The missing pillars of National (Patreon)

Yesterday Chris Bishop tweeted 

I’m just imagining what people would be saying if @NZNationalParty was in government and we had the slowest vaccine roll-out in the developed world

It came after Bish has been hot on the attack over the delayed Covid vaccine roll-out. Day after day, Bish and some of the National surrogates on Twitter have been relentless in their criticism of the vaccine roll-out. The above tweet is a very clear sign of frustration that National just can't gain any traction with the issue.

National has struggled to gain traction with any issue. The party has seemed aimless and strategically bereft, firing off random shots at everything. Trying to make Māori separatism an issue. The electric vehicle rebate. They've even had a crack at the Trans community, influenced in no doubt by their anti-trans press sec in the National Leader's Office.

You may have noticed that for a while, Collins was focused heavily on the Māori separatist issue. Banging on and on about the He Puapua report. I'd wondered if this was an issue that was just dreamed up by National, or if they were privy to more information than me and people outside of Wellington really were worried about some kind of imagined racial separatist issue. But then we had a couple of polls come out that showed National had made next to no progress. And just like that, He Puapua has disappeared from National's attack lines.

It's interesting that it took some public polling before National moved. I would have thought that they'd be doing plenty of internal polling, not only on their own numbers, but on issues and focus group testing etc. But I've been recently told that National has found itself without three key external support groups that made the National of John Key such a slick machine.

National's pollster has historically been David Farrar's Curia, however rumour has it National hasn't been doing any internal polling at all so has had no idea what issues resonate with the public until public polling tells them.

They also haven't been using Crosby Textor who had been providing National with strategic assistance; even if only at the beginning of the year, someone would come and help National with the strategic direction of the party and develop communication strategies.

There's also no Topham Guerin to help with their social media (there is still a bloke who works for National who is very, very good at what he does, but he's constantly overlooked for promotion).

And the reason National has been missing these organisations is the root cause, which is the donations have dried up. The wealthy business folk that National has traditionally relied on have bailed. They see 2023 as a lost cause and so aren't spending their money. Without the money, and with a greatly reduced parliamentary presence, National has had to rely on itself, where once it could use experts.

This lack of money, I'm told, is why Peter Goodfellow was able to get re-elected as Party President, despite performing abysmally. Peter said that if he was re-elected as President, he'd underwrite National's 2023 election. With the bank accounts looking so grim this was a very attractive proposition.

This is why National has been barking at every car. Because they don't know what is working and what isn't. They also don't have the resource to properly communicate or strategise, and they can't afford the social media gurus. I knew National was in bad shape, but I didn't realise it was this bad.

At least with Labour, when they were in the darkest days of the Cunliffe era, they could rely on the Unions to chuck them some coin.

And so this is why Bish tweeted what he did. He knows National is dreadfully unpopular, that's why he conceded that people would be lashing out if the vaccine was being rolled out as poorly as it is, under a National Government. But until there's some kind of circuit breaker that jolts them into professionalism, we're going to see them flail and struggle. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving group.