How far has National really fallen?

• lprent
• 2 years ago
• Categories: Politics, polls
• Tags: colmar brunton

Because I love accurate comparisons and because the media typically do a shit job of looking at political polls, I decided that a look backwards to a comparable poll in the last parliament.

So One News – Colmar Poll from the start of the mid-term year – early Feb 2019, the election, and the latest poll.

Date	Event	NAT	LAB	NZF	GRN	ACT	TOP	MRI	NCP
22–26 Jan 2022	Poll	32	40	2	9	11	2	2	1
17 Oct 2020	2020 election	25.6	50.0	2.6	7.9	7.6	1.5	1.2	1.5
15 Mar 2019	Chch shootings
9–13 Feb 2019	Poll	42	45	3	6	0.9	0.6	1.4	0.2

I left in the significiant event that occurred after the Feb 2019 poll because it saves explaining to the bewildered with Jacinda Derangement issues talking about Jacinda’s ‘luck’ about the actual sequence of events.

Obviously the significiant political shift at a polling level between the two polls.

• National dropped 10% over the last 3 years and Act went up by 10%.
• Labour dropped 5% and Greens went up by 3%.
• Generally the very small parties have increased a tad, but are still unlikely to gain seats in parliament.
• Nat/Act are now 43% rather than ~41% in Feb 2019
• Lab/Green are now 49% rather than 51% in Feb 2019

Overall it looks like the right are making very little headway in an overall goal of gaining the treasury benches. They have clearly just been shifting a lot of support from National to Act.

On the left, the Greens have made steady progress. Labour, as you’d expect from a second term governing party has been slowly dropping support – but little of it appears to going right.

I find the leader preferences tedious and usually irrelevant for overall results. I guess that the media need to get their talking points somewhere because they seem to have problems with understanding numbers. However for what it is worth…

Leader	Feb 2019	Jan 2022
Jacinda Ardern	41.8	35
Christopher Luxon	?	17
Simon Bridges	5.0	0.4
Judith Collins	6.2	0.2
David Seymour	?	6

I’d expect that most of the Luxon 13% rise is the usual honeymoon. However it only resulted in a party vote increase of 4% to National, probably mostly from a 3% drop to Act’s soft support. That kind of minimal translation of personal support to party support is pretty much what I’d expect from visible leadership.

What leadership counts in our parliamentary system is if a party house leadership can weld their caucus together in common cause. That is something that will take some time to show for a first term National MP catapulted into leadership. Especially since the National caucus and party organisation have had quite a few fractured years to get over.

Over the last 3 years, skipping all of the Covid-19 and Christchurch shootings, mostly what you can say from the polling numbers over the last 3 years is that National is severely diminished – their support appears to have mostly gone to Act.

But on a conservative/progressive balance – nothing much has changed over the last three years. As government lead, Labour has been slightly leaking support. But the real surprise is that the Greens as a smaller party associated with the government have been gaining support – that has been unusual since the first MMP parliament came in in 1996.