The latest Horizon Poll has been released. horizon is different to the more common Roy Morgan, Reid Research, Digipoll or Colmar Brunton polls in that Horizon questions an online panel as opposed to calling people at random. Because the panel is self selecting Horizon gives a different weight to each participant to try to bring the panel inline with the current demographics of New Zealand. The other difference between Horizon Poll and the others is that Horizon leaves undecided voters in the poll giving a slightly different picture of party support.
But on with the numbers, National 37.7%; Labour 23.9%. Ouch I hear you say, the opposition are screwed and we are all doomed to another 3 years of this shitty government. But wait there’s more, Greens 9.9% and New Zealand First 7.4, which by my count makes the three big left parties at 41.2% which goes up to 42.2% once Jim Anderton is counted, which is still slightly behind the many headed Hydra that is National-Act-Maori- United Future on 45%.
I have no doubt that as time goes on the National government will bleed votes, the economy is still terrible and the government is doing nothing to fix it, seriously when was the last time you heard the government propose any idea to improve our economic performance? And the disaster support resulting from Pike River/the Canterbury Earthquakes will not last forever. I think it is a bit too early to write of the election.
But this particular poll shouldn’t really be used as a base for these sort of comments, all the other polls have National above 50% even converting the Horizon poll results into the way the other polls express their data leaves National on 41.7% about 10% below what all the other polls are saying and about 16% behind what 3 news are sa
ying, although I am sure that has nothing to do with a multi-million dollar loan that company received recently.
So perhaps the best use of Horizon poll is to observe the trends in party support amongst this group of two thousand or so voters, so the trends in party vote support since November last year are in this handy chart. As you can see the only real trend is that Labour is losing support to either national or the Greens/ New Zealand First depending on whatever poll is being looked at. looking at the polls in terms of government/ opposition does not really make the trends seem any nicer.
obviously despite the general uselessness of our government the left is failing to reach the people of this panel, there is still a hell of a lot of work to be done.
