Discussion
It's shocking to me that Hipkins is still party leader, after leading Labour through an ejection where it lost about 800,000 votes.
David Cunlife - who also had only a year in the job before his first election as leader - was ousted for a drop of about 10,000 votes (614,937
604,535). On the other side of the House, the Nats vote under Bill English in 2017 actually went up by more than 20,000 on their 2014 result. He still got rolled as leader for losing the election.
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Why did Hipkins not get rolled within a few months of this unmitigated disaster? Is 2020s Labour really such a talent vacuum that he's the best they can offer?
If only everyone who votes Red to keep the Blues out, even though they vastly prefer Green policy, would actually vote as if the election was a referendum on policy. Rather than a horse race, where a vote is a bet on who's going to "win" based on polls.
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Coda: I still think election law should make it illegal to publish poll results in the 3 months before an election. For the same reason we ban campaigning on election day; it distorts the outcome.
Without a regular supply of polls to obsess over, political reporters couldn't cover an election like a slow-motion horse race. So they'd be forced to gird their loins, and talk about .... (gulp, deep breath) ... policy differences between the parties (shock! Horror!).
meanwhile labour says what they’re not going to do, like tax the wealthy
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