Maori voters supporting National

Today’s Fairfax poll is fascinating – now for the main result which is barely changed from May (27% gap closes to 24% gap), but the ethnic breakdown.

Now the number of Maori respondents will be very small (around 15% of 1,100 respondents would be around 165 Maori respondents only) but even with that it is unprecedented that Labour is almost in third place with Maori voters. They have National on 39%, Maori Party on 22% and Labour also on 22%. Labour ir normally way way ahead of National amongst Maori voters.

A sample of 165 has a margin of error of 7.8%. Large, but when the parties have a 17% gap, still arguably significant enough to say National leads amongst Maori voters.

I have just calculated the probablity that on those results National is in fact ahead of Labour amongst Maori voters, and it is 99.79%. So that certainly is significant.

It would be interesting to know how it differs between Maori on the general roll and on the Maori roll.