July 11, 2020 7:00am by David Farrar

Will the Greens make it?

Bryce Edwards writes:

The Green Party of Aotearoa-New Zealand could go from helping Jacinda Ardern run the country, to being turfed out of Parliament altogether in ten weeks.
And that could see the end of Labour in government. Without them, Labour would likely have to do what no party has done since the introduction of the current MMP electoral system: gain an outright majority of seats.
With just ten weeks to go until the election, the Greens have been consistently polling precariously close to the 5 per cent threshold needed by parties who don’t hold an electorate seat.
In fact, since the last election which saw the Greens win 6.3 per cent of the vote and become part of the Labour-led Government, their polling has been stuck below that level.
They have recorded an average of only 5.7 per cent by the country’s two main polling companies. And since the start of the year, this average has been trending downwards to just 5.4 per cent.
Unfortunately for the Greens, they consistently do worse in elections than their polling predicts.

Readers may be interested in what the gap normally is between what the Greens polls and their actual result.

Over the seven elections they have contested, they have on average done 1.3% worse than the polls. By company it is: