Newshub political editor Patrick Gower claims the latest Reid Research poll is ‘incredibly explosive’. Why? There has been a swing of 9 percentage points to Labour. They are now on 33%. And more dramatically, Jacinda Ardern is within a point of Bill English as preferred PM.  Her predecessor never got above single digits.

Gower would tell you these are trends not seen in a decade.

Well, that is one interpretation. I would argue that these numbers don’t suggest a dramatic shift in party support. The fact is Labour was polling up to 33% under Andrew Little. They began the year averaging 30%.

It was months of negative publicity that caused Labour to plummet in the polls. By contrast, the party has enjoyed a week of positive media coverage since Ardern became leader. So maybe we shouldn’t read too much into the polling (yet).

But if there is a ‘Jacinda effect’, it has done nothing to weaken National. With 44% support, the Nats are no worse off than they were before the dramatic events of last week. In fact, National continues to outpoll Labour and the Greens.

The real significance of the polling could be in the decline of NZ First and the Greens. Both parties have slipped under 10%. While the slump in support for the Greens will no doubt be attributed to the Turei scandal, the loss of support for NZ First is more intriguing.

There is one thing that hasn’t changed though. The media narrative that Winston Peters is king or queenmaker will continue right up til election day.

Noted has published details of a ‘snap’ online poll conducted for The Listener as part of its Election Barometer series. The poll has a sample size of 1175 and is representative of the national population. Respondents were canvassed between 5pm Tuesday 1 August and 11:30am Wednesday 2 August.

It is the first major poll to capture public opinion in the aftermath of the Labour leadership change. As it did in June, The Listener has chosen to include undecided voters in the result. The numbers are as follow: National 39%, Labour 23%, Greens 12% and NZ First 8%.

But it is misleading to include the undecided in these results. If the undecided are removed, the picture we get is more consistent with other polling:

National	45% (+1)
Labour	27% (+3)
Greens	14% (-2)
NZ First	9% (-1)

So as of yet there has been no major shift in party support. Yes, support for Labour is up. But it remains under 30%. I think the more interesting observation is the small increase of support for National.

Could it be that the threat of a centre-left government will lead some conservative voters to leave NZ First for National? Of course this is one poll. We will have to wait and see what other pollsters come up with before any trend can be discerned.

 

A lot has happened since June. For one, the NZ Labour Party has a charismatic new leader. The rise of Jacinda Ardern is causing a lot of excitement in the media. But there is good reason to be skeptical of what Bryce Edwards calls ‘Jacindarama’.

I would argue that the main challenge for Labour is to win back the working-class. Last year, I did some research into this for my MA thesis. I have summarised my findings on the University of Auckland Politics & IR blog Pacific Outlier. The following table illustrates my argument.

	Working-class		Middle-class
	Labour	National	Labour	National
1996	32%	29%	26%	37%
1999	47%	22%	32%	37%
2002	45%	16%	40%	23%
2005	47%	32%	42%	38%
2008	42%	38%	28%	50%
2011	39%	36%	20%	54%
2014	35%	38%	20%	52%

These numbers come from the NZ Election Study. I explain my methodology in the Pacific Outlier post, but basically the working-class are those voters in manual and low or semi-skilled non-manual employment. It includes both the traditional blue-collar workforce and those in routine white-collar employment. I estimated that, in 2014, the working-class made up nearly 40 percent of the vote.

But it was National, the party of businessmen and farmers, that won the working-class in 2014. A further 18 percent went to the Greens and NZ First (nine percent each). This is significant because until now, Labour has relied on strong working-class support to carry it to victory. The Labour share of the working-class vote has fallen from an average of 46 percent in 1999-2005 to 35 percent in 2014.

To put it another way, Labour must win back the working-class before it can win the country.

The Listener has published the results of a poll conducted 19-24^th May. In contrast to other major polls, this one has included undecided voters in the base of the calculation. That means the percentage of party support is considerably lower than it would otherwise be. Whereas 44% of decided voters support National, only 35% of the overall sample do (see this table shared by Matthew Hooton). It is the latter figure that The Listener has chosen to publish. But as we know, a large proportion of those eligible to vote choose not to.

In the last election, turnout was only 77%. That is why pollsters leave out the undecideds when calculating party support. After all, we don’t calculate the party vote as a percentage of the electorate. If we did, then the National vote was only 36% in 2014. That makes The Listener poll less sensational than the headline numbers suggest. And it means the result is consistent with every other poll we have seen out this year. National leads Labour by a wide margin and any centre-left government would depend on the support of NZ First.

But there is one major difference: the new poll suggests that Labour’s electoral support has not recovered from 2014. Only 19% of respondents would vote Labour. If we remove the undecideds, this would mean a party vote of 24% – one percentage point less than the 2014 result.

And yet, until now, Labour has been averaging 29-30%. Last week, these poll numbers were cited by NZ Herald journalist Claire Trevett as evidence that Labour would avoid further collapse. Trevett went on to suggest that any failure of Labour to form a government this year could have more to do with the unreliability of Winston Peters than the Labour vote. This is a naïve claim.

In May 2014, Labour was polling slightly better than it is now.  But after four months of campaigning, it finished with barely a quarter of the vote. Analysis by David Farrar on Kiwiblog suggests that this has been a recurring theme in every general election since 1999. On average, Labour support has declined 5% from the start of election year to election day.

It may be that the worst is yet to come for Labour. Certainly, political columnist John Armstrong agrees. The haphazard and lackluster response of Andrew Little to the Budget has prompted Armstrong to argue that the greatest challenge for Labour in 2017 could be preserving its status as a major political party. The Listener poll gives further justification to this argument.