Few people outside of her campaign team gave Chlöe Swarbrick any chance of winning in Auckland Central this year – but the Green Party MP was too busy to listen. Here’s how they turned the electorate green.

First published November 12, 2020.

Three Ticks Chlöe is part of Frame, a series of short documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff.

There were debates. There were street corner meetings, and all the other old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground types of campaigning. There was a drag show, too. No one else running in Auckland Central organised a drag show for their supporters.

Despite the polls just two weeks out from election day putting her behind both Labour’s Helen White and National’s Emma Mellow, Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick and her team saw the rewards for their relentlessly energetic campaign trickle in with the vote count on October 17. Once all the specials had been counted, Swarbrick’s margin of victory over second-placed White was more than 1,000 votes.

This historic win capped a memorable campaign which has been captured in the new Frame documentary Three Ticks Chlöe. “I’m running the campaign I always wanted to run, with the people I love, in the place that I love,” Swarbrick explains in the film. “I care about all this stuff, so to throw everything that I’ve got at it is just the only thing that makes sense.”

Frame is a series of short, standalone documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff. Watch more here.

Made with support from NZ On Air.