Election Results

Since I had the planet between me and the action, I refrained from commenting during the last forthnight of the election campaign. The skeletons that I expected to see during the last two weeks of the campaign did not appear (although I see that David Benson-Pope has just been interviewed by the Police) while a story about apparent corruption by Taito Field failed to have much traction. Hence the collapse in Labour's support that I had anticipated failed to materialize and so we have a situation in which forming a government is harder than it was in 1996.

However in June, I made a set of predictions as to which general electoral seats would change hands between National and Labour. This was based on an interpolated 12% swing to National while Labour's share of the vote remained static. This was based on poll results at the time but they mirror the election result so it's worth comparing the two.

For the seats of Invercargill, Napier, Northcote, Otago and Whanganui, my predictions of National Gains came true.

Banks Peninsula: Despite my prediction, Ruth Dyson retained her seat with a halved majority. The Press (probably Colin Espiner) suggests David Carter lost because of the "shit country" controversy although I understand he denies having said that.

Hamilton East: My figures predicted a National Gain and National did gain the seat. However when composing the blog post, I got confused between Hamilton West (which was narrowly retained) and Hamilton East and so botched this prediction.

Wellington Central: This seat defied my predictions although that seems largely due to Mark Blumsky's stairwell misfortune.

Seats which I didn't predict to change hands were:

Aoraki: The chief cause was the motorcade incident although Mallard's school purges also contributed.

East Coast: The rise in National support meant this seat was vulnerable but the retirement of the old Labour incumberant shifted it into National's hands.

Tukituki: I was wrongfooted by this as I had expected Rick Barker's support to hold up. On Tuesday night, Rick blamed his defeat on the rising National support which is almost certainly wrong because if the Labour share of the vote remained static (as it did elsewhere), he would have retained his seat. But what had happened was that Rick Barker suffered a 16% collapse in support which also ate away into Labour's share of the party vote. Normally a scandal would be the cause butt I'm unaware of anything that Rick Barker said or did to cause such an erosion of support.

Wairarapa: I failed to predict this primarily because there was a significant third party vote in 2002 (for Merepeka Raukawa-Tait of Christian Heritage) that largely reverted to National in 2005. Also significant was that Georgina Beyer had decided to become a List MP for this election.

I didn't predict the Tauranga or the Maori seats because those were not Labour/National contests.