A tripod of voting intentions

The three polls published in the last 18 or so hours are a real mixed bag for the Greens.

The NBR poll (not online) has the Greens drop from 9 percent in their last outing to 7 this time. This is no great surprise, as Rod said in the Dom Post at the time of their previous poll “I would say the poll is overrating us … because I think we are only about seven. ”

The TV3 poll (also not online) has us unchanged at 6.

The NZ Herald poll has us at 3.2 percent, down 0.8 and behind the Maori Party on 3.4.

We’ve been trending downwards on the Herald poll since April, which is somewhat anti-intuitive as that’s when we started moving up in all the other polls as the Zimbabwe issue emerged.

Clearly something is amiss with someone’s methodology when three polls in such quick succession have such wildly differing results.

Despite Labour’s dramatic bounce into the lead in two of three polls, the coalition sums are still pointing to a messy election outcome.

TV3 has the combined Nats-Winston at 46 percent and Labour-Green at 45. NBR has Labour-Green at 48, Nats-Winston at 43. The Herald has Labour-Green at 47.1 and Nats-Winston at 44.6, although of course in that poll we’re gone.

What’s clear from this muddle is that neither the left or the right would be able to form a ‘clean’ two-party coalition. Throw in a Maori Party and/or Anderton overhang and the make up of the next Government, whoever ‘wins’ the election, becomes even harder to predict.

frog says

8 Responses to “A tripod of voting intentions”

  1. sock thief Says:

    Bring back FPP.

  2. Peter Says:

    Nooooooooo
    no bloody way
    Never
    no

    Though vote for the Nats and we might just get that

  3. bjchip Says:

    Sock Thief

    Are you trolling again? :-)

    respectfully
    BJ

  4. icehawk Says:

    sockie,

    Oh no. No-no-no.
    Not even slightly yes, just NO..

    Your proposal is to disenfranchise around 20% of voters (by current polls), not to mention those in safe electorates (whose votes become worthless), and worst of all moving back to the tyranny of the minority whereby a party with 40% of the vote could push through any legislation they wanted, at all, without limits or controls.

    No. Uh-uh, no. No.

  5. bjchip Says:

    Hey, that poll has a margin of error of 3.1 points.

    Maybe we don’t exist! :-)

    respectfully
    BJ

  6. peterquixote Says:

    fascists have a prayer meeting for David Lange this morning, lots of thems crying, remebering the jokes he tell while douglas and prebbs works away fast, we wants a state funeral for him when it happen, it very sad to us, we have free talks about everything in his honour, , and one fascist saying he has this recurring dream that he in love with helen and he going to shoot hisself to end it all, so we send him to the psickchyatrist, and he gets a lots more drugs for the sickness benefit,
    and well we donts understand the polls either, but we says that
    MMP IS MORE PRESIDENTIAL THAN EVER, peoples donts care about their electorate MPs anymore just who the boss is, every party scrapping for the total vote and it dont matter if a monkey in a given electorate,

  7. fastbike Says:

    The margin of error is for the main parties. It is probably closer to 1% for us. Jack Vowles wrote a good article recently about political polls.

    I can’t find a link to his recent article but this one from 2001 gives the picture. Enjoy.
    http://www.mediawatch.co.nz/default,292.sm

  8. Craig Ranapia Says:

    The creepy thing is that Winston First is at the heart of every scenario - which should give any thinking voter conniptions.

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