The Lame Duck leader (Patreon)

The latest disaster poll for National to emerge is a UMR poll which puts them at 29 per cent.

It had Labour at 55, NZFirst at 6, the Greens at 5 and ACT at 3 per cent.

Obviously the crisis of COVID-19 and the PM's adroit handling of it meant that Labour would aways go up, but the fact it seems to have massively benefitted from National and not the Greens or NZFirst is a very bad sign for Simon Bridges.

There is little to no chance that this will be the election result. It will tighten as the economic crunch hits but how much is the question?

There are a number of difficulties for National, beyond the general uselessness of Bridges. If we're still in any kind of lockdown level then parties will be almost certainly be relying on their leaders over the campaign. No flyers, no door knocking, no town halls. Just leader on leader. And in that fight I don't think Simon could hold his own against the podium he'd be standing behind, let alone Jacinda Ardern. 

The other interesting thing to come out of the polls - since pretty much Bridges took over - is the presence of Judith Collins in the preferred Prime Minister poll. That question is done differently to others in the poll. People who take part are not prompted for a name, they are just asked who their preferred PM is. So it comes down to a name recognition competition, which is pretty important for polling.

I'm told that there isn't likely to be a move against ol' mate Simon based off this one poll but that this will cause caucus to demand they see National's own internal polling, which hasn't been shown to anyone outside Bridges, Bennett and McClay since February. Despite repeated requests from caucus to see the polling, Bridges has rebuffed them.

There is also no one single contender that has the backing of enough in caucus to make this a clean coup. The two front-runners are Collins and Muller, with Bennett and Mitchell having now been relegated after their attempts earlier were made public. 

Both parties have said they need a public poll to really make a move, but neither TVNZ nor TV3 are in the field at the moment, so this may be their best chance.

An earlier version of this said  "the PM's adroid handling..." because I am a muppet and this is what happens when you take away my sub-editor. Thank you to the commenters that pointed it out.