Third is that a majority of voters don't change their minds in the year before an election.
This is a gross over-simplification of what occurs in the lead-up to any election and ignores the extreme volatility demonstrated by New Zealand voters in recent times.
In 2002 The National Party scored a touch under 21 per cent of the crucial party vote and in 2014 Labour managed just 25 per cent.
These real numbers demonstrate just how rudderless the ship of state has become in the 21st century and how few voters are attached to the traditional big parties.
Fourth, one quarter of New Zealand's enrolled voters didn't bother to cast a ballot in most recent general elections and no political theorist has yet managed to foresee how these punters would jump should they decide to participate.
Fifth, National barely scraped home in the 2014 general election despite its 47 per cent share of the vote and the slightest political breeze could change that outcome.
There's a wonderful quote attributed to a variety of sources which Claire Robinson should note. "Never make predictions, particularly about the future".
The truth is that tea-leaf readings and palmistry are about as reliable as the kind of numerology we saw yesterday.
Some game changers may be under way right now.
With just a year to go before the next General Election in New Zealand, yet another disaster in the shape of large earthquakes has struck in the South Island and reverberated badly as far as Wellington.
The locations of these shakes, mainly thinly populated rural areas, has meant that the cost in human life has not been near the scale of the Christchurch earthquakes or the Pike River mine explosion, but it will still be expensive.
The roads, particularly the one on the coast north of Kaikoura and rail line in the same region will be very expensive to restore and the infrastructure in the small towns that dot the region will not be cheap to set right.
The damage to buildings in Wellington is worrying and could also be costly.
At least one eight-storey building will have to be demolished and both Statistics House and the Defence Headquarters will need significant repair. These latter two buildings are relatively new and should have been built to high standards.
The epicentres of the earthquakes which did the damage in Wellington was some distance from the capital, and one shudders to think what might have occurred had the shakes been closer.
Many years ago I asked the then Minister of Civil Defence what would happen to the government in the event that the "big one" struck Wellington.
My hope was that the capital would move to Auckland and I believed that if that happened, that's where the capital would stay.
I was to be disappointed. The Minister told me that if the government was forced to move from Wellington, the destination would be Palmerston North on the grounds that this city was "seismically stable".
Politicians have very mixed feelings about such disasters. On one hand they are opportunities to strut in the limelight and seem to be in command, on the other the costs must be met and that takes the kind of money that could be spent on tax cuts or other goodies timed for election year 2017.
Even remote disasters can be costly.
The Boxing Day Asian tsunami of 2004 brought Prime Minister Helen Clark rapidly back from her summer holiday in Northern Europe and New Zealand handed out millions of dollars in supplementary international aid to the badly affected countries.
Perhaps one of the greatest benefits to any government is that disasters distract voters from the day-to-day shortcomings of its administration of the country.
