There are some on the left who seem to think that a magical transformation in popularity when hundreds of thousands of people who have no interest in politics or voting suddenly choose to support one party, and Andrew little suddenly transforms into Andrew Corbyn and changes all Labour’s policies.

Not having anything solid to pin their hope on fantasies are about all they have.

Danyl Mclauchlan:  The myth of the missing million

I used to believe in the missing million – the idea, if not the exact number. Voter turnout in New Zealand used to be around 90%. In 2011 it was 74.21%. Almost eight hundred thousand registered voters failed to vote. Obviously, I felt, these were people who agreed with my political beliefs but refused to vote because none of the choices presented a genuine alternative to the status quo.

I did have a few doubts about the missing million theory. Like:

If turnout is low because people don’t feel the existing parties represent real choice, why was it really high under FPP, when there were only two parties in Parliament and the only votes that really counted were a handful of swing votes in marginal electorates?

If non-voters wanted a radical change to the status quo why didn’t they vote for the Progressive Party or Mana or the Greens, who all, over the years, denounced neoliberalism and campaigned on platforms of radical change to the status quo?

In 2014 the Department of Statistics published a report on non-voters in the 2008 and 2011 general elections based on their General Social Survey – a study of 8,795 residents from randomly selected households. They found that a very high proportion of non-voters were neither woke-but-alienated radicals nor shiftless sexting millennial deadbeats. Instead the single highest predictor of being a non-voter was identifying as a recent migrant to New Zealand.

It is likely that recent migrants don’t know enough about the candidates and parties to make a decision on election  day.

Is Metiria Turei trying to target them with her attacks on Winston’ Peters’ ‘racism’ and her veiled attack in Labour for the same?

“All right,” you might say. “But what about what Jeremy Corbyn has just done in Britain?” Under Corbyn, British Labour openly embraced socialism and rejected the neoliberal status quo. The youth vote surged and he almost won the election! We know that some non-voters are young non-migrant New Zealanders. Why can’t Labour do the same thing here?

This is the argument that left-wing commentators and Young Labour activists have been blogging and tweeting and Facebooking about, and maybe even talking about verbally ever since Corbyn’s near-victory. They might be right! They’re definitely indulging in the Pundit’s Fallacy, in which commentators insist that a political party can win votes by doing whatever it is the commentator desperately wants them to do anyway, and cherry-picking data points to prove it.

Cherry-picking datapoints to support what one desperately wants seems to be common.

But when you look at the political attitudes of non-voters in the New Zealand Electoral Survey, a longitudinal study of voting attitudes and behaviour, the results are not wildly encouraging for the left. When non-voters in the 2014 NZES were asked to rate the National government’s performance, over 70% thought that the government was doing a good job. This doesn’t mean they’d all vote National – 43% of Labour voters also thought the government were doing a good job. But it doesn’t point to the simmering discontent we’ve seen in the British and US elections.

Maybe things have changed since the last election? Maybe there is something in the air? According to Roy Morgan the percentage of people who ‘think the country is heading in the right direction’, is at 62%, almost exactly what it was before the 2014 election. Prior to the recent British election the government’s ‘right direction’ rating was literally half that.

The political situation in New Zealand is very different to that in the UK.

Labour’s strategists seem to feel that they tried the Corbyn route last election, under Cunliffe, who embraced socialist rhetoric and led them to an historic defeat.

NZ Labour seems to be caught between wariness over past failures and the sort of success of Corbyn and Labour in the UK (except they failed).

They are probably closer to Hillary Clinton’s campaign where she should have won easily but stuffed up badly.