Election 2023: Claire Trevett - the polls should be giving the National Party the night terrors

OPINION

In the pickle of polls in the closing week of the election campaign only one thing is really clear: the various attempts to play Whack-A-Mole with Winston Peters have failed miserably.

The spaghetti of results in three polls out this week will leave the parties on tenterhooks.

Volatility and different polls telling different stories in the closing days of an election campaign can indicate voters are changing their minds - and that can be a roller-coaster ride.

That will have the National Party the most worried about whether its vote is starting to crumble at a critical stage.

It has said for weeks that the election would be close in a bid to get its voters out. It may not have believed it when it first said it - but it is now increasingly looking true.

There have been signs it is starting to panic and the Newshub Reid Research poll might show why.

That poll has some similarities in movement to the Guardian Essential poll out this week.

It should be giving National’s leader Christopher Luxon and his team the night terrors.

That Reid Research poll showed National had dropped by another 4.6 points to 34.5 per cent after hitting almost 41 per cent just one month ago.

It will take some comfort from the 1News Verian poll showing its support was up a smidgen to 37 in the last week. However, even in that poll its rise was cancelled out by a drop for Act and the left block of parties had risen, closing the gap.

The two-week period between the last Reid Research poll and this one included a series of troubling turns and risky (or maybe dubious) strategy calls in National’s campaign.

National’s warning last Sunday that it might not be able to cut a deal with New Zealand First and raising the prospect of a second election was a risky move. That happened halfway through the polling period for both the television polls, so the full impact of it will not be known.

The period included the CTU’s revelation that the headline figure National was using to advertise its tax cuts policy would only apply to 3000 families. It boasted about the number of people that went to its tax cuts calculator after that - but a fair few of those would have discovered they weren’t getting much and may well feel ripped off.

The Goldman Sachs warning that National’s policies risked making inflation worse did also not help.

Meanwhile, in all of the polls Labour and the left have ticked up. Labour leader Chris Hipkins had claimed he had momentum and he does, although it is still a mini-mentum at this stage. It may not be enough or in time.

But in the Newshub Reid Research poll, Labour and the Green Party got the same numbers of seats as National and Act for the first time in a long time. Add in Te Pāti Māori’s three seats and the left have 57 seats to the right’s 54. The rest are in Winston Peters’ hot little hands.

To actually get those 57 seats and the four more they need to pip National at the post, those left parties have to get their voters to vote for them. That was always going to be the hard bit for Labour and is why the likes of Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern have started lending their weight to Hipkins’ efforts.

It is also the silver lining for National: fear that the party will fail at this point will spur its voters to vote.

However, if he pulls it off, Luxon seems likely to need to take the peace pipe along to Peters who is unlikely to let him off scot-free for those various naked bids to try to starve Peters out of his big return.

Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.