Labour lost votes to National in electorates with the highest proportion of Asian and African immigrant voters

Labour campaigned on cutting immigration by 20,000 to 30,000 people every year. Labour’s subsequent 10% vote boost across general electorates was tempered by a less enthusiastic boost from electorates with many residents from Asia¹, and in those electorates, National actually gained overall. Overall there is currently no significant link between an electorate’s Asian immigrant population and that electorate’s level of support for Labour. But the change from 2014 to 2017 is significant: for every 1,000 residents from Asia in an electorate, National’s vote went up by 0.25% while Labour’s went down by 0.28% over the three-year period marked by a series of public statements and policies by Labour widely perceived to be anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese. Labour may risk alienating kiwi voters from Asia further in the future if they continue down the same path from now until the next election.

Labour campaigned against immigration in the last election and there has been speculation that their anti-immigrant stance hurt Labour in the Asian immigrant vote. Some data has come out suggesting widespread support for the National Party from Chinese voters.

I can’t directly test immigrant support for Labour, but I can test the support for Labour in each electorate and compare that to the proportion of immigrants in that electorate.

Statistics New Zealand provide easily accessible information on ethnic groups and world birthplace in each electorate. Unfortunately, neither dataset allows us to drill down to distinguish between different Asian countries or cultures, for instance, to look at relationships to Chinese or Indian residents in particular. Because we’re interested in immigration, I used the data on birthplace rather than ethnicity. So every time I talk about “Asian immigrant residents” or “residents from Asia” in an electorate here, we’re looking at the number of people born in Asia (excluding the Middle East) who were in that electorate on Census Night 2013.

There’s no significant link between an electorate’s residents from Asia and Labour support…

For context, let’s look at how the data in 2014 and 2017 side-by-side.

For both years there’s no clear trend: you can see that in both 2014 and 2017, overall, there’s no significant association among electorates between voting Labour and the number of Asian residents.

…But there is a link between an electorate’s Asian-origin population and the swing from 2014 to 2017

But if anti-immigration rhetoric from Labour in 2017 affected the results of the election, what we are more interested in is the change from 2014 to 2017. Overall there are lots of things that affect the way an electorate votes and most don’t change from one election to the next. By just looking at the change, we can get an idea of how each electorate was affected by circumstances in this election compared to the last one.

If we want to know whether Labour’s stances over the last three years might have hurt it with Asian voters, then we are less interested in the vote in 2017 as we are in the change in votes from 2014 to 2017:

The first thing we can see here is that Labour improved its record in every electorate, by an average of from 25% to 35% across the general electorates. Still, that wasn’t enough to quite beat National, at least in pure numbers, this time around.

But on to our question of interest. There is a clear correlation here: the more residents from Asia within an electorate, the less boost that electorate got for Labour from 2014 to 2017 (r=-0.36, p=0.0034).

This doesn’t prove that if Labour hadn’t been through the Chinese-names saga, and hadn’t campaigned against immigration, that it would have done better. But is there any other reasonable explanation for this pattern?

Considering the effect of Greens support doesn’t change the result

It is possible the difference change we can see here arose from other factors. Urban and student areas feature prominently in the regions with the largest changes, so perhaps the change is driven mainly by students. Of those regions, only Auckland Central has a particularly high share of residents from Asia. There is evidence that whiter urban liberal electorates were the largest contributor to Labour’s success, maybe at the Greens’ expense. We can estimate their effect by using the Greens’ success in each electorate in 2014 to predict Labour’s success in 2017.

Adding Greens’ success in 2014 as a predictor only makes the effect of Asian immigrant residents in an electorate even more important. We can calculate that on average, for every 950 votes the Green party got in an electorate in 2014, we’d predict that electorate to have a 1% rise in Labour support from 2014 to 2017. Using the same method, we predict that for every 3600 Asian immigrant residents in an electorate, there is a 1% fall in Labour support, or, more accurately, 1% less of an increase from 2014 to 2017.

Labour’s loss was National’s gain

It might also be interesting to see how National did:

This is actually instructive, too. It turns out that there’s a very strong relationship between National support and Asian residents in an electorate. For every 4000 Asian residents in an electorate, there is a 1% rise in National support.

Results were similar for electorates with high immigrant populations from the Pacific Islands and Africa…but not the UK

We can compare these patterns to correlations between change in Labour support and immigrants in electorates from other regions.

Electorates with high numbers of immigrants from Pacific Island and Middle East and Africa sources followed the same significant trend as those with high numbers of immigrants from Asia. We actually saw the reverse pattern for electorates with high numbers of immigrants from the UK and Ireland: a larger swing towards Labour.

What does this mean?

There’s been speculation that Labour’s immigration policies may have influenced voting in 2017, particularly by influencing people in electorates with high proportions of residents from Asia. The data suggests that in electorates with more people from Asia, the Pacific, or the Middle East and Africa, Labour did not gain nearly as much support as in electorates with relatively few immigrants from those regions.

This might be relevant when Labour works to frame immigration policy. When voters have themselves immigrated to New Zealand; when their neighbors have; they may have more sympathy for immigrants and question restrictive immigration policies.

Following through on a campaign promise to reduce immigration by up to 30,000 people every year would be a huge change and the data I presented here could mean that it would harm Labour in the polls three years from now. National has resisted making similar changes, and Bill English actually claimed Labour’s changes would end up having minimal effect on long-term migration, because the changes mostly target international students, 80% of whom return to their country of origin. In any case, if Labour wants to avoid high-immigrant electorates becoming characteristically National territory, they may need to reach out to those communities to find out what might be alienating them from voting Labour.

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1. Here, “number of residents from Asia in an electorate” means the number of people in the electorate on Census night 2013 who reported being born in an Asian country. See 2013 Census electorate tables.

"Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right"

Kill all Normies paints a picture of the modern world (the “post-post-modern” world might be more appropriate) as a online-bleeding-to-offline battle between transgressive and post-modern forces rooted in Tumblr ‘social justice’ blogs on the one side, and 4chan and various subreddits on the other. The author, Angela Nagle, calls on the left to abandon what she describes as the “transgressive style” for kind of more affirmative politics. She says that since the 1960s, the left-liberal style, which the left has carried with it throughout its takeover of academia, the media, and other cultural centers, has been appropriated by the right. In her reading, there’s nothing inherently leftist about the ‘transgressive style’. Such shock-and-awe can be used to destroy conservative norms and values, as it did when a figure of crucified Christ was submerged in piss and displayed in a New York art gallery, or perhaps more constructively, from the 1960s sexual liberation movement through to today’s broader struggle for rights for gender and sexual minorities. But the transgressive style can be also used to destroy mainstream taboos against sexism, racism, and generally just not being horrible to people in public. Recently disgraced figure Milo Yiannopoulos might be the most famous example yet. He described his role as a “provocateur” (basically a troll but offline, I guess?) and spent months touring around campuses in the US goading liberals into hysterical and violent responses to his transphobic and anti-feminist rhetoric.

Nagle’s response is to call for the left to end its fascination with the “transgressive style”, and to find a new rhetorical aesthetic. The left has not always been about tearing down convention for the sake of it, and perhaps we have some conventions which are worth defending.

But how much does all this matter? Are the obscure corners of Tumblr with their 50 genders and otherkin really influencing wider culture? Or is /r/The_Donald and the rest of the Alt-Right - Richard Spencer, et al. - really responsible for getting Trump elected? Or are they an irrelevant freak-show whose influence and voice are amplified by the media to drive ratings and exaggerated by activists on the other end of the spectrum to validate the necessity of their own cause? I’m sure Trump had his support from the subreddit /r/The_Donald and associated young white and male supporters. But did /r/The_Donald and associated Alt-right and fascist-sympathizing online movements really get the Donald elected?

This is important because if the online culture wars really are shaping the wider discourse, it is possible their influence will grow and it is important to pay attention to them if you want to know where the culture is going and what direction politics is likely to take in the future. On the other hand, if these fringe online movements are mostly just extremes of wider culture, all the media’s attention on them may be unhelpful and even serve to exaggerate support for Donald Trump and the extent of extreme views on both the left and right.

To me it seems like new right-wing media - InfoWars, Breitbart News, etc., played a part. Facebook has also been accused of playing a part by enabling “Fake News” producers to spread untrue findings, like for instance, an infamous story about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump. Both of these forces are obviously a recent phenomenon and you can chalk them up to online movements, but I am not sure how linked they are to grassroots culture movements by young right-wing activists and trolls on 4chan.

On the flipside, I think progressive movements have succeeded in culture change in particular instances, for better and, following backlash, for worse. Black Lives Matter have been very active and have succeeded in getting their concerns into the mainstream. There has been a response by the media and police to try to address their concerns. Though we are not there yet in achieving the goals set out by BLM, they’ve made their concerns known. Activists for transgender rights have succeeded in having transgender rights issues pushed into the public consciousness, although even there it sometimes seems like the backlash has been stronger than the initial movement. In spite of all this, I am not sure these movements really played such a large role in the election. Surely it was the Democratic establishment, not accusations of sexism and racism by “Bernie Bros” and “brosocialists”, that made Hillary’s win?

In general I enjoyed Angela Nagle’s call for a more affirmative politics, less focused on the ‘politics of transgression’; a progressive liberal politic more focused on building than tearing down - abandon irony to the twitter trolls. The right has always focused on the “rhetoric of fear” to the liberal’s “audacity of hope” so perhaps this is not entirely new. But appeals to emotion and group interests are very human and I’m not sure you can just change the political game by refusing to be drawn into them.