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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Stephen Berry.
What These Polls Tell Us
The Roy Morgan poll is frequently written off as being too volatile and too different from the Kantar and Reid Research polls to be worth taking notice of. However, another poll that has quickly become viewed as sufficiently “mainstream” to receive “mainstream” comment is the Taxpayer’s Union Curia Poll, which has registered drops as large as 6.1% for Labour in a single month and jumps of 4.6% for the ACT party in the same month. In any case, that is why I have maintained a poll of polls, measuring the averages over the previous five polls, to even out the spikes.
First, however, let’s examine the changes in the Roy Morgan poll, which has seen support for both the potential National/ACT coalition and Labour/Greens coalition drop on the poll in March. National ACT is down 2.5% while Labour/Greens have dropped 0.5%, though the former maintains a large lead of 4.5% over the latter.
Support has bled to non-parliamentary parties in a volume not seen since the 2020 election. The 8.5% support in the ‘other’ column beats the previous high set in the August 2021 poll of 8%. New Zealand First is the primary beneficiary of this change and can consider itself to be the winner of the Roy Morgan poll with its support doubling to 4% from 2% in March.
This is New Zealand First’s best result in a Roy Morgan poll since at least the 2019 election and its best result in any poll since achieving 5.1% in the Talbot Mills (formerly UMR) poll of August 2020. It is also interesting to note that as a result of the volume of wasted vote increasing from 5.5% to 8.5%, National and Labour both enjoy an increase in parliamentary seats despite no change in support.
ACT New Zealand has suffered the biggest drop in this poll and experienced its third consecutive drop. I believe this is a natural consequence of National’s growth in support but it should be pointed out that the voting bases for ACT and New Zealand First overlap, despite one party being classical liberal and the other socialist nationalist. Perhaps sufficient time has elapsed since the end of the anti-mandate occupation of parliamentary grounds for the impact of both party’s leader’s attitude toward the protestors to appear in the polls.
The Poll of Polls includes the March and April Roy Morgan polls, the February and March Curia polls and the March Kantar (formerly Colmar Brunton) poll. Again, ACT loses the most support with a drop of 0.9% with National gaining 0.6% and New Zealand First 0.3%.
What really matters in MMP is coalitions, and if the Poll of Polls were to be translated into seats in Parliament, the result would either be a hung Parliament or one in which a National/ACT/Maori party coalition governs. National and ACT combined have 60 seats, Labour and Greens have 58 seats and the Maori Party have 2 seats.
While National has previously governed with the support of the Maori party and ACT, it is difficult to imagine this scenario occurring again given how radically left-wing the Maori Party is today and how numerous ACT’s MPs are. However, even that scenario appears more logical than a Labour/Greens/ACT coalition which is the only other possibility, short of a National/Labour grand coalition.
(Note: Only the Kantar poll regularly provides polling results for Outdoors, ALCP, Heartland, Tea Party, One Party, Social Credit, Vision and Sustainable NZ, so the poll-of-polls will only register unchanged support assuming a Kantar poll is at least one of the previous five public polls published.)
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