frogblog

There’s a great danger with making blind predictions: you can very easily get burned. But, alas, I like hopping around in the fire, so here goes.

Back in January, the Herald decided to break the story of their own political opinion poll a few days early, before it was ready, to try and get two bites at the cherry. Shortly after Don Brash’s Orewa speech about welfare, they went to print with the half-finished poll, reporting that National appeared headed towards closing the gap with Labour from 20 down to 5 percentage points…

Well, today, the paper hasn’t gone quite that far, but has intriguingly teased readers about the results of their next poll, due out on Monday. The teaser reads:

POLL SHOCK: One party has made big headway in the latest Herald-DigiPoll survey due out on Monday. The surprise result will shake up the election year political landscape.

This has me intensely curious. Who will it be?

The last Herald poll, on April 1, had the following standings:

• Labour: 47.7%
• National: 34.5%
• Green: 5.1%
• NZ First: 3.6%
• Act: 2.2%
• Maori Party: 2.2%
• United Future: 1.9%

“Big headway”, “surprise result”, “shake up the political landscape”? Well, it can’t be Labour. It doing even better would not be a surprise result, nor would it shake up the political landscape. It could be National, who may have closed the gap with Labour considerably, but that wouldn’t be that much of surprise: the gap between the major parties in most public polls has been smaller than the 13 percent in the Herald poll.

No, my guess would be a third party. Any chance of United making considerable headway seems very unlikely: its Caucus has remained largely anonymous in the past few weeks - one can think of no large “media splashes” the party has made, and it was polling at less than 1 percent in the last One News poll, which tends to favour the right-wing parties.

NZ First’s 3.6 rating in the above poll must have been a statistical anomaly: almost all other public polls have had the party somewhere between 5 and 9 percent. So, one can imagine NZ First’s rating on Monday being considerably larger than 3.6. But would that really be a surprise result, unless they’ve jumped to something like 10-12 percent?

So, short of National getting really close to Labour (or even drawing level), I think the most likely options are three-fold: Act, the Greens, and the Maori Party.

Act has been slowly edging up in previous months, and it finally getting over the 5 percent threshold in a public poll would be a great result for it, and would be a significant news story. This, in turn, would be bad news for National, a sign that many of its voters are deserting to Act because they see little chance of National winning and so are trying to make sure that Act survives to fight another election in 2008, when National might have a chance of winning the Treasury benches.

The Greens jumping up close to the 10 percent mark would also be big news, and given Labour’s distaste for both NZ First and the Maori Party would make the party the “big player” in election year as Labour’s other preferred option United languishes.

And then there’s the Maori Party: it has had a great deal of publicity of late (including a fascinating cover story in the new Listener), especially in light of Marae Digipoll results showing them likely to win most of the Maori seats. If the Maori Party started getting close to the 5 percent threshold as well, eating into Labour’s party votes among Maori, then this also would be very significant. Labour is going to have a lot of defending to do this election year: National, NZ First and United will be nibbling at their socially conservative voters, the Maori Party at their Maori voters, and the Greens at their “liberal leftie” voters…

Of course, the teaser on the front page of today’s Weekend Herald could just be shameless spin and the poll could turn out to be much less of a big news story than I have imagined here… But I guess that’s what the paper’s wanting: for people to be left wondering over the weekend.

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