The National party chose Todd Muller to save them, but the first post coup poll hasn’t delivered much good news.
A UMR poll the week after Todd Muller took over as National Party leader has shown no immediate change to the National Party’s fortunes, although Muller has debuted at 13 per cent as preferred Prime Minister.
The poll results had National on 30 per cent – just 1 per cent higher than the 29 per cent it scored on the last such UMR poll under Simon Bridges’ leadership at the end of April.
The poll has Labour still well ahead of National on 54 per cent, NZ First was on 5 per cent and the Green Party on 4 per cent.
UMR is the polling company used by the Labour Party, but this was one of a regular series taken for its corporate clients rather than Labour.
Act wasn’t mentioned in the article at far-left rag NZ Herald, but the numbers leaked to me suggest they were on 2.5%.
This poll aligns with the two major public polls and also with the Roy Morgan which National has been busily slamming for the past three days.
The brains trust in National needs to start actually formulating a plan because it appears the only plan they had was to get rid of Simon Bridges.
The wunderkind’s first week was actually a nightmare and Matthew Hooton must really be tearing his hair out that he trashed his media appearances for this.
It seems that actually doing the job of Leader of the Opposition still eludes the abilities of Todd Muller and time is running out fast to get it together.
Meanwhile there are lots of nasty rumours about Todd Muller swirling around in Auckland National party circles, so it is fair to say that all are not pleased with developments. Sources of those rumours appear to be the usual suspects, so it is fair to say the white-anting of Muller is already in progress, and from the connections it appears to be centred on those connected politically to his deputy.
Perhaps Nikki Kaye is pre-positioning herself for the inevitable post-election blood bath.
National and especially Todd Muller are going to have to do much better than that if they want to unseat Labour.
Whilst 13% is the stuff only Bridges can dream of, the first poll after John Key took over saw a jump from 9.2% to 28.5%. If that is the benchmark then Todd Muller is flailing. It took him a further six months to finally pass Helen Clark. Even then it took another 14 months to stay in front of Clark all the time.
Todd Muller doesn’t have that time. He has less than 87 days until voting starts. His handlers need to start smacking him around the ears. Time is a wasting, and every day that goes by without sensible things coming out of his mouth are days where Act and NZ First will command the media.
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