But Tāmaki 2023 is nothing like Epsom 2005.
What is sometimes forgotten is that National did not cut Hide a deal back in 2005.
There were no cups of tea or quiet nods to their voters from National. National didn’t think Act had a chance, so it didn’t bother risking it. One of the reasons Hide won was because of that arrogance.
A win for van Velden relies on National Party voters supporting the Act candidate rather than the National Party candidate.
They need a good reason to do that.
In 2005, there was a reason.
Hide set it out time and time again in every bowling club and Rotary meeting and street corner of the electorate until he’d talked 60 per cent of National’s voters - 15,251 people - into seeing the logic of it.
An electorate for Act would give National more chance of winning the election because of the coat-tailing rule. If Hide won Epsom, he could bring in a few more MPs and they would count on the National side.
Epsom was not a campaign on policies - it was a campaign on MMP strategic voting and it still is.
In 2023 Act is unlikely to need Epsom let alone a second back-up electorate. Its polling is well over the 5 per cent mark.
Seymour will win Epsom, partly because he works hard to keep it - and just in case Act ends up needing it again.
No ‘deals’ are needed anymore, everybody knows the game and its voters are used to it.
But make no mistake, it is still National Party voters who support him there.
In the last election only 10 per cent of Epsom voted for Act - and 80 per cent of National voters voted for Seymour. They vote for him to benefit National.
Winning Tamaki as well as Epsom will make no difference to National’s ability to get into government. And it has been a National seat since Muldoon’s day.
Without a reason that benefits National, why would they vote for an Act candidate?
That leaves Act’s Tamaki campaign based on a pitch for a protest vote against National’s support for housing intensification measures - and against its MP Simon O’Connor.
Of the two, the first is likely to get more traction for Act with the National voters in Tamaki. In essence, Act is asking National voters in Tamaki to do what NZ First leader Winston Peters persuaded Northland voters to do in the byelection in 2007 and protest vote against their own guy.
O’Connor himself is no fan of National’s support for those rules, because of the grief it has caused him - and many other National MPs - from constituents who don’t want three storey buildings going up at their neighbour’s.
Act opposes the changes - but the risk is that campaign plank will collapse if National does indeed backtrack on its support for the intensification accord with Labour.
Otherwise, Act is clearly hoping enough National Party people will be turned off by O’Connor’s Christian conservative social views to vote for the more liberal van Velden instead.
He has a fairly long list to highlight, among them an apology for celebrating the US Supreme Court overruling abortion rights in the US, and a recent quip to Green co-leader Marama Davidson about a US school shooter not being a “white CIS male.”
Those things upset voters on the left a fair bit and likely some in National’s ranks as well - but the Tāmaki National voters know O’Connor and his beliefs fairly well. O’Connor has also learned to stick to talking about the economy as a general rule when talking about his seat.
It might be enough to get some of the Labour voters to support van Velden for the fun of seeing if they can nudge O’Connor out. Whether there are enough of them is very doubtful.
