Billionaires at the ballot box: Did the vote-splitting campaign work?

Harry Mowbray says his Split Your Vote campaign is ‘100%’ the reason National is likely to return to government. Pattrick Smellie says it’s ‘sheer, outrageous bollocks’. Who's right? Henry Oliver asks in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

The pitch: give your electorate vote to National, your party vote to Act or NZ First. With National winning more electorates than its party vote entitled it to, the extra seats would grow parliament and give the right a structural advantage. It worked, in the sense that a seven-seat National overhang now exists – plus four more from Te Pāti Māori, producing a record 11-seat overhang and a 131-seat House (all pending the final result, of course).

Mowbray, the 75-year-old Zuru dad whose family is National’s largest donor, has no doubts about the cause. “The campaign succeeded incredibly well,” he told Stuff’s Isaac Davison the day after the election. “This is 100% due to us. 100%.” He was scathing about the party’s response: “I can only describe that as they’ve been f...... idiots.”

Simeon Brown, National’s campaign chair, disagrees. “I think what you see in that is actually our candidates performing incredibly well,” he told Jack Tame on TVNZ’s Q+A. “Our party vote stayed pretty consistent throughout the campaign.”

Behind the campaign

The mechanics of the campaign are documented by Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne, who spent the weekend at the Coatesville mansion (which I’ll never not know as the Dotcom Mansion) where Mowbray hosted an election night gathering. The guest list included property developer Matthew Horncastle, NZME director Jim Grenon, lawyer Patrick Winkler, ex-Act MP Owen Jennings and Brash. 

The campaign ran through individuals rather than a single entity, exploiting the $17,000 third-party spending cap. Mowbray paid influencers Chantelle Baker and Penny Marie and donated to Reality Check Radio, which ran the newspaper ads. That outlet, formed by Voices for Freedom, registered as a third-party promoter with a spending limit of $424,000, and its ads were approved by Act and NZ First.

Mowbray didn’t seek approval for his own website and is now under police investigation following a referral from the Electoral Commission. He told Stuff it happened because he didn’t respond to correspondence in time – and that it “ended up being a positive” by drawing attention.

When Harry met Sally (an emotional woman)

The campaign was never really about this election, Mowbray says. He wants MMP gone. He told Milne he’d be "delighted if we just carried on using MMP” because “I can guarantee you a right-wing government for the foreseeable future” – but he believes he owes it to New Zealand to find something better. He and Maurice Williamson are pitching “Positive MMP”: 100 electorate MPs, 20 top-up seats, one vote.

In a section that has to be read to be believed, he also offered Milne his theory of our current system. “The whole of the party vote system is women driven by emotion, and so that’s what the left always argue about. It’s always emotion. These people haven’t got this and that and the other thing, and you need to throw some money over here… That mother with two kids, what she wants is another $10 or $20 in her weekly budget, and so it’s very easy for the left to throw a few dollars into that pot, and drag those people over emotionally. That’s the interface, and so National and Labour have to fight that interface.”

The counter-argument (to the split the vote claim not the emotional women one)

Smellie, writing for BusinessDesk today, has done the maths and disputes Mowbray’s case. If the campaign had worked, he writes, National’s party vote should have come in significantly below the polling average. It didn’t. At 29.2%, National “slightly bettered” it. 

He runs through the electorates. Tāmaki swung back to National from Act, but that was predictable once Brooke van Velden departed. Epsom stayed with David Seymour despite more National votes. Big swings in safe National seats like Whangaparāoa and Rangitata are “irrelevant to the overhang.” Nelson may be the one seat that benefited – “that’s one seat in 131 that may have benefitted from the mythical Mowbray Effect.”

The real cause of the overhang, Smellie argues, was Labour’s underperformance. Labour had been polling in the mid-30s until earlier this year before tanking into the high twenties. “Had Labour kept polling more strongly, there would have been no National Party overhang on election night.”

Smellie’s alternative theory is that if a Mowbray influenced this election, it was Nick (one of the sons), not Harry (the dad). Nick’s $250,000 to National and $225,000 to Act would have been more impactful than “running a late, confusing vote-rigging campaign like his old man”.