The National Party’s leadership woes

Prior to the 2020 election, the opinion polls were over-estimating National by about 5 percentage points (low 30s compared with the election result of 25.6%). If they are still that inaccurate, then National’s recent polling results in the 20’s (as low as 23% in the Roy Morgan March 2021 poll) could reflect a more dire underlying reality.

The Roy Morgan poll also suggests that Labour support is weighted towards women, National’s towards men. 54% of women and 36% of men supported Labour; and respectively 20.5% and 25.5% National.

National also lost support to the right-wing ACT Party, but there is less to be gained from attracting those voters back: there are fewer of them, and ACT can only coalesce with National in a government, and so they are National’s political ‘captive’.

To form a government in 2023, National would have to entice over many many busloads of voters from Labour (that is, from the centre), but those busloads would have to be majority female.

Just having a strong female lead (Judith Collins) is not sufficient in itself. It’s hard to imagine Collins beating Ardern in 2023, after failing in 2020, unless something drastic were to happen in the interim.

National now only has a minority of women MPs (10/33), and they lost some strong women from their caucus in 2020.

The recent ‘chatter’ about Simon Bridges and Christopher Luxon as replacement leaders for Collins is not helpful for National in the short term. And it’s hard to see how former opposition leader Bridges or the newly-minted (and anti-abortion) MP Luxon could win over large numbers of centrist voters, least of all women. This is especially difficult for National while Jacinda Ardern continues to perform well and sustain her popularity.

Collins probably has to go before 2023, but the alternatives don’t look like winners at this stage. My conclusion is that National needs to foster and promote talented women.