On Friday the 13th NZ First leader Winston Peters cast his vote and it was a very appropriate date for it.
Eleven days earlier, at the Eastview Baptist Church in Botany, a man called Neville Webb had cast his vote and was wondering why all the media turned up for the occasion.
That was October 2, the first day of advance voting. Webb and his wife had voted for Winston Peters. He was just the man “to put the whole handbrake on the economy”.
A few minutes later, a silver Crown car pulled up and National leader Christopher Luxon got out to cast his vote.
A week earlier, Luxon had put up a video to say he would pick up the phone to Peters if the election results demanded it.
Peters went from being a mere hypothetical spot in Luxon’s peripheral vision to being a horror show.
Peters was a “last resort” and by Sunday last week, he was the risk of a second election - Luxon reckoned he could still make a deal but “no guarantees”.
By Thursday – two days before the election – Luxon was claiming to be far more certain he could cut a deal as the polls increasingly showed he would have no choice.
Luxon’s campaign had run smoothly and strongly until the Peters prospect cast its shadow.
He is a natural campaigner, who knows how to ask questions and get a conversation going. It had the effect of making voters feel as if they had been listened to.
People were curious about him. One woman waited ages to ask what his exercise regime was. He was happier to answer that than a number of the questions the media were asking (an 8km run around the Ōrākei Basin and its surrounds).
In Hamilton, another woman asked about abortion. Luxon assumed she was concerned about his anti-abortion views, and assured her the current laws would not change. He assumed wrong: “That’s the problem,” she said.
She told Luxon she’d vote for him as the best of a bad bunch – but it was a shame he wouldn’t tighten abortion laws, or at least remove safe zones, because the Catholic vote was a large vote.
Aware the women’s vote was an even larger vote and the cameras were watching, Luxon held his ground.
His campaign had strong echoes of the John Key campaigns.
It wasn’t just traipsing around, shaking hands and having selfies. He did things. In what must have been the most absurd, glorious visit of the campaign, he went to a goat farm in Patumāhoe and tried to milk the goats.
He learned how to pour a pint in Greytown, he went jet boating, he tried out icecream scooping at Rollickin’ Gelato and a number of other icecream venues: soft serve and scoop.
He’d often grade himself on his achievements. A 3/10 for the goats, not much better for the pint but the publican said she’d employ him anyway: a teetotaller wouldn’t drink the profits.
We discovered Luxon doesn’t just try, laugh and move on. He keeps trying until he’s made a fair fist of it. It’s a characteristic his team used on social media: a clip of Luxon trying to flip a water bottle until it landed standing upright. What does this tell us about Luxon’s character? That he’s a perfectionist? Doesn’t give up? We asked him and he said he was a “reforming perfectionist”.
His walkabouts were done at pace: the media scrum sometimes had to jog backwards, tripping over steps and signs, to keep up with him.
He had a startling tendency to bond with other bald men by rubbing or patting their heads. On one occasion he even pulled a beanie off to see if someone was bald underneath it.
Winston Peters dismissed the Labour and National campaigns as “photo opportunities, photo shoots, and all sorts of things like sausage rolls and eating icecream” rather than the real issues.
But it worked for Luxon, who was still an unknown quantity to the voters. Luxon had had to answer the question of whether he was likeable, whether he could be trusted.
The earlier weeks of his campaign were aimed at doing that and the exposure saw his preferred Prime Minister rankings tick up to the point he was on level pegging with his rival, Chris Hipkins.
The Peters question had also proved a turning point in Labour’s campaign.
Hipkins had a campaign in three parts. The only familiar theme in the three parts was Hipkins’ appetite for pastry.
Part one was a lacklustre affair of awkward conversations with voters and policies that failed to fire.
It was as if Labour had forgotten how to campaign or had not adjusted its campaign to suit Hipkins rather than Ardern.
Part two was six days in a hotel room with Covid-19. Funnily enough, it was in these six days that Labour’s polling started to hold and lift back up.
Part three delivered the almighty fight-back. Luxon’s rule-in of Peters, the increasing likelihood that Luxon would need to call on Peters and ongoing questions around National’s tax cuts and wider policy offerings gave Hipkins something to fight back with. He was on more comfortable ground: attack mode.
He came out with a smile and with energy. Lacking his rival’s knack for conversation with strangers, he learned it was often enough to simply smile and ask if they wanted a photo. Most did. He seemed confident: there was no indication in his demeanour that he had given up.
If it were not for the polls telling otherwise, the two campaigns at that point would have felt as if they were neck and neck again – not 8-10 points adrift.
Luxon campaigned better on the footpaths, through the malls and at the goat farms.
Hipkins campaigned better on strategy and behind the microphones – and, yes, on attack.
Hipkins’ weapon of choice was not small talk or his own policy offerings: it was doubt.
He tried to get people to doubt Luxon and his promises, and to doubt whether change would deliver something better.
Sometimes the attack was ridiculous: such as accusing Luxon of being a chicken because he could not fit in a re-scheduled leaders’ debate.
But he was relentless on the things he knew were making a difference to the voting. By the last week, Labour’s internal polling was showing that it was making a difference and some public polls followed suit, putting the left bloc equal with or even ahead of National and Act. The question mark was Winston Peters - and whether Labour’s voters would get out and vote.
By the last week, National’s momentum in the polls had stalled and started sliding back – all the capital from its tax cuts offering gone.
Sometimes National was a willing accomplice in that: the late move to warn that National might fail to get a deal with NZ First and force a second election was fertile soil for Hipkins to raise the prospect of “months, if not years of uncertainty raining down on the country”.
They talked about each other and sometimes also talked about how the other was talking about them. Luxon repeatedly accused Hipkins of running a negative campaign, of personal attacks, even as he himself ran negative campaign about Labour.
Walkabouts can be instructive in revealing what voters think will be an election outcome.
Despite National’s attempts to persuade voters the race was still close, on one of Luxon’s walkabouts in Hamilton, it was very apparent a fair few had decided he already had the election in the bag.
A couple walking past a jewellery store saw him inside: “Look, it’s the Prime Minister,” one said.
Later, a couple of teachers talked to him. One said “Hello, Prime Minister” - not in accident, but by way of making it clear he thought it would be the outcome. Afterward, they said they had voted for Winston Peters in the past. They still liked “Winnie” but this time it was National. They didn’t trust Peters after 2017.
The voters can also be merciless – behind the leaders’ backs.
In Sylvia Park Mall a week before election day, just as Chris Hipkins is convincing himself he still has a chance and there is momentum in his campaign, Maghal Trivedo lined up for a photo with him in front of Labour hoardings.
It turned out Hipkins’ self-belief was not universally shared.
As soon as Hipkins had gone, Trivedo was asked if he thought Hipkins had a chance of winning. “No way!” he said. Did he want Winston Peters getting back in then?
“No way!” again.
Hipkins’ own answer to the first question had been a “yes” since he emerged from Covid-19 and hit the campaign with renewed vigour. It seemed to be infectious, at least among the party faithful. They turned up to wave signs and to phone banks, they cheered him.
Whatever Labour’s problem was, it was not Hipkins himself.
Campaigns in which a leader is unpopular or going to lose badly are desperate, desultory affairs. There are days of leaders wandering through cavernous malls with voters pretending not to see them, refusing to meet their gaze or scurrying into shops to avoid an encounter.
There are electorate candidates keeping both party branding and leaders’ faces off their billboards, except for a few emergency installations when the leader comes to visit.
They must be soul-destroying journeys.
Hipkins’ campaign was not that campaign. People did not dislike him. They were just a bit sick of Labour.
His own party members and MPs had not turned on him, nor had many of the public. However, that did not mean votes.
Neither leader was mobbed in the way of Key and Ardern in their later elections: then again, neither of them was mobbed in their very first elections either. They were not Big Names then.
On the Thursday before the election, Luxon was visiting an early childhood centre in Te Atatū Peninsula. By that stage, dinosaurs had somehow made their way into the campaign: a bizarre rumour for which there is still zero evidence that Luxon vetoed an Air NZ advertisement because he did not believe in dinosaurs.
By now Luxon knew the drill: laugh your way out of ludicrous things. At the early childhood centre, the Frozen song Let it Go was playing in the background. One kid had a dinosaur tracksuit on, another had a dinosaur hoodie. There were dinosaur T-shirts and dinosaur shorts. It was as if they were trolling him.
One had a unicorn T-shirt on, but nobody asked if he believed in unicorns.
One of the unanswerable questions of this campaign could end being what would have happened had Luxon not done his video saying he was ruling Peters in.
Did it make any difference? Would Peters have gone up in the polls anyway?
On the way out, one of the National Party members was being asked about the Petersaurus. “No,” she said. “I don’t like Winston. We don’t want Winston. We want a landslide National victory.”
By then, thanks to Peters, the chances of that seemed as unlikely as the chances of unicorns being real.
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
A reminder that electoral rules prohibit media coverage of the campaign on Saturday (election day). But join us at nzherald.co.nz from 7pm for extensive live coverage and analysis of the results as they come in, featuring ZB’s Mike Hosking and Heather du Plessis-Allan and our panel of experts including Madison Reidy, Shayne Currie, Claire Trevett, Audrey Young and Barry Soper.
