Written By: - Date published: 7:55 am, October 25th, 2008 - 42 comments
Categories: polls -
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Polling trends
Rather than argue about individual polls, it is more interesting to look at the overall trends. A number of people have put an excellent summary of the polls up on wikipedia.
What is noticeable to me about this chart is that the National support looks very soft. Coming up towards an election with the less committed people making decisions, they are polling downwards. The recent polls are jumping all over the place, but National has a much higher rogue factor downwards.
Great work from the people doing this summary.
hat-tip: outofbed
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If you super impose the preferred PM on the Party vote as below
http://www.nelsongreens.org.nz/images/NZ_opinion_polls_2005-2008_-PPM.jpg
It yields a strange result Labour Mirrors HC and National is 8-10% higher then JK
Is this significant ? or did I just cock it up ?
That’s an interesting observation! The two of course aren’t really comparable, but…. its still an interesting observation! You have to wonder who the 20% of potential National voters who don’t want Key as PM do actually want (hint: its not Brash!).
trevva,
Yes its an interesting observation I wonder if any poll gurus out there
can tell me why the difference ?
in a vain attempt to get an answer to his question
OOB moves this post briefly to the top
Trevva/oob,
It’s because the two questions are asked separately, and the results for one aren’t discarded if you say “don’t know” to the other.
I can think of two reasons why the result might be as it is for pref-PM…
1) Some people intend to vote National, but don’t know who the leader is
2) Those voting for minor parties predominantly prefer Clark to Key
DPF once said “The party vote is everything and the correlation between preferred PM rating and party vote rating is not that strong. ”
but it appears to match exactly. for the preferred PM and Lab
so yes it does appear that a large number of voters do not know Key is the Nats leader
Do you think, if they ever find out, the National party votes % will drop?
He might have been talking about Australian polling.
I don’t think the Nat’s will be worried – it’s a similar phenomenon to what Brash, English, Shipley, and even Clark, went through as new leaders. I think those of us acutely aware of politics forget just how little interest the rest of the public has in this, and don’t know the personalities involved (outside of the proper campaign period).