OPINION:
When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was asked about Labour's worst poll result since 2017, she replied she was focused on New Zealanders rather than numbers.
The number of New Zealanders at issue is this: Labour has lost almost 500,000 of the people who voted for it in the 2020 election.
That is more than one-third of those who voted for it last time.
While Ardern may be putting a brave face on it, Labour should now be getting very worried indeed about whether it will get those voters back.
Labour has dropped in every 1 News Kantar Public poll since at least March last year - from 49 per cent then to 33 per cent now. It must be wondering where it will bottom out.
It is getting perilously close to the death-spiral: the point at which the erosion of its support becomes almost impossible to pull out of. And nothing it is throwing at the problem is working. It got no reward for the Cost of Living payment and the PM's overseas trips had very little effect on either Ardern's or Labour's polling.
It could be of some - but not much - solace to Labour that National's rise has stalled recently after an initial surge under new leader Christopher Luxon. Its own focus groups reportedly show some negative sentiment coming in around Luxon after a series of recent woes.
That gives some hope to Labour that Luxon's honeymoon is over, although it could simply be a patch of turbulence. National, too, should be worrying about that.
But it should worry Labour that it kept falling even while National stalled.
Only Act has anything to sing about.
Labour's drop below 35 per cent has also seen Ardern begin to be asked about her leadership. The question annoyed Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, who pointed out that Ardern was still the most preferred over anybody else.
Five years ago, Andrew Little handed over to Ardern because he recognised she had a better chance of getting a good result for Labour. She did - she got 37 per cent in 2017, but Labour is now polling below that again.
Nobody really thinks anybody else has a better chance than she does - there is nobody outshining her.
Ardern will not now be able to recapture what Bill English called the "stardust" that attracted voters to her back then. Stardust is a honeymoon thing.
But she doesn't necessarily need to, either. She now has a track record instead.
What she does need to recapture is some of the optimism that was underneath the stardust, but seems to have been ground out by Covid-19 and other troubles.
Labour's game plan so far seems to be to hope the polling is a reflection of post-Covid disillusionment and winter.
Covid and flu have been rife, everything costs too much, the All Blacks are losing and the weather has been bad.
It is hoping summer will cheer people up and inflation will ease. The tourists are starting to return and people will put Covid behind them.
It hoped the same thing last winter too. The trouble is that another winter comes between now and the election.
And there is no guarantee that when people start feeling better about things, it will be Labour instead of National they reward with that bonhomie.
Labour needs to have a plan ready for when voters start to focus again.
What is certain is that Ardern remains the best person for Labour in 2023.
For other MPs, things are less certain. The other number that will be worrying Labour is the number 21. That is the number of MPs it would lose on the latest poll result. It would go from a caucus of 65 to 44.
As the reality of that sinks in, things will get a lot more fractious among MPs scrambling for the liferafts that a good list ranking offers.
Both parties have been beset by mini-scandals in the past week.
National has had to contend with revelations about the past of new Tauranga MP Sam Uffindell and allegations of bullying, and Labour with allegations of bullying of staff by its MP Gaurav Sharma.
It has also had to contend with Sharma's own kamikaze move: penning a piece in the Herald to attempt to paint it as a situation in which he was the one being bullied by Labour's whips and even the Prime Minister's office.
The moment Sharma's op-ed splashed up on the Herald site and in the newspaper there would have been a thrill of delight through the National ranks.
It distracted attention from National's own strife over its new MP Uffindell, who waits in the Bay of Plenty to find out whether he will make it past his first weeks in the job.
Sharma's explosion is also the first public rumbling from those on Labour's vast and over-populated back bench. At the moment, he is alone in that.
The cases of Uffindell and Sharma will not make much difference to the fortunes of the major parties in the long run.
The election will still be won and lost on issues such as the economy, leadership and trust.
The majority of voters will never have heard of Uffindell or Sharma and won't particularly care. Thus far both Luxon and Ardern have handled the respective issues sensibly.
Unless that changes, neither are important enough to damage their leaders or parties.
Both are, however, cautionary tales to others wanting to be MPs.
Uffindell is a warning that your past does come back to haunt you if you've been an idiot. Either don't be an idiot when you're young - or make sure you front-foot it if you have been.
Sharma is a warning that becoming an MP doesn't make you powerful, famous or influential - no matter what you are told.
Not enough attention is paid to giving candidates a realistic view of the job. There is emphasis on it being an honour and a privilege. Too many MPs think that equates to power, and privilege in a different sense of the word.
Sharma was a doctor and then suddenly he was a backbench MP, and the most irrelevant and impotent group in Parliament are Government backbench MPs.
They are the Parliament equivalent of the Year 9 student in Uffindell's situation - but with a lot less certainty that they will make it to Year 13.
It is now almost certain neither Uffindell nor Sharma will make it past Year 9.
Once proud and hard-working, most Māori have no meaningful mahi.