analysis – What’s a right-leaning voter to do?

The past few weeks have seen debates about strategic voting, as polls have consistently placed National below 30 percent and a centre-left bloc, Opportunity permitting, more likely to form a government.

Voters wanting to give the existing coalition the best chance of remaining in power are wracking their brains on where to cast their ballot. Stick, twist or return?

In turn, that means National, New Zealand First and ACT strategists are trying to figure out, not just how to win the “soft centre”, but how to steal from each other.

National’s panic and pivot as it tries to win back its fractured base

As RNZ deputy political editor Craig McCulloch says in this week’s Caucus episode, National wants to fish for voters who will add to the overall centre-right bloc, especially the undecideds (approximately 11 percent in the TVNZ-Verian poll and 6 percent in the RNZ-Reid Research poll) and those who are dallying with Opportunity.

They are the most useful and consequential votes to be won, but with Labour polling as badly as National, and New Zealand First and ACT both polling well by their own standards, the party in blue is in a bind. The soft centre will be hard to crack.

At 25.9 percent in the RNZ poll, National is nearing its humiliating 2020 result of 25.6 percent, just without the leadership changes and pandemic.

Does it behave like a leader of the pack, or does it grab the nearest life-raft and go after traditional National voters who have drifted – or strategically shifted – to its coalition partners?

For example, ACT is on 9 percent in both the TVNZ and RNZ polls. For a party that received 0.5 percent in 2017 and had its best-ever result of 8.6 percent in 2023, it’s a strong number.

Eight weeks out from the last election, ACT was on 12 percent. National won back roughly 3 percent from ACT late in that campaign and has to wonder how it can do that again.

Can it also go after Team Winston?

Its medicines policy, released this week, did just that, boldly stomping into ACT and New Zealand First territory, or as political editor Jo Moir says in the podcast: “National is, in an election campaign, trying to pull back the narrative.”

National promised a further $604 million for new medicines, significantly increasing Pharmac’s buying power. As the associate health minister responsible for Pharmac, ACT leader David Seymour has owned the coalition’s funding increases for medicines.

National is trying to claim a greater share of the credit. More controversially, National tied its increased medicines budget to a cut in foreign aid, saying it was “bringing money back from overseas to fund more medicines and cancer screening”.

That sort of nationalist jingoism is pure New Zealand First, except in this case, it messes with Winston Peters, because it’s taking funds from his sacred foreign affairs budget. Moir says National is gambling on the idea there are “potential National Party voters who are increasingly feeling like things need to be concentrated more domestically then internationally and that, actually, you need to protect your own”.

National’s willing to gamble because, as McCulloch tells listeners, party figures he’s spoken to confess to “a degree of panic and concern at the polls”. While they claim their internal polls have National about 30 percent, McCulloch says they admit “this very negative ‘no new taxes’ strategy is not generating the huge boon or boost for National it is hoping for”.

At best, it’s weighing down Labour’s vote. Labour Party figures fear it’s having an effect, which is why it’s pushed back this week, calling National liars on taxes and fiscals.

That aligns with what a National Party insider told me. They said the over-the-top claims about Labour’s “nine new taxes” and the like had gone beyond clever negative campaigning, and made the party look panicked and weak.

Its key message should be, ‘We’ve got this, the other lot don’t’.

National seems to be changing tack. Moir points out that National has suddenly stopped talking about Labour’s “nine new taxes” and Luxon hardly mentioned the tax attacks in the TVNZ Leaders’ Debate this week.

“That is a fascinating turn around, isn’t it?” Moir says. “If you think about the rhetoric and the robotic chanting of no new taxes… for Christopher Luxon to go into that and only mention it once, and not even in as a direct way as it has been, it’s a hell of a pivot in terms of strategy.”

The polls due out next week will show whether National’s pivot bears fruit.

Follow and listen to Caucus with Jo Moir, Craig McCulloch and Tim Watkin on any podcast app.

This week, as well as National’s pivot, they discuss what stuck from the leaders debate, policies that can change how you vote and frustrations with fiscals.