Puzzling

Published: September 7, 2005

by frog

So, a TVNZ poll out last Sunday had National 8 points ahead. A TV3 poll out today has Labour 9 points ahead – 45% plays 36%. That’s a seventeen-point swing in a few days. Now, the TVNZ and TV3 polls are reputed to favour National and Labour respectively – but that doesn’t begin to explain this seventeen-point discrepancy. There’s volatility here that appears quite unprecedented. What on earth is happening? I half expect the political pundits in the Press Gallery to throw their hands in the air, say “God, I don’t know”, give up, and go home.

The best theory I can come up with (and, I stress, it’s just a theory – probably with little statistical merit) is that National got a couple of very large spikes in the polls off the back of its tax cut and race announcements, but that these advantages quickly evaporated. You can imagine voters hearing the National message, saying “yeah, that sounds great”, then thinking about it for a while and concluding “nah, I prefer the Labour lot”. If this theory is right, one would conclude that the political environment is fundamentally conducive to a third Labour term, but that National has been successful at scratching a couple of itches which give it short-term poll boosts that soon disappear.

By the same token, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this polling madness continued, and we had hugely vacillating leads for both Labour and National for the remaning days of the campaign. I’m genuinely bamboozled. I guess we’re probably going to go into election night not quite knowing what to expect.

As for the third parties: the Greens are up 1 to 7%, a heartening result, while NZ First is down 1 to 5%. I remain convinced that the Greens are the only party sucessfully avoiding the third party squeeze.

TV3 also asked some other questions which were revealing about the mood of the electorate. Asked whether they consider Clark and Brash capable leaders, 85% said yes for the Labour Leader and 49% said yes for the National Leader. Asked whether they consider the two “rather inexperienced”, 9% said yes for Clark and 69% said yes for Brash. These are Brash’s two problems: next to Clark, he seems neither competent nor experienced enough. Asked whether tax cuts would be the issue that decided their vote, 85% said no and 14% yes. Taken together, these results make pretty sober reading for National. However, I have to say, all this volatility makes me very gun-shy about making bold pronouncements about this data :)

Now that National has declared a favoured coalition partner in United, we have two quite distinct teams to compare: Labour/Progs/Green vs National/United. In the TV3 poll, LPG leads NU by 52% to 37.5%; on frogblog’s averager LPG leads by about 8 points, 49.86% plays 41.90%. Now that we know the configuration of the two prospective governments, I’ve added two more graphs to the info I upload with each poll update: showing how much of the party vote and how many seats each “side” has according to the polls. At the moment, LPG have 60 seats and NU have 50. Enjoy.

frog says

Published in Campaign by frog on Wed, September 7th, 2005   

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