A pasting in Mt Roskill

Mt Roskill by-election 2016 (special votes still to be counted)

• Michael Wood (Labour): 11,170
• Parmjeet Parmar (National): 4652 (27.6%)
• Roshan Nauhria (People's Party): 709
• No Green or NZ First candidates

Total votes including minor candidates: 16,857

Mt Roskill 2014 electorate vote

• Phil Goff (Labour): 18,637
• Parmjeet Parmar (National): 10,546 (31.6%)
• Barry Coates (Green): 1682
• Mahesh Bindra: 786

Total votes including minor candidates: 33,933

Mt Roskill 2014 list vote

• National: 14,275
• Labour: 12,086
• Green: 3279
• NZ First: 1805
• Conservative: 1240

Yes, a governing party has never won an opposition seat during a by-election.

Yes, John Key did talk his party’s chances down during the campaign, describing Mt Roskill as a safe Labour seat.

And, yes, there was the usual by-election apathy and low turnout.

But the margin of Michael Wood’s victory over Parmjeet Parmar was still notable.

I have to trollishly respectfully disagree with Rob Hosking; Labour winning Mt Roskill was not like National holding Waikato. This central Auckland seat has gentrified. I cast my vote at a decile 10 primary school. National handily won the list vote in 2014.

It was easy to conclude Phil Goff had only hung on to the seat because of his large personal following.

It seemed possible that Ms Parmar could parlay her party’s list vote advantage into a win over Labour’s hard-grafting but colourless Michael Wood.

At the very least, it should have been close.

Instead, Mr Wood cleaned her clock with a 6518 election night majority, which after special votes come in could well come within a handful of votes of Mr Goff's winning margin in 2014 (yes, the Greens sat out the contest but Mr Wood's winning margin was still nearly twice the total Green vote at the last election. In any case, National should have been able to inherit votes from the now-defunct Conservatives to help balance that out).

Whichever way you spin it, Ms Parmar's 4652 votes in an electorate where National got 14,275 list votes last time out is a poor result.

The same critics who said a poor Mt Roskill performance would be the death knell for Andrew Little as Labour leader now have to accept the flipside: it will give him a considerable boost.

And while Mr Key was the invisible man last night, Mr Little was duly on hand to capitalise with an announcement that Labour would re-open 23 community stations and add 1000 officers (Labour focused quite strongly on crime during the campaign, along with the more obvious housing and transport, picking up on a hot-button concern with locals, especially often hit small businesses).

I live in the Mt Roskill electorate. Ms Parmar was a solid candidate. She worked hard, her billboards covered home after home on Mt Roskill roads, and her supporters mobbed intersections with placards over the final week. She phoned my wife twice (I wasn’t enrolled until Friday), and stuffed our mailbox with flyers.

But Labour also ran a strong ground campaign, which if a tweet from its chief-of-staff can be believed, the party’s well-attended annual conference was followed up by a re-invigorated organisational effort.

Mt Roskill campaign in numbers:
900 volunteers
30k doors knocked
11k phone calls
95k pieces of direct mail
Avg donation $30#peoplepower

— Neale Jones (@nealejones) December 3, 2016

A lot of Labour voters did stir themselves into action on Saturday. A lot of National voters stayed at home.

Neale Jones brags there was an 11% swing to Labour at booths in Royal Oak, the part of the electorate bordering moneybags Epsom. Mr Wood also prevailed at the Maungawhai Primary school booth in Mt Eden in the northern part of the electorate, a neighbourhood carried by Ms Parmar in her 2014 tussle with Mr Goff.

Mr Little’s position should not be over-estimated. Curia’s rolling poll-of-polls puts his party on a miserable 26%. And as Rob points out, a direct parallel (National list vote majority, Labour win) can be drawn to the Christchurch East by-election ahead of the 2014 general election – where of course Mr Little and his party performed so poorly.

But after last night, he can claim one of the most desirable commodities in politics: momentum.

Andrew Little with Eric Trump Michael Wood last night.

POSTSCRIPT: What did the by-election tell us about the Labour-Greens alliance?

Nothing, really.

It showed that the Greens not standing a candidate could help Labour secure a seat, though the size of the majority for Labour’s Michael Wood was twice the entire Green vote from 2004, and it’s not clear how many Greens turned up to vote for him.

The fact that Green candidate Barry Coates got far fewer votes than the Greens' list vote in 2014 shows most of his party's supporters were already accustomed to casting a strategic ballot.

But even if the new alliance had been decisive in handing Labour victory, the mechanics of MMP mean that outside of byelections or the two seats (Ohariu and Epsom), the list vote is all that matters for the two major parties. The Labour-Greens alliance could well mean Nikki Kaye becomes a list MP while Jacinda Ardern moves from her party’s list to Auckland Central MP. Big deal.

Labour and the Greens did play well during the by-election. But that was, of course, held in a bubble, without the distractions and broader battle lines of a general election. How that will go remains to be seen.