There are many variations in recent poll resukts, with movements in support going both ways for major parties.
Andrea Vance at Stuff talking about yesterday’s 3 News/reid Research poll and others:
National jumped four points, its highest support since early in the election campaign, the 3News poll showed.
It gave John Key a big boost, up from 37 to 41 per cent in the preferred prime minister stakes. National was on 51.4 per cent support, with Labour on 32.6 per cent, down two points. The Greens slumped from 13 per cent to 10.8 per cent.
The survey was in line with a recent One News-Colmar Brunton poll, which gave National a five-point boost to 49 per cent support.
However, last week’s Fairfax Media-Ipsos poll put National on 44.9 per cent, or 1.3 percentage points down on the previous poll in December. Labour was up 1.9 percentage points to 36.3 per cent.
A Roy Morgan poll published on February 14 also had National dropping and Labour climbing.
David Shearer is quoted making the same observations I have been suggesting:
“They [the polls] are all over the place at the moment. My sense is that there are two reasons.
“People are not terribly interested at the moment, and there is a great deal of softening of the vote, which is showing up dramatically different in some polls.”
Mid term most voters have little or no interest in possible election decisions so are likely to choose a party (if pushed) based on little information and no consideration of possible coalition combinations.
And with…
- National making a lot of mistakes
- Labour and Shearer struggling to impress
- a wariness of Greens getting into power
- NZ First biding it’s time until closer to the election (and Winston hoping to score media attention)
- the lack of publicity of and interest in the small parties
…there is likely to be a ‘softening’ of the vote – that is, many simply don’t have any strong preferences.
If there was a poll choices for
- Something better than what’s on offer
- I can’t be bothered with politics at the moment
they would probably score quite well.
Darryl
/ February 25, 2013It makes me laugh, how the left only agree with the polls that give them a couple of points, everything else, can’t be right. I can see no reason to support the Left, all they do is mud sling. They spout off at the Government, but don’t tell the public what they would do, or how they would implement a policy, or where they would get the funds from, got a pretty good idea about that I may add. Tax and Spend is the Left’s only real policy. Always has been and always will be.