Losing Down Under

OK, here’s the best spin I can put on the election in NZ. We lost but we won. How’s that for spinmeistering?

Three years ago, the party I was working with (The National Party of New Zealand) was in shambles, barely getting 20 percent of the overall vote. This election was considered a “throw-away” to help them gain respectability for the 2008 election. The candidate and party infrastructure was considered more of caretaker than a winning combination.

Earlier in the year, nobody thought they had a realistic chance of winning and all hopes rested on looking good while losing. Then the candidate delivered a speech on race relations that had just enough red meat for the true believers but contained enough positive messages about building one nation that he was giving great kudos throughout the country. The speech, along with a stingy budget by the party in power, catapulted National into strong consideration of winning the election.

We climbed in the polls all summer and overtook the other party in several polls early in the summer, dropped down for a while, and rose again once they released their tax policy. We even had leads in a few polls down the stretch.

In the end we came up about 20,000 votes shy out of 2.4 million cast.

There is this funny story about people’s outlook (and maybe this is a bit off subject). An optimist looks at a glass filled halfway and says the glass is half-full; a pessimist looks at the same glass and says it’s half empty; an engineer looks at the glass and says the glass is the wrong size). Well, that’s kind of how I felt. We had the wrong size glass.

It is difficult to feel optimistic because we could taste a win all though the day on Election Day. Even when the results were coming in, we took an early 10-point lead. The graybeards around the party said don’t get too excited because these votes were coming from rural areas that tended to vote National. The commentators on the news were saying the same thing but also saying the lead in the rural areas may be too tough to overcome for the existing government.

The rest of the night I watched as the polls sunk, first to a nine percent lead, then 8.5 then 8, then back up to 8.5 and even back to 9.5 before moving quite rapidly down to 4 then 3 then 2 then 1 and then we’re behind. If I had gone home at midnight and never again checked the newspapers, I would have walked away thinking we’d won.

The upside of it all is that each of us thought the results were better than we could hope for and so, while there was disappointment, there was also a good deal of happiness. We nearly doubled the vote from three years ago, elected 22 more Members of Parliament than three years ago, and generally set the agenda for a strong shift to the center-right.

And the most interesting news, for quite a while National had an outside chance of being able to form a government, albeit small and requiring some fancy footwork. Today all hopes ended as the existing government was able to cobble together a five-party coalition that may hang on for at least 18 months. National will be a strong backbencher, sniping where they can.

Now for the truth: I am so pissed that we lost. I think I am more pissed than just about everyone save the campaign manager and the party chairwoman. We were in a position to win and we should have won. Kellen and I can come up with 100 things we could have done differently that all would have given us more votes. In the end, too many mistakes were made in the field and the party board got timid down the stretch. Dirty politics and vote buying was going on by the other side and we just watched, believing people would see the morality in our party not responding in kind. As they say there; that’s bullocks. Dirty politics is done precisely because it works, meaning we were a couple of brass knuckle kidney punches from winning.

As they also say: almost is good enough in horseshoes and hand grenades. In politics, there are no awards for most congenial political party. Only one prize is given and it’s strictly for the winners. To put it plainly, we just lost. $^&(*&#%*(@$*($#!!!!