‘Dystopian’ and ‘depressing’ - David Seymour on what ‘collapsed’ Act’s support and how he lost faith in media

By most people’s standards, Act’s 2023 election campaign was a roaring success. The party consolidated its remarkable resurrection in 2020, proving it really was more than the party behind whoever happened to be the MP for Epsom, it won its highest share of the party vote, got into Cabinet and its leader, David Seymour, will be Deputy Prime Minister next year.

But Seymour himself isn’t so sure, describing the record-breaking campaign as “something of a disappointment” in his contribution to Victoria University Professor Stephen Levine’s book on the 2023 election.

After each election, Levine convenes a conference in Wellington at which political party leaders, academics and journalists reflect on the campaign. Their contributions are later published in a book by Te Herenga Waka University Press (formerly Victoria University Press). The latest volume, Back on Track, is out in October (I should declare that I also have a chapter in it, from the perspective of the media).

The chapters by party leaders tend to be the most boring – with only a few exceptions (Greens co-leader James Shaw used his chapter in the 2017 volume to recall what it was like making what might have been the last speech by a Green Party MP in Parliament, so dire was his party’s position). Leaders tend not to want to open up about what they got wrong.

Seymour’s chapter is different. He confesses to being disappointed by the campaign and takes responsibility for some of its strategic errors. He also details what caused him to lose faith in the media, an issue that has become a hallmark of Act’s thinking.

His disappointment boils down to the fact that Act’s final party vote result of 8.64% was “a little over half of the party’s peak polling”, which, frustratingly for Seymour, occurred just five weeks from polling day, leading him to describe the last term for Act as “150 sensational weeks and five bad ones”.

So what went wrong? Well, a few things. First, Seymour reckoned the party peaked too early.

“Quite simply, we’d run our race and lost focus on what really mattered to voters by mid-September,” he wrote.

But there were other “deeper problems”. Seymour is frank that some of these were problems he made himself – including one that “collapsed” the party’s support.

The biggest single error, he believes, was a decision he made in early September to openly float sitting on the crossbenches after the election and not go into government with National if it would not concede some policy ground.

Seymour said the logic behind the call was simple: he reckoned voters were flocking to Act for its policies and it needed to show it would fight hard for those policies and not allow the larger party to dictate what was on or off the menu.

This was a miscalculation.

“More than anything, our supporters wanted to evict Labour from power, and any sign of instability in the putative coalition made National seem like the safer bet,” Seymour said.

That call “did more harm to our activists’ morale than any other single event”. He dubbed the last two weeks of September a “fatal fortnight” in which support “collapsed from the low teens to the high single digits”.

This conclusion echoes what Shaw and the Greens found in 2020, which is that there is little to be gained from friction with your major coalition partner. Green voters in 2020 liked Jacinda Ardern and a Labour Government, and it seems that hypothetical Act voters might have felt similarly about Christopher Luxon and National.

That conclusion opens up questions for Luxon. If it’s true that Act lost out when threatening to weaken or torpedo a rightwing government, then Luxon probably has much more latitude to force a U-turn on Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill. Withdrawing from the coalition might damage Act as much, or even more, than the other two parties.

Seymour admited several other significant errors.

He said the party’s got its “approach wrong just as the electoral landscape shifted”.

“[W]e were too focused on New Zealand First as a threat to Act, falling for the same confirmation bias as the media.”

Brooke van Velden on election night. Her election campaign was cited as evidence of what Act got right. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Seymour revealed that his party later learned “only 13% of our ‘swing’ was susceptible to voting for New Zealand First”. This meant NZ First’s rise cost Act about half a point overall. Instead, the party appears to have been more vulnerable to National.

He also reckoned the party got the tone of its social media wrong. During the term, Act had “built a brand that was positive, differentiated and above all solutions-focused”.

However, a “siloed internal team” drew up ads that counteracted that message with ones that were “dystopian, depressing and utterly discordant with everything people thought they knew about us”.

Seymour fumed that “incredibly” the party’s vote fell concurrently with the amount of money spent on advertising; the more people saw those ads, the less inclined they were to vote for Act.

“The online effort should have neutralised voter concerns about negativity and ‘extremism’. Instead, it actively reinforced them,” he said, particularly among young voters and women, who were target swing voters for the party.

He said the counterfactual to this played out in the Tāmaki electorate, where deputy leader Brooke van Velden’s more positive, aspirational campaign kept Act’s support together to take the seat.

The party also had a logistics problem. During the parliamentary term, Seymour ran wildly successful meetings up and down the country. A tour in June and July 2023 drew particularly big crowds.

The meetings were almost too successful, however, because by election time many people felt they had already seen Seymour’s tour and didn’t show up to his public meetings. Sometimes, he said, he showed up “to the same place, with the same message” as he had three weeks earlier.

The party didn’t even book studio space for its main radio ad, which had to be recorded in the back of a rental car.

“From the potential voter’s point of view, Act was becoming a hot mess of appalling media coverage, chaotic (or half-empty) meetings, combative debates and interviews, and discordant digital communications,” Seymour said, adding the only thing that saved the party from performing even more poorly was the work done during the parliamentary term to consolidate its support.

He gave more detail on his long falling-out with the media, which has become a significant feature of the current Parliament.

He took issue with the reporting of three incidents. The first concerned the character issues reported in low-ranked Act candidates. Seymour took responsibility for candidate selection and admitted the comments made by some candidates were “inadvisable”, but he felt the overall level of coverage was excessive and pointed to an “activist media”.

He took particular umbrage with one unnamed journalist who gave the stories an “inexplicable prominence ... running them night after night”.

Seymour was also frustrated by the coverage of his gaffe relating to the Ministry of Pacific Peoples, in which he made an ill-advised joke suggesting he would like to blow up the ministry like Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament.

Though acknowledging the remarks as a “gaffe”, he said it was politicians and the media who turned the story into a comment on the party’s attitude to matters of race.

He singled out another journalist for airing the comments repeatedly on television.

“Such reporting began to damage Act’s and my own brand, the latter having started to dip in approval ratings,” he said.

He was particularly scathing of an altercation at his party’s campaign launch between camera operators and Act supporters. He alleges the media participated in the melee but later refused to acknowledge its involvement.

He was confident in his assessment of the events “after considerable examination of video evidence, talking to eyewitnesses and remonstrating with the journalists involved and their management”.

He said the journalists involved “know who they are”.

“[I]t needs to be recorded that they did enormous damage to journalism and democracy through their actions.

“Having defended journalism from various accusations of bribery and bias over many years, I have little faith left and see no reason to defend them.

“Unfortunately, they are every bit as venal and incompetent as their worst critics contend. As the debate about the future of media unfolds, what’s become clear is it’s not just the business model, it’s the product.

“Actions like these deserve to be recorded. The people deserve to know how these journalists act and their bosses condone.”

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.