Vote Compass NZ 2017: Marketing Insights into Public Views on Policy and Leaders

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of descriptive statistics from the 250,000+ Vote Compass data set to help us to understand what the market wanted. Analysing the whole sample but also by demographics and each party’s prospective voters, it finds that health was the top issue, closely followed by the economy, then housing, education, social welfare, and the environment. Politicians thus face the challenge of implementing substantial social investment and infrastructure policies while maintaining economic competitiveness. The products offered by Labour, New Zealand First, and the Greens were the most closely aligned with public opinion in terms of policy, while Labour offered the most likeable leadership. National needs to reflect on being the least responsive to public opinion in their policy offering; Labour needs to defend their market share and leader’s popularity; NZ First need to focus on retaining supporters and the Greens work on improving the reputation of their leadership.