Mike's Minute: Let's take a proper look at the polls

For what it's worth, let me have a crack at the latest Taxpayers' Union-Curia poll. 

Firstly, officially, I pay no attention to them other than a broad theme i.e. a collection of polls and an overarching trend. 

The trend continues in this latest poll with the Government being re-elected by a fairly heavy margin, 65 seats to 55. 

Small point: is it me or do there seem to be a lot of polls? Is it because of election year? It's not cheap to do a poll so someone is either fascinated, or flush. 

Then of course we get to the now well accepted truth that getting people to participate isn't easy. In fact, it's getting harder and the age-old concept of 1000 random people is well and truly gone as they hand out food vouchers and rewards to take part. 

The next problem with this poll is the NZ First figure of 13.6%, which is up four points. That isn't real. 

That’s about a 30%-ish increase. No one grows or loses their support at that pace. 

You also see a shift fairly dramatically to the Government. National is up, NZ First is up, and ACT is up. The Government are on fire according to this. Are they? 

But despite all that moderately interesting analysis, all the NZ Herald could do yesterday was focus on the fact National had failed to get 30%, even though it was 29.8%. And you always round up, so it was 30%. 

Why we fixate on large parties in an MMP environment I still don’t know. MMP is about parties and deals. This election is about two choices – the current lot, or the other lot. 

On this poll, in fact virtually in all polls, the current lot win. 

If you want to fixate on National then, yes, if these numbers were real, they would lose some seats. But that’s because they did well last time and why did they do well last time? Ardern, Hipkins, Robertson, and Covid. 

Case closed. 

Parties that ride high in one election tend to shrink in the next. It's not fun if you are in the middle of it but it's political reality nevertheless. 

In an environment where the vote is so widely split, having 30%+ parties will get more and more rare. It's not a bad thing, but the media having decided they hate Luxon can't look past it. 

Maybe for them it's more fun than the reality of the overall poll, which is of course their preferred option. 

The left is getting spanked. 

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