The latest Talbot Mills poll has been released and it shows that National has a problem, and that problem is Christopher Luxon. Sure, they are Labour’s pollsters, and it’s the first time in a long time since their polls leaked, but it echoes what three other polls are saying, that Christopher Luxon is tits and voters know it.
National leader Christopher Luxon’s preferred prime minister polling has fallen to a new low, hitting 23 per cent in the latest Talbot Mills poll.
This represents a fall of 4 points from last month’s poll and one point lower than his prior worst performance, which was 24 in September and October last year.
New Labour leader Chris Hipkins continues to climb, hitting 39 per cent, up four points on the last poll.
In the all-important party vote, the poll put Te Pati Maori in kingmaker decision, with neither the left nor the right aligned parties having enough to govern without them.
Labour led the field with 37 per cent up 4 points from last month, while National trailed on 34 per cent – down 2 points.
Act rose 2 points to 12, while the Greens fell 3 points to 8.
Te Pati Maori was on 3.2 per cent, and NZ First was at 2.9 per cent. TOP rounded out the smaller parties on 1.5 per cent.
On those numbers, and assuming Te Pati Maori wins at least one electorate seat, Labour would have 47 seats, and the Greens would have 10 – 57 in total and not enough to govern alone.
National would have 44 seats and Act would have 15 – 59 in total and two short of the majority needed.
Te Pati Maori would have 4 seats, enough to put either party in power. Realistically, the current leadership skews more towards the left than the right.
NZ Herald
Christopher Luxon is failing to fire and I’ve written about it a great deal in the past few weeks.
His problems are multi-faceted. Firstly he looks and sounds like a ventriloquist’s dummy; parroting rehearsed lines that his micro-expressions in his body language betray as inauthentic.
Then there is the fact that his underlying mantra is that National would govern just like Labour but they’d be more efficient or less crap at it. That is not a reason to change the government. Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. Right now there is no compelling reason to change the government if all we are going to get is a shabby facsimile of the current government.
Then there is the issue of his net favourables, which are negative. Jim Bolger was the last leader with negative net favourables when he won in 1990. But everyone hated Labour back then, more than they disliked Jim Bolger, and we had First Past the Post as an electoral system. In the subsequent thirty-three years, we have changed the electoral system and no leader with negative net favourables has ever won office.
Then there is his baldness, his shiny dome, glaring at us. Now you might like to think that I’m being silly, but then you know I am never silly when it comes to politics. Whether you like it or not, it is a factor. The bottom line is this: bald men rarely win elections. If they do there is usually an exceptional set of circumstances that prove the exception.
There have been only five bald Presidents of the USA; John Adams; his son, John Quincy Adams; Martin Van Buren; James Garfield; and president and WWII General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower won two wars, so that was the exceptional circumstances, but he won more than sixty years ago and was the last genuinely bald American president.
There are few world leaders who have been elected who were bald. History is against Luxon there as well.
Christopher Luxon’s demeanour and attitude also lead to a disconnect with what he is saying and what his body language is really saying. Add in his propensity to use his mouth and ears in the reverse ratio of that which God intended when he gave us two ears and one mouth, leads to a real perception that he is glib, inauthentic, fake and rehearsed and has no discernible principles.
To give you but one example of that lack of principles, just look at his repudiation of his faith. He professes to be a Christian, yet when asked about his church he went into full-on denial akin to the Denial of Peter. As a Christian myself, I’m uncomfortable with people who deny their faith in the face of a challenge. I never will, and never have. But when confronted Luxon became squirrelly. His subsequent actions on social issues also show a man who denies his alleged faith and fails to confront vexing social issues with the necessary convictions of a man of faith.
If you deny what is supposedly your core belief, then what else would you deny?
National has a very real problem, and it’s just six months out from the election. It is almost too late to do anything about it, and the alternatives are worse.
It seems National’s play for the election is to hope Chris Hipkins makes a mistake. Chance would be a fine thing, but I can’t see Hipkins making a mistake so grave as to lose him the election. All evidence points to him doing what is needed to calm the electorate and play on the fact that voters have poor memories.
The problem for National is that if they cease to look competitive, and it is looking more and more like that, then voters will shuffle off elsewhere.
You can’t blame voters for doing that. For a start, it is arrogant to assume that National and Luxon are the answer and secondly the problem starts and ends with Christopher Luxon and his obvious lack of authenticity.
The media really need to start asking Christopher Luxon what he is going to do to get voters to like him. The voters have already asked, and Luxon has been found wanting. It reminds me of a scene from a Knight’s Tale:
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