Someone needs to tell Simon Bridges that he’s dreamin’. Hopefully, it will be his caucus, but he appears to be heading down the same self-destructive path of David Cunliffe.
Simon Bridges is still confident he will lead National into the September election despite dropping below 5 percent as preferred Prime Minister.
The latest Newshub-Reid Research Poll shows Jacinda Ardern is New Zealand’s most popular Prime Minister in a century and Opposition leader Simon Bridges is hurtling into political oblivion.
No leader has ever been as popular in our preferred Prime Minister stakes as Ardern – 59.5 percent, up an astounding 20.8 points.
As for Bridges, the country doesn’t want him anywhere near the ninth floor – just 4.5 percent of Kiwis back him, down 6.1 points – that’s more than half his support wiped.
It puts him close to National MP Judith Collins again who’s on 3.1 percent, though she’s also down 0.7 points.
Think about this. In a time where Jacinda Ardern is hogging the limelight, it is expected that she would be stratospheric in the polling. But Simon Bridges more than halved his ratings. Judith Collins only dipped slightly.
The pretenders, Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye are nowhere to be seen.
It looks like Bridges is going to fight Muller and Kaye with their Michelle Boag and Murray McCully backed putsch. That means blood on the floor.
Bridges will need to be dragged out the door kicking and screaming, but that just ends badly for him, with his throat cut. The best option for him now is to embrace a deal with one of the other two factions, the one which lets him save face.
The problem is that one of those factions is now staffed by the very people he promoted to stave off a challenge. This is the thanks he gets from Todd Muller, Gerry Brownlee and Chris Bishop…a debilitating coup and knives in his back.
Someone needs to quietly sit him down and tell him he’s dreamin’ having a fight he can’t win.