John Armstong: National ahead by a mile in the momentum stakes

Too close to call? Aren't you sick of hearing that excuse? So, here's a pick, even if it comes weighed down with provisos.

National would be worth a flutter. But only a small one - and wagered in the same fashion you might invest a few dollars on a rank outsider in the Melbourne Cup with no expectation of getting your money back.

More so in this case, given the $1.70 being offered by Centrebet yesterday was on Don Brash becoming prime minister, rather than National simply winning more seats than Labour.

The winner tomorrow night may not be the ultimate victor. Helen Clark may still be better placed to form the next Government. But Labour's salad days are likely over.

The next Government may be a more multi-headed hydra that draws together some combination of Labour, Jim Anderton's Progressives, the Greens, New Zealand First, United Future and even the Maori Party.

The only thing guaranteed tomorrow night is that a lot of the talk from the party leaders will be about how nothing can happen until they have talked to one another.
But with NZ First and United Future saying they will talk first with the party that wins the most seats, the immediate priority for Labour and National is winning the two-horse race.

The polls are all over the paddock, and the private tracking polls conducted by the two major parties suggest it is margin-of-error stuff.

But National is the party with momentum going into election day.

Labour has gone right off the boil. In the past four weeks National has affected a huge change in the political atmosphere. A change of Government is now seen as a distinct possibility.

That is a major psychological victory for National. Its support is still yo-yoing wildly in the polls, but it is quite capable of drawing around 40 to 43 per cent of the vote. And maybe even more.

A few short weeks ago it would have been seen as being more likely to get 35 to 38 per cent.

As incumbent, Labour will do well to match the 41 per cent it secured in 2002.

Using Dr Brash's performance as the measure, National's campaign would be judged an unmitigated disaster. But it has won the campaign hands down. Its messages were carefully tailored to strike an emotional chord in an electorate becoming more and more conservative the longer Labour is in power.

National is talking the right language to unattached voters. It has done so on its billboards. It has done so on race.

National neutralised Labour's advantage of a booming economy by turning that into a debate about household income.

There has been something of a voter backlash in this campaign to National's advantage. Many voters do not see Dr Brash making mistakes. They instead see someone being unfairly pilloried by a liberal-minded, Wellington-based elite.

In contrast, the grim looks on Labour faces this week was the face of the incumbent realising it had to pedal 10 times faster just to stay in the same place.

Labour's campaign has been a failure of imagination. It has been overly negative and somewhat half-hearted in trying to really scare people about Dr Brash. It has been bogged down in numbers arguments. It has been too academic, too Wellington-centric, too safe, too dull.

It has failed to make any emotional connection with voters. The missing ingredient in its campaign is passion. The only sign of that was actor Sam Neill's withering dismissal of Dr Brash during its campaign launch.

Labour has instead defensively gambled everything on voters waking up tomorrow and doing a cost-benefit analysis that puts long-term worries about losing social services ahead of short-term gain from tax cuts.

Those worries will sway inner-city, middle-class voters. But they will vote Labour anyway.

It is in the mortgage-belt suburbs and the provincial cities where elections are won and lost. Voters there will wake up tomorrow asking themselves a more basic question: do they feel better off after six years of Labour?

That question will accompany them into the booth - not how well Dr Brash performed in last night's televised leaders' debate.