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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 14 Sep 2007 11:47 pm |
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Saturday, 15 September: Another disastrous poll for Labour. Another wonderful poll for New Zealand, present and future.
The Dominion Post reports today on an A C Neilsen poll with these results:
National - 50%
Labour - 36%
The Greens - 6%
NZ First - 3%
Maori Party - 2%
ACT - 1%
United Future - 1%
Destiny Church - 1%
Nothing much new there, you might say, but the DomPost seeks to make much of a statistic showing that 62% of voters now believe that National will win the next election. Even 46% of Labour voters believe the same thing, apparently. I am astonished to find that so many members of that loopy persuasion have the firm grip on reality which that view implies, but there it is: it would seem that even Labour voters can see writing when it appears on walls.
The DomPost says that this perception is enormously significant, because:
"Allowing the perception of defeat to set in is the political kiss of death."
Well, maybe. If the reverse is true - that allowing the perception of victory is the kiss of life - then Mike Moore is still prime minister, the All Blacks won the last four World Cups, and Paul Holmes is New Zealand's leading television personality.
Much more interesting, in my view, is the polling on preferred prime minister. Here, John Key is now out-polling Helen Clark by a wide margin (41% to 34%). The DomPost also describes Clark as "Labour's trump card", something I expect it to continue to do when the margin between the party leaders is 20%: there has to be something positive to say about Labour. If anything about the latest poll says "Goodbye, Labour" is it surely Key's rapid ascent in the popularity stakes. The attack on Key can now be seen to have been an abject failure: if anything, it damaged Labour. As, of course, it deserved to do.
Clark is right about one thing, however: as the election nears the small parties can be expected to do better. In New Zealand First's case, they are going to have to do better, or that party is going to disappear into political history, along with Social Credit and the other bands of snake-oil salesmen who have roamed the New Zealand political landscape over the years.
Who will cry for Winston Peters when he is at last obliterated from political life? Restaurateurs and taxi drivers, perhaps. The rest of us will be dry-eyed, I suspect.Attached Image (viewed 94 times):
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 15 Sep 2007 12:39 am |
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One question which you may be asking yourself is whether Labour parliamentarians are showing any signs of humility in the face of the mounting evidence that most New Zealanders want to see the back of them.
The answer to this question is readily accessible to anyone who listens to Question Time in Parliament. The hubris - not to say arrogance and rudeness - of Labour Ministers like Mallard and Cullen (but they are only the worst of them) has to be heard to be believed.
What these unlovely people have yet to grasp - what, I believe, they will never grasp - is that most New Zealanders are by now heartily sick of this unpleasant performance. As Mike Moore said, it is behaviour reminiscent of Muldoon at his worst.
Mercifully, we won't have to endure very much more of it.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 16 Oct 2007 09:27 pm |
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Two months ago I reported on the latest TV One-Colmar Brunton poll, which showed these results:
National 53%
Labour 36%
The Greens 5%
NZ First 3%
Maori Party 1%
United Future 1%
ACT 1%
Since then there has been a poll showing a slight improvement in Labour's position. This has deteriorated in the latest poll, the results of which were released on Monday, 15 October:
National 49%
Labour 37%
The Greens 6%
NZ First 2%
Maori Party 3%
ACT 1%
The next poll will be interesting, as the extent to which Labour is held responsible for the All Blacks' defeat emerges.
Meantime, support for Winston Peters as PM has fallen to 3%, and his party's support is now at 2%. Whether it can make the 5% threshhold in eleven months' time seems highly doubtful. Peters won't care, of course - he has made his pile - but his supporters will be looking for somewhere to go in 2011.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 16 Dec 2007 06:24 pm |
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There have been some speed wobbles in National's path to victory in 2008, but the overall picture remains the same: Labour is heading for a (thoroughly-merited) landslide defeat. Increasingly, however, NZ First and the Greens look to be at significant risk.
The two latest poll results, reported this morning:
National - 54%
Labour - 35%
[TV One-Colmar Brunton]
National - 51%
Labour - 36%
[TV3-TNS]
Commenting on the results, John Key attributed a lot of the margin to Labour's handling of the Electoral Finance Bill, which will have the effect of restricting parties' access to private funding at a time when the Labour Government has been spending more than any government in New Zealand history promoting its own performance. Will Labour be able to buy another election? Only time will tell.
Another commentator on the polls, political scientist Barry Gustafson, had a different view. He said he thought that Trevor Mallard's behaviour had been a key factor in the further deterioration of Labour's position.
Thank you, Trevor. The nation is in your debt.
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David Harcourt
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 19 Mar 2008 08:43 pm |
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After a very long run (of nearly a year) of bad polls for the Labour Government there is bad news and there is good news.
The bad news is that the Morgan Poll published on 7 March reported the following results:
National - 49.5%
Labour - 35%
The Greens - 7%
NZ First - 4%
Maori Party - 2%
ACT (aka Rodney Hide) - 1%
United Future (aka Peter Dunne) - 0.5%
Progressive Alliance (aka Jim Anderton) - 0.5%
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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Posted: 3 Apr 2008 05:37 am |
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The good news is that the 7 March was just a blip/dead cat bounce.
In a Morgan Poll two weeks later, on 21 March, National was back at 51%, Labour on 34%, the Greens were on 6% (the third consecutive poll in which they have lost support), NZ First was down 1% to 3% (yay!), the Maori Party was unchanged at 2% and both ACT (1.5%) and United Future (1%) had gained half a percent.
Phew! That's a relief.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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Posted: 20 Apr 2008 08:16 pm |
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Mixed results in two poll results announced this morning.
A TV3 poll shows a big recovery for Labour:
National - 48%
Labour - 38%
Greens - 5.8%
NZ First - 3.4%
Maori - 2.9%
But a TV One poll - conducted, apparently, after the TV3 poll - has a very different result:
National - 54%
Labour - 35%
Greens - 3.7%
Maori - 3.2%
NZ First - 1.5%
ACT - 1.1%
Both polls have a margin of error of roughly 3%. As the difference between the two polls is beyond the margin of error we can only hope that the second poll is accurate and there has been a dramatic swing back to National. Time will tell.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 29 Apr 2008 09:48 pm |
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It looks as if it's going to be six months' more misery for the Clark Labour Government, and six months of mounting pleasure for those of us who look forward to its demise.
It would seem that Labour's recent minor resurgence in the polls is an instance of dead cat bounce and that the cat has now descended to the floor again, leaving these results in the latest poll in the New Zealand Herald:
National - 52.1%
Labour - 37.2%
Greens - 5.2%
NZ First - 1.5%
So this year's election continues to hold the prospect of:
* a landslide defeat for Labour
* and Winston Peters and New Zealand First being consigned to the dustbin of history
This is too much happiness.
Where's the downside?
Surely there has to be one doesn't there?
Or can we have our cake, eat it too, and have more the next day?
Amazingly, it seems so.
Here is how Herald reporter John Armstrong commented on the lastest results:
Today's Herald-DigiPoll survey is grim reading for Labour for reasons other than the obvious. It's not just that it has slipped a further 5 percentage points behind National. The party's frustration is that this has happened after a sustained period when the Labour-led minority Government had been functioning more effectively than it has for quite some time, give or take the odd distraction.
But there has been no payoff in the polls. Sometimes a mood shift in the electorate can take time to register in the polls. Labour will be praying that this is the case. But that is really clutching at straws. The electorate's mood gives every appearance of having solidified. Not only have voters taken the phone off the hook, in Labour's case, they have buried it deep in the bottom drawer.
And not only in Labour's case. NZ First's waving of the flag of economic nationalism combined with an injudicious bit of Asian-bashing has done nothing to lift its stocks. Winston Peters' party is registering at a paltry 1.5 per cent. Essentially NZ First's parliamentary future hinges on whether Peters has a good election campaign, as he did in 2002, or a bad one, as occurred in 2005. It is not entirely coincidental that National was in a weakened state in 2002, from which it had largely recovered three years later.
Since 2005, National has vacuumed up most of NZ First's remaining support. To wrest back those voters, Peters will argue that it is essential NZ First be in Parliament to keep a National Government on the straight and narrow. But it is probably too early for voters to be focusing on such messages. Peters' ability to grab attention - no doubt enhanced by his standing in Tauranga against National's Bob Clarkson - means he can bide his time until campaigning proper starts.
Labour is simply running out of time. Four months of election year have passed without it having made any discernible inroads into National's support. Ideally, Labour would have wanted to go into the Budget, now only three weeks away, on something of a roll. Instead, the Budget will now inevitably be burdened with the expectation that it be Labour's circuit-breaker. The risk is that expectations of its contents are raised to such dangerously high levels that Finance Minister Michael Cullen cannot satisfy them.
The Budget is not Labour's last throw of the dice. It will save some big announcements for the formal election campaign. The Prime Minister does not believe in circuit-breakers anyway. She has repeatedly said Labour's core support is holding steady, positioning the party to tackle National head on in the swinging vote territory of middle-income New Zealand when voters start thinking seriously about the choices on offer. So it will be particularly galling for Labour that the Herald poll shows John Key making significant gains among one segment of the electorate where Helen Clark has traditionally dominated - female voters.
Adding to the agony, National's leader is at his highest rating as preferred Prime Minister despite Labour's campaign to denigrate and discredit him as "Slippery John". The gender breakdown shows Key is drawing female voters away from Clark. That is important because her cross-over appeal has drawn female voters to Labour who might not otherwise contemplate voting for the party. Whether they have shifted to National as a result of Key softening his party's image or are turned off by Labour's attacks on Key or are simply reacting to increased pressures on household Budgets, Labour must win them back.
Potential circuit-breaker or not, Budget Day is the one day Labour will have voters' undivided attention. If the polls don't budge, then what? The load on Cullen's shoulders just got heavier.
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