ACT vs NZF for the polarised redneck vote and why Luxon can’t be rolled despite being in the 20s

What we are seeing with NZF taking ACT vote is a function of the highly polarised political environment we operate in now.

If you are a cross-burning, banjo twanging redneck culture war boomer, you want your bigotry full strength, not the diet sugar free version that ACT are offering behind flimsy intellectual fig leaves.

Thanks to social media hate algorithms, you want your bigotry to be full bodied and cruel and no one is offering up full bodied cruelty like NZF.

When Culture War Boomers like Chris Trotter refer to themselves as ‘conservative populists’, he’s really talking about being a cultural brownshirt.

NZF have more ‘Rob’s Mob’ populist hate than ACT can muster and thanks to the highly polarised online community, NZF are taking from ACT.

This dynamic has some way to run for NZF because if you look at the sub 5% threshold, there are still plenty of anti-vaxx freak shows that could give their vote to Winston, with Freedoms NZ going up 1.5 points to 2.3%.

Anti-Trans, climate denial, anti-Treaty, anti-vaccine, pro-Israel, pro-Trump, weaponised free speech – these are all the alt-right boomer culture warrior talking points and Winston’s anti-intellectualism is more appealing to the gumboots of NuZilind than Seymour’s zen poet routine.

If Winston really wanted to slay ACT, he’d knife Seymour’s Regulatory Bill that is currently floundering and play the National Sovereignty hero role.

Meanwhile National slide into the 20s which has always historically been the zone National replace whoever is the leader, however Luxon is safe for two reasons.

The first is that Erica Stanford is the lead candidate but can’t win it because of her skeletons in the closet, so if anyone other than Erica takes leadership it will arouse questions about why she didn’t.

The bigger issue for National however is that they are failing, not just because Luxon has all the charm of a road accident, but because the economy is in free fall and that’s because of Nicola Willis and her poor decision making at the beginning of the 2024 election which has caused cascade Industry failures throughout NZ.

Removing Luxon doesn’t solve that issue, so Luxon AND Willis would both need to go and there is NO appetite for that kind of move inside a Party as uptight as National.

So Luxon is safe because the other choices would be more destructive.

 

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