New Zealand election minus 16 days

By popular demand, a thread for discussion of the looming (November 8th) New Zealand election. Below are the results of every poll from the last month I was able to locate. Recommended reading: Kiwiblog.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

62 comments on “New Zealand election minus 16 days”

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  1. I’m a bit sheepish about making a prediction
    but
    Labour should just scrape in.

    The big factor is how the economic crisis is played out in the media

  2. Hmm well Labour got a bounce after the crisis so you’d expect that suggests it played out well for them.

    Maori are going to decide government imo.

  3. You may have fixed the sunglasses face emoticon but that does not stop me from having seen it. (I confess that I have made the same mistake at some point).

  8. For polls, I recommend looking at http://curiablog.wordpress.com/, it’s sort of a poll-averaging blog for NZ. As of this morning it has National winning 60/124, with ACT on 2 and UF on 1, which would give National an incredibly slim win. If they fall any further then they will rely on the Maori Party, who will make a decision between a Labour/Green government and a National/ACT government.

  10. Some volatility there, although the three polls from Colmar Brunton look pretty stable. None of the other polls show the Nationals falling to 40% so that Morgan poll could be an outlier.

    It looks as if Labour is stuck on about 35-37% of the vote, which would make it very hard for them to win, espcially if the Nationals are pulling 45%+.

  13. I always thought Haider was a closet-queen. These neo-fascist poseurs, they’re so predictable. With any luck, his odious party will now disintegrate, as Fortuyn’s party did in the Netherlands. Now if only someone would expose Le Pen.

  18. I’ve spent three days re-calculating the Queensland redistribution and producing a publication, so I find Haider is an amusing diversion. But I’ve wandered away from the topic of discussion, New Zealand, which is bad of me. I’m off to Auckland for the last week of the campaign. I also get to watch the US election from there.

  19. Is the ABC doing any live coverage of the US election? The only information I’ve found is that SBS is beginning coverage at 3:30 on the 5th but that’s hours after polls, some in battleground states, have closed.

    Anyway, NZ. Key’s called the potential coalition between Labor, Greens, Maori, Progressive and NZ First a “Five headed monster”.

    Can someone explain how the Progressives can pick up a seat when they are polling significantly below the threshold?

  20. Jim Anderton will win his own electorate. That allows the Progressive so doge the 5% requirement, but they are unlikely to poll enough votes to get a second member in on the list.

  22. I’m not particularly sure why questions regarding ABC coverage of the US election belong in an NZ election thread… unless you meant to put NZ rather than US, but I doubt it.

    I remember seeing polling earlier this year which puts Winston Peters’ chances of re-winning Tauranga pretty low. Here’s hoping!

  29. The relevant NZ terms are Rogernomics after Finance Minister Roger Douglas under David Lange in the 1980s, and Ruthenasia, after Finance Minister Ruth Richardson in the first term Bolger National government, 1990-93. Jim Bolger’s campaign style was once colourfully described by David Lange as running around the country stirring up apathy.

    The party system splintered under a decade of economic reform, and at the first MMP election in 1996, every party in the Parliament had a member who had served in the Labour caucus under Lange in the 1980s.

    Roger Douglas is on the ACT list for the current election. ACT has said they want Douglas in the Cabinet if the National party are forced into coalition. National so far has said no thank you.

  30. National may soon regret their early comments about ACT and NZ First.

    The National vote may be a bit higher in that Morgan poll but it’s still significantly down from the high 40’s and even low 50’s it reached earlier on when talk of majority government was going on. The Green vote in that poll is ridiculously high.

  32. Sorry, I didn’t mean that it was unlikely to be achieved I meant it was ‘ridiculous’ in the sense that it’s a record high. “Ridiculously good”, if you will.

  34. I’m not doing anything on the US election. My specialty is comparative Commonwealth politics. I had originally planned to do something on the US election, but I’ve had too many domestic elections in Australia. There is a useful US election site at ABC news, http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/us-election/ . It has a useful map with listings of all recent polls.

    NZ depends on whether I get time in the next week.

  35. If you meant coverage of the US count, I have no idea. If I want to know what’s on ABC television, I look at the TV guide like everyone else.

  36. Best source of recent NZ opinion polls is wikipedia at:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_Polling_for_the_2008_New_Zealand_General_Election

    Most recent Morgan Poll shows Labour 32% and National 43% – a reversal of the Labour gains in the previous poll (which had showed Labour 37.5% and National 40.5%)

    And the latest Herald Digi-Poll has Labour on 37% and National on 50.4%

    In any case, it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that Labour is well and truly gone. Much like in Australia in 2007, the polling has been consistently bad for the government all year, and shows no real signs of turning around. After 9 years in government (a very long time by NZ standards), the voters seem to be ready for a change – just as they were after 11 and a half years of John Howard.

  37. I don’t get why ABC is putting so much effort into the US election with interactive maps and everything. I get why they do Australian elections (since it is by far the gold standard of coverage), and I understand why commercial media organisations would do something to improve their ad revenues. But surely someone who is interested enough to look for detailed interactive maps and polling figures will go to pollster.com or one of the many US media organisations, not the ABC? Seems a waste of time.

  38. I presume it’s brand recognition? Australian’s looking for US election information might stumble upon ABC and see “Hey that’s pretty comprehensive. Maybe I’ll get all my political and election news and analysis from the fine folk at ABC.”

  40. Ben, the only effort is the map. Exactly the same data is available on the ABC site as any American site. All the same polls. Click on the ABC map and all the polls are listed down the page. The ABC just pulls down the same XML data set as everybody else. Because there is no electoral commission to provide the data, all media organisations subscribe to the same data providers. It’s all a matter of how you deal with the data. If you compare all the maps, you’ll find some weight the data to the most recent poll, some average it using different methods.

    The entire map is fully automated and has been running without human intervention for the last month.

  44. Adam @ 13

    Well off the topic, but I think you might find that Le Pen has let go the leadership reins this year. Still, as you say, there would be value in a retro-fitting, if based on fact.

    I recall the complete confusion amongst the right/racists about what to do about, or with, Pym. It was a hoot. OK, he had the right idea about what to do about the race issue, but, crikey, he was openly gay as well! Some folk did not know whether to come or to go.

    Jorg certainly did middle-european sanity a favour recently when he crashed his car, while very pissed, at something like twice the speed limit. Returning from a ‘family celebration’, he was. Nevertheless, following the erstwhile leader’s very significant success in the recent Austrian elections, and needing a bit of a red herring for the appalling mess they have helped create, the pollies in Britain and France have sniffed the wind. In France, led by Sarkozy, they confected outrage when the Maghreb mob booed the Marseillaise in Stade France recently. George Brown’s new Immigration Minister’s first announcement was about the need to put a cap on Britain’s population. Not hard to spot the dog whistles in either example.

  45. European race politics are indeed depressing. I was in Austria earlier this year, and it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful, prosperous and well-run country. Parts of Vienna are pretty shabby, sure, and there are lots of Middle Eastern faces about, but far less than in most German cities. So where does this far-right vote come from? I can understand it in Marseilles or Rotterdam, where there are real issues with Muslim communities which for whatever reason have not integrated very well, but I don’t understand what the Austrians are so het up about – unless they really are nazis under all that gemütlichkeit.

  49. I rember on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart said about Jörg Haiders driving, if he had been just a little futher to the left he may be alive today. I shouldn’t have laughed i know 😛

  50. Ahahah that was one of the funniest calls of the year.

    Are you sure that was on the Daily Show? I thought I saw it on Shaun Micallef’s program.

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