Wednesday night’s 1 News Verian poll shows that both National and ACT are faltering.
Both right leaning parties are seeing their support start to soften and dip away.
Whilst the drops are not huge, its a concern as they are looking like being a few seats short on October 14th at the General Election.
ACT is now well short of its highs over the past few months, and are now back in single digits, which is a far cry from the polls of just a few months ago.
National have been milling around the mid to high 30%s, but they are just not gaining any additional traction.
Enter NZ First and Winston Peters…. They are firm at 5-6 % and now seem to be holding their own. We suspect that come election day the party vote for NZ First will be higher than the current polls suggest.
The issue that both National and ACT now have, is that their campaigns are just not getting the cut through to the voting public. The credibility and relatability seems to have waned, and the public are starting to become disengaged with them.
ACT is guilty of being to focused on Winston Peters, and David Seymour has lost his once laser sharp focus. It’s a fair observation that Seymour has perhaps just got a little ahead of himself in terms of thinking its a done deal with a 2 party right leaning government, and last nights poll proved that point.
National is in some what of an odd position, as given how dire the Labour Party are polling, most people we speak with are of the view that National should be polling in the early to mid 40%s. Thats just not happening, and it looks like it wont happen on election night either.
National party leader, Christopher Luxon appears to have reached his peak in popularity. He certainly is no populist leader like John Key or Jacinda Ardern. In fact, he is far from it, and many believe he’s the reason why the Nats have come up short. Time will tell if his so called skill set of getting the most out of people will translate into a government that gets the results, as god knows we need some urgent results.
Luxon was wise to not discount NZ First and Winston Peters, as we suspect that quite some time ago the party strategists told Luxon that Peters could be a real chance to be back over the 5% threshold, and if that happened his votes would be at the expense of National and ACT.
Another factor that Luxon has to contend with is that he only now finally just ahead in the preferred PM role, and once again his numbers are hardly anything to be impressed by. The voters just dont seem to warm to him.
Labour are hardly worth a mention as they have run an abysmal campaign, and they have never really got going. The reality is they are over and out, and they know it. Chris Hipkins, like Bill English will suffer the same fate and be rolled post the election.
Both Key and Ardern knew that the game was up, and abruptly bailed out – thats never a good sign for an upcoming election.
Barring a huge surge over the next few polls for either National or ACT, its going to be a 3 way deal of some sort with NZ First.
Love or hate Winston Peters, he sure knows how to pack out the halls across the country and get his message out there.
As ex PM, John Key pointed out this morning on TV 1, both Jim Bolger and Helen Clarke had great working relationships with Winston Peters, and as we all know both of this people recently backed Peters as someone that can be trusted. The comments by out going PM, Chris Hipkins, is just another lie, as not once during 2017 – 2020 in coalition did Labour ever complain about their working relationship with NZ First and Winston Peters.
