ICYMI: that festive pileup of opinion polling, in one snapshot.
It’s just like London buses. You wait for ages for a poll to arrive and then a rush of them arrive at once. In the blur of December you might well have missed them. What, you’re probably asking, is the story?
The story of four polls – that’s Verian for 1News, Freshwater Strategy for the Post, Curia for the Taxpayers’ Union, Talbot Mills for the Labour Party (as provided to Stuff) and Roy Morgan – published in the last fortnight is this:
The most recent of those polls, for 1News, is just a hair’s breadth from the election result 14 months ago, and it’s been pretty consistent in the intervening time. With one exception: the sole party to really leap, presumably as a result of the treaty principles bill and the pushback it has generated, is Te Pāti Māori.
If we take the average of those four polls (they haven’t been weighted for authority or sample size or anything like that, but this is a finger in the wind) and plug it into a parliament, the seats would fall this way:
National: 41
Labour: 37
Greens: 14
Act: 12
NZ First: 8
Te Pāti Māori: 8
Chop that into blocs, and the parties of the governing coalition has 61, the opposition trio has 59.
Speaking of the treaty principles bill: the legislation, now in the hands of the justice select committee, was subject of a question in the Verian/1News poll. Asked if they supported the bill, 23% said yup, 36% said nope, and 39% said they didn’t know enough about it to answer either way.
What of the Chris-off? Verian has Luxon holding a decent lead, 24% to 15% and Curia is in the same terrain, at 27.1% preferring Luxon to Hipkins’ 18.9%. Not so Talbot Mills, where it’s Hipkins by a whisker, 22.7% to 22.1%, while the Freshwater poll matched the two men called Chris – in fact both were called Christopher in their polling – head to head, and Hipkins was a skerrick above Luxon, by 42% to 41%.
As repeated ad nauseam in US election, the metric arguably to rule them all is track – that is, is the country on the right track or wrong track. Freshwater measured a majority for wrong: with 48%, against 35% who said right track. According to Roy Morgan, meanwhile, 46.5% said right direction and 42.5% wrong – that’s a cheering result for the government, with the first “right direction” victory in the survey since January 2022.
