frogblog

As I suspected it might, TVNZ’s poll tonight tells a rather different story from the Sunday Star-Times poll out this morning. The whole of TVNZ’s poll was done after the tax cut announcement, and it has Labour ahead of National by three points, 43 plays 40. This is a closing of the eight-point gap in the TVNZ poll from last Sunday, but it will nevertheless be worrying for National that it is still behind after a week that was dominated by what was meant to be its king-hit policy.

Among the third parties, only the Greens will be smiling, up one to seven percent. This is the Greens’ best result in the TVNZ poll in almost two years, and is especially heartening because the TVNZ poll tends to understate our support relative to the other polls. NZ First is down one to 5 percent, and all other parties are well below the threshold. United and Act must be starting to panic. With three weeks to go, they’re both bogged down under 2 percent.

Plugging today’s polls into frogblog’s average graphic shaves a point off Labour’s lead. Labour now leads National by around four percentage points. The other significant movement is that the Greens have reached the 7% we got in the 2002 election, and have overtaken NZ First as the third most popular party. The upshot of this new data is that the Labour-Progressive-Green combination have enough seats to form a majority government, but the majority would be a razor-thin one. This remains a very tight election.

As for what today’s polls tell us about the overall shape of the race: well, National has managed to get a lift out of its tax cut announcement. However, whether that lift has been enough to get it back on par with (or even ahead of) Labour remains to be seen. We’ll have to wait for a few more polls before making any definitive statements about that.

The new data and charts are here.

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