How the Left loses again.

And which parties will suffer most from the Treaty Principles Bill fiasco?

In the US, the White House, Senate and House of Representatives have all gone to the Republicans. The Trumpian electoral landslide wasn’t all that deep, but it was broad, bringing down the entire demographic turf on which the Democrats had been standing.

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira has compared the results achieved by Obama over Romney in 2012 with the Biden/Harris collapse in 2024. Read it for yourself, but here’s one point Teixeira makes:

“In 2012, the 18-29 year olds who provided Obama’s 23 point margin were all members of the Millennial generation. In 2024, those voters are now entirely contained in the 30-44 year old age group, where Harris eked out only a 3-point advantage. So much for the generational theory of political dominance.”

I can recall some on the left bragging about how the young were getting more diverse and more “progressive”.

Ethnic minorities, legal migrants (and their children) and the non-college-educated are walking away from the American Left. While most women aged 18–29 voted for Harris, Trump did better in that demographic in 2024 than in 2020, up from 33 to 40%.

Veteran Democrat Robert Reich argues that “Americans voted mainly on the economy – and their votes reflected their class and level of education”. He joins a chorus on how the Democrats “abandoned” the working class. But he could have said more: people who just want to get ahead in life couldn’t stand the suffocating atmosphere of political correctness created by activists who are eager to denounce anyone guilty of the slightest doctrinal deviation and who pushed policymaking too far.

There was a lot of voter defection in the US, notably among Latinos. I’ve also seen more than one American online admitting that, even though they voted Democrat, they’re glad that Trump won. How long before that feeling wears off? How many defectors will be satisfied that Trump & Co solves their problems? One thing we do know is that Elon Musk’s net worth took a big leap upwards.

As Trump names the cast for his next circus, he’s taking his country back to the nineteenth-century “spoils system” of presidential patronage (“to the victor, the spoils”). Mar-a-Lago is the new swamp where, if you can wade in and avoid the alligators, you might get yourself and your relations some highly-paid jobs.

Meanwhile in God’s Own

In May 2023, I argued that the New Zealand Left was making losing look easy, in part because of a culture of finger-pointing. For example, it was said that the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” had a become a “dog-whistle” for white supremacy. A principle fought for heroically by the Left had been adopted by the Right and hence had to be denigrated in the darkest possible terms. But how many voters will the Left win over if they insist that the universal franchise is racist?

I explored in greater depth in an earlier post the reasons why the Ardern/Hipkins government lost. But, in basic numbers, here’s what happened to the Left between 2020 and 2023. If we count the three parties that could have made a left-wing coalition (Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori), their combined party votes had amounted to 59.1% in 2020. In 2023, that dropped to 41.6%. That’s a far deeper slide than was suffered recently by the Democrats.

Given turnout also dropped in 2023, let’s put that into raw numbers.

In 2020, 1,703,932 Kiwis voted for those three left-wing parties.

In 2023, 1,186,291 voted for them.

That was down by more than half a million. Thirty percent who’d voted for the Left in 2020 didn’t do so in 2023. Most swung right, but not because they loved Christopher Luxon. And a lot just stayed at home.

Admittedly, 2020 was an exceptional high for the Left, so the fall looks worse. In 2017, those three Left parties mustered 44.4% – ironically the same figure that National won on its own – and so the low 40s could be the Left’s default-setting.

Let’s not assume that the Luxon government is a one-termer. Labour has a track-record from the 2010s of sitting around 25%, and that could be where they end up again one day. Let’s say the Greens can rely on 10 and TPM on 4, then the three of them could amount to less than 40% on a mediocre day, unless they up their game.

What, then, can they do? There are two basic political lessons from recent experience: (1.) address low wages/high prices, and (2.) in politics, demography is not destiny. Don’t assume that a growing cohort of younger brown people is “in the bag” for the Left in elections to come, nor that grumpy white boomers won’t be around much longer to vote for National.

By way of comparison, older Americans support Trump less than the younger ones do. Young people, especially men, are rejecting the Left. Latinos shifted to the Right. Here’s one explanation: while claiming to be inclusive, the progressive Left “distanced themselves ideologically from the median American voter”.

That demographic/political switch may not translate straightforwardly, or may not apply to NZ yet. Nonetheless, not unlike the progressive Dems, the NZ Left look like they’re planning to lose the next election by turning people away. Just look at their conduct in the House during the first reading of the Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill.

The Green MP Tamatha Paul, in Oral Questions, appealed to The Establishment, in the form of an open letter from 40 elite lawyers, all of them over-paid silks, to support a conservative argument for judge-made law and against an open parliamentary debate. Then, as if to prove that Luxon was right to worry about a “divisive” debate, Labour’s Willie Jackson did an apoplectic rant, called David Seymour a liar and got expelled from the debating chamber for unparliamentary language. Not to be out-done, Te Pāti Māori brought the House down – and attracted global headlines – by performing a haka.

Centrist voters won’t embrace the prospect of a Labour/Green/TPM coalition if those parties keep performing like that – unless people can be persuaded to blame the Right for it all. After all, aren’t they the ones ruining Crown–Māori relations? Isn’t ACT’s Bill a breach of contract, and not a turn towards equality of rights?

National MPs had to keep saying that they don’t want a referendum, and they’ll vote down the Treaty Principles Bill at the second reading. For the time being, however, they’re supporting it to go to select committee as agreed in coalition negotiations with the ACT Party. It’s one of those corners in which politicians get stuck and can’t help getting their hands dirty. The opprobrium they’re getting for it is just a price they’ve paid for power. Will that hurt them much at the next election?

NZ First has form here. The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Deletion Bill 2005 was introduced by Winston Peters who said that the Treaty is as it was written, with no “principles” attached. His bill would have removed all references to “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” from all legislation, rather than invent new ones. Although that bill didn’t pass, National voted for it. As then deputy leader of National, Gerry Brownlee said deletion of “principles of the Treaty” was “core National Party policy”.

The 2023 National/NZ First coalition agreement mandates “a comprehensive review of all legislation (except when it is related to, or substantive to, existing full and final Treaty settlements) that includes ‘The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’ and replace all such references with specific words relating to the relevance and application of the Treaty, or repeal the references.” So there’s more to come.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Treaty Principles debate has any effect on party support in opinion polls, and in which direction. If it doesn’t make a noticeable difference, it could be because the battle-lines were already drawn before the 2023 election, clearly signposted with the term “co-governance”. If the Left find that they’re not gaining (or even losing) support over the next six months, their emotional and political commitments may lead them to get even more unruly as they sense power slipping further from their grasp.

On the other hand, New Zealand sometimes goes against global currents, and so this debate could go in favour of the Left. That would take more than just blaming the Right for the divisive behaviour. The Left would need to educate more Kiwis that co-governance rectifies the injustices of colonisation, and that the Courts, the Waitangi Tribunal and a platoon of KCs are the experts who are best equipped to fine-tune the country’s unwritten constitution by re-interpreting its founding covenant. Should be an easy sell.

A Curia poll done in October found that 25% were opposed to the Treaty Principles Bill and 45% supported it. I’d guess there would have been greater opposition if people were asked whether or not they wanted a referendum on the Bill. And there are large numbers of “undecideds” who could be persuaded either way. But IPSOS polls reveal that Kiwis have other matters on their minds, like the cost of living and healthcare.

My prize for Court Jester, by the way, goes to a member of the public, Karl Mokaraka, who did another one of his hilarious stunts to interrupt Mr Luxon and urge him to come back to Jesus. I wouldn’t vote for Mokaraka, but his comedic interventions tell a kind of truth. The Speaker, Gerry Brownlee, had to have him removed, but did he get the joke?

(Note: for the purposes of this post, I’ve talked generally of Right and Left, referring here to the three-party coalition and its three opposing parties that sit in parliament at present, and to their respective supporters, realising that this changes over time and is a little artificial.)