Poll of polls looking good

• Anthony R0bins
• 11 years ago
• Categories: election 2014, polls
• Tags: polls, roy morgan

It’s an occupational hazard of being political obsessives of course, but we (bloggers / writers / commenters) tend to over react to individual polls. Polls come with built in “noise”, error that means that the figures quoted can only be approximate. The last Roy Morgan in January had National on 46% (unchanged) and Labour on 31.5 (unchanged). Our own Zetetic wrote a piece lamenting that Labour was “flatlining” in the polls. But were they really? On that evidence we couldn’t be sure.

In contrast yesterday’s Roy Morgan had National at 44% (down 2) and Labour 34.5 (up 3):

As the headline puts it “LABOUR, GREENS WITH MINOR PARTIES WOULD WIN ELECTION”. So is Labour surging ahead? Maybe. On this evidence we can’t be sure.

What is more useful are the “poll of poll” measures that weight and combine several polls over an extended period. Here’s the Pundit poll of polls from January:

From this we can see trends with more confidence:

• The Nats are slowly falling
• Labour is slowly climbing
• The Greens have fallen from their post election high but are stabilising

(When the current Roy Morgan is added it will add a bit more support.)

For all that many commenters here are impatient with Labour, it is the Greens who are both down on their post election high, and static. But over all the poll of polls is looking good for the political left.

I want to see both main parties of the Left doing better – moving forward together (well clear of the range where NZF or any other party would hold the balance of power). In my personal opinion good coordination and cooperation between Labour and the Greens could achieve this, could be the game changer. So how about it?…