Green Damage

The Green Party has been found to have links to those who changed the slogans on hundreds of hoardings around the country. It was done by Russell Norman's EA's partner who was formerly a Green Party member and the EA was aware of the campaign. The hoarding vandalism is quite funny. It is however a real hassle for the National Party volunteers who now have to fix those signs. Unlike in some of the minor parties who hire people due to lack of membership the larger parties have unpaid volunteers usually doing the job of repairing hoardings. It's probably okay this coordinated stickering happened this time but if it becomes regular practice to deface hundreds of hoardings that is a massive waste of activists time who already dedicate so much to their campaign. Its better if it just sticks to the small time vandalism like Paula Gillion's batman hoarding.

The interesting thing to see now will be how this affects the Greens in the polls. From what I can see there is two possible outcomes. As some context if you follow Horizon Polling on voter loyalty you will see for this whole term there has been this little cycle going on where Labour loses voters to National, National loses voters to the Greens and the Greens lose voters to Labour.

Russell Norman utterly condemned the vandalism of the hoardings which was mostly done by his own supporters. Most of the public are unaware how much time it takes and will simply find the action funny including some of the less involved Green Party members. What this means is that those of the left who hear Russell Norman condemning the actions of supporters may now be put off by him and switch to Labour.

The alternative scenario is that which Russell is trying to avoid; losing National voters back to National. The Green Party has picked up quite a lot of blue-green people particularly in this last term and those people are not dedicated voters to them. By it being seen that the Greens are attacking National a lot of these people could switch to National thus reducing the Greens votes and their prospects of forming a coalition with their preferred partner Labour.

Thus the Greens are trying to make the best of a difficult situation and pick the lesser evil, probably the smarter move because at least lost party votes to Labour don't reduce their chance of Government as much. This could still put them below 10% again however.