Let's talk about this election. To start off, I'd like to compare the final result of the election with the last two polls of the term, one including Alliance and one not.

Obviously, National going from 24% to 48% is a pretty big shift. National by far had the strongest campaign this election -- some have suggested that it's a case of basically spamming low-effort campaign posts, and I'd like to be clear -- low-effort campaign posts were not marked well. I can tell when someone is just regurgitating the same points almost verbatim with no effort or care. There were some posts from National that there were very obviously low-effort, but there were also some very good posts from National.

Overall, however, the effort of National this election was just so beyond everyone else that it was difficult for them not to do well. Post totals are a blunt tool for measuring quality and effort, but I feel like it is useful for a broader view in this instance. This table tallies all list and electorate posts in the election:

National was indisputably the most active party in campaigning, and I don't think they won based off low-effort spam. Of course, there are a few objections I can think of, so I'll go into them now.

The first is that this result didn't weight termtime activity enough. National were less active than ACT and Labour throughout the term -- they shouldn't be able to go from third placed to a runaway lead. I don't agree with this, but I see where it's coming from. The problem is that activity last term was driven by very few people -- each party essentially has only one or two active members. In the past, this may have been the case in termtime, but activity usually spiked at elections. This time, though, ACT had pretty much only its two active members as well as eels, and Labour had just Madi. Compare this to the Nats, who got basically everyone they stood to post at least once.

I get the argument that this is a small sim and that, if only two people are active throughout the term that should be reflected more significantly in election results, but the way I see it, with a 13-person Parliament, a party of a couple of people is never going to go beyond maybe twice their size.

Had we gotten the same result as we did in the 25 July poll, do I think it would have been better for the sim (in terms of amount of active people elected)? No, not really. I can see the argument that most of National's 6 MPs are likely to be inactive, but had we gotten the same result as in that poll, would ACT's 5 MPs have been active? No disrespect to Ina and Bailey, but I'm not sure if they would have been, and I'm even less sure if Labour's 5 MPs would have been. While the political dynamics have changed, I think the end result elected about the same amount of active MPs.

To me, this is a case to reduce the size of Parliament more than anything else. I'm not saying we should, but what I'll be doing this term is closely monitoring activity. A variety of things could happen, so I'm not going to make any predictions, but if we have a large number of inactive MPs and not many active people outside Parliament, I think I'd look at reducing the size of Parliament. But crucially, if National can't maintain the activity they did in this election throughout the term, they will recieve quite a rude awakening -- so fair warning.

That aside, I'd like to address another thing -- why did Labour do so well? They only had one person campaigning (Madi) who was focused on her own electorate, so how did they still manage to hold onto 3 seats and 23% of the vote? If you look at the last poll with Alliance in it, this seems even more confusing -- Labour was on 26.4% then, they're on 22.6% now -- what gives? Well, Alliance dissolving gave Labour a pretty big boost. It meant that they basically started the campaign in first. Looking at the 22 July poll, the left had a combined result of 41% -- now the only real leftist party is on 22.65%.

If you folks have any questions, please feel free to comment them down below and I'll be happy to answer.