Double poll! (Patreon)

Well well well. Yesterday morning when both 1News and Newshub announced they were doing polls concurrently, I tweeted:

Given that both channels rushed out to poll immediately following the changeover to Chippy, I thought it would be too soon to have a marked difference.

I got my first inkling that I might have been wrong when I saw David Farrar had written a post in Kiwiblog about how new leaders usually see a bounce. This suggested to me that National's own internal polling had shown a Labour bounce, and Farrar was trying to set the scene.

And then the polls came out, and boy was my tweet wrong.

Labour had pulled ahead in both (by statistically insignificant amounts but still). This arrested a slide that had been happening for the past 12 months. In fact Labour hadn't been in the lead in a One News poll since January last year (summer NZ loves Labour?).

The similarities between both polls were staggering. Labour just ahead of National in both. ACT ahead of the Greens in both. A hung parliament in both. 

All of that is fascinating, sure. But what I was interested in was preferred PM and a couple of other questions.

Preferred PM is mainly about brand recognition. People taking part in the poll are asked to name who they think should be PM. They aren't given options. So if you don't know who Chris Hipkins is, you won't say him. You won't have the opportunity to.

And yet Hipkins was ahead of Luxon immediately. 

This is bad for brand Luxon as it means that either he's still an unknown quantity, or he's known but not liked. 

Then TV3 included a question of trust in its polling, and it was also not good for Luxon.

Looking at those numbers, both Luxon and Hipkins had about 20% of "don't know" answers, but Chippy was considerably ahead of those who did have a view.

Luxon's trust rating is about the same as National's poll rating, whereas Chippy's trust rating was in excess of Labour's poll rating. This suggests Labour has more room to go up.

A lot of commentators have speculated that Luxon is a drag on National - despite National being ahead in the most recent polls. A while back, a now ex-National MP said to me that he thought Luxon would have a ceiling of 40% then just start to droop from there. He's been spot on.

I don't think National will be in panic stations. And nor should they be. They're still in a good position to form the next government. However it's not going to be as easy as they thought. And this poll could represent a turning point where all the momentum starts coming in behind Labour.

We may have already seen the highwater mark of a Luxon-led National Party.