Latest poll

I’ve blogged at Curia the results of the latest Roy Morgan poll.

After a month of headlines of the Government in crisis and how Labour has them on the ropes and this is a turning point, the poll shows a massive 10% vote shift for National.

National has gone from 43% to …

53%!

A few pundits may be regretting their columns.

Now as I commented on Twitter I don’t think there has been a 10% increase in support for National in one month, which would be 250,000 more New Zealanders suddenly deciding they will vote National. Roy Morgan is known as a yo-yo poll as it does tend to have fairly regular large increases and decreases. So it is probably the case that either their June poll was too low for National or the July poll too high – or both.

But regardless of how large the movement has been, it is beyond doubt that in a month of relentless negativity in the media, National has gone up in the Roy Morgan poll. I’ve done an analysis of how likely each party movement’s is genuine, rather than just sampling margin of error.

• National up 10% – 99.8% likely to have gone up
• Labour down 2.5% – 83.3% likely to have gone down
• Greens down 3.0% – 95.2% likely to have gone down
• NZ First down 2.0% – 92.2% likely to have gone down

Labour at 25.5% is 5.5% lower than they were three years ago in the same poll. And if you compare it to how National were doing in Labour’s third term, well National in July 2007 was at 49%!