pn891. A Funny New Poll

 

POSTSCRIPT. See new Talbot Mills poll result in the next post.

A new pollster has hit the NZ stage: Post/Freshwater Strategy. Hired by the Wellington Post, the head office of Freshwater Strategy is in Sydney, Australia. Its chief director is Mike Turner who has worked mainly with British Tories such as Boris Johnston and Liz Turner, and its NZ connector is Tim Hurdle, a former National Party staffer. 

Upfront about its probable right-wing political leaning, and the influence it could have on how people vote, the poll was surprisingly unclear about its methodology.  

Conducted on-line between 28-30 August (before the announcement of National's tax policy or Labour's free dentistry for the under 30s) 1,511 people were polled, 500 more than most polls. The stated margin of error was ±3%. Fine.

 But there was no mention of whether the poll used "weighting", the method used by pollsters to shape their sample to resemble the total population.  There was also no mention of those who refused to answer and about one in five (20%) of those polled were "undecided": a very high number.  Undecided and refused to answer usually account for 10-12% of those polled.

 Over 300 people  of the 1511 polled were "undecided" and  were excluded from the calculation of party vote totals and seats in Parliament.  This common practice, as I have noted in previous postings, distorts results.   I think they should be included in the analysis.  The poll showed National/Act to win 60 of the 120 seats in Parliament.  My estimate which included "undecided" resulted in 31 seats,  25 for Labour/Greens, and 18 undecided seats.

The poll showed NZFirst across the 5% theshold. With Labour having ruled out working with the party, NZFirst could give National/Act a more assured lead. One interesting finding was that the addition of Te Pati Māori party to the Labour.Greens line-up saw support slip 5%.  

The table below shows how the poll compares with the average of five other polls conducted in July-August by 1News-Kantar, Talbot Mills, Taxpayers’ Union-Curia, Roy Morgan and Newshub-Reid. It was slightly more favouable to National and the Greens, slightly less favourable to Act, and considerably less favourable to Labour.  Would I heed the results? No,it adds little and its methodology is unknown.  But the finding on the addition of TPM to the Labour-Greens line-up is disturbing and could speak poorly of our race relations.

-- ACW