Election 2020: Heather Du Plessis-Allan’s The Front Bench: Is National on a death spiral?

OPINION:

You know things go wrong for a match when people start to wonder if that match is already on its death spiral.

And that’s the conversation around National now.

This has been fueled by last night’s Newshub-Reid research poll, which puts it at 29.6 percent. It’s not too far from Colmar Brunton’s poll last Wednesday, which had National at 31 percent, which means it’s a pretty accurate reflection of where National is.

I don’t think we can answer this death spiral question yet. We need one more poll: tonight’s next 1 News-Colmar Brunton poll.

The reason I don’t think we can call it a death spiral at the moment is because the last poll we have, which is last night’s putting National at 29 percent, was done before Judith Collins got the Crusher back. . The poll was conducted before Wednesday of last week. Which means he got all the bad stuff: Judith’s weird flirtatious act and the revelation of the multi-billion dollar tax hole.

But on Wednesday things change a bit. Collins performed well in the debate of TVNZ leaders who, as we have said, will not have won their votes but could have stopped or slowed the exodus of voters to ACT.

Since then, Crusher took the fight directly to Labor leader Jacinda Ardern, went into battle for National’s traditional voting base, including farmers, vowed to repeal regulations, including the Zero Carbon Act, and some of us did. We noticed, Gerry Brownlee has had some of the billboards removed. The campaign seems to have changed course.

There are reports that Judith is essentially lone on the campaign now, with less advice from Gerry and his team. And this is good. Because her advice has led to a confused campaign where the national seemed to lose its backbone, made bad strategic decisions and made big mistakes.

He’s a good pivot, but is he in tonight’s poll? If you do, National still has a chance to save the furniture. If not, the death spiral becomes a real threat.