Curia poll exposes big problem for National

I'm going to be smug. In the last 6 or so months, nearly every "pundit" has said that National was going to canter to victory at the election. I have been one of two hold-outs that I know of. Just me and Matthew Hooton have said all along we thought Labour would win.

I was basing my assessment off the fact that the world is going to shit, and Labour could point to Jacinda Ardern and say "who do you want to get us through this turbulent time, Aotearoa? This incredible leader who has done it all, or that untried newbie over there who hates women's bodily autonomy?"

Obviously JA stood down, so that might've taken half my argument away, however we've now seen Labour bounce back quite dramatically suggesting that JA was more of a liability than I had realised. 

That and Chris Hipkins has barely put a foot wrong when it comes to retail politics. Ideologically average, politically strong.

So now I think Labour can still make the case that they are the team to shepherd us through a crisis because the alternative is still Luxon, and people don't seem to like him.

This was magnified by a poll that came out yesterday. The Curia Tax Payers' Union Poll headline was that National/ACT could form a government with 61 seats. National and Labour were level pegging, but ACT was considerably ahead of the Greens hence why. 

But when I dug into the numbers a bit more, a very bleak picture of Luxon's support started to emerge.

The TPU poll includes "favourability scores". This is measured by asking if you have a favourable or unfavourable view of someone, then doing some maths.

So in the table below you'll see that 46% said they had a favourable view of Chippy, while 20% said unfavourable, which is 46-20 = 27% net favourable. That's astoundingly high. JA's final net favourability was -1%. You can see below that Luxon's is -5%. That's a 32 point gap between him and Chippy.

The concern for team Luxon is that both Chippy and Luxon have very similar total recognition - Chippy had 34% of folks who didn't know/had no view, while Chris had 31%. 



And this is a problem long in the making. Twelve months ago, Luxo was at the dizzying heights of 14% favourability (still 13 points behind what Chippy is now), and that number has been trending downwards ever since. It seems the more people get to know Luxo, the less they like him.



But the numbers I found most staggering in this poll was when each party's voter base had their favourabilities quizzed, so e.g. what do Labour voters think of Chippy, Luxo, Seymour etc.



You can see that National voters have Chippy's favourability at -4% (which is still better than Luxon's overall favourability!). Chippy has favourability of 78% with Labour voters, which is good - not great.

But then you get to Luxo and he's only at 66% favourability with National voters. 

That suggests not just a lack of the populace like Luxo, but even his own base isn't terribly inspired or excited by him.

It's hard though, I'm not really sure what you could do to arrest this. Because trying to prove likeability or trustworthiness from opposition is next to impossible.

At this stage it feels like Luxo is going to slow walk National into a defeat. I know the headline numbers say a National/ACT victory, but the trend is not National's friend.

I could still be wrong, things could change. They always do. But as I've said in an earlier piece, given the fundamentals of everything that's going on, National should be miles ahead. The fact they are tied, and heading in the wrong direction should be causing massive alarm for them.