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It is very tough for a government to win re-election when two-thirds of voters think the country is heading in the wrong direction. But that is exactly where Chris Hipkins’s Labour Party finds itself: between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Nearly two-thirds of New Zealand voters think that the country is going in the wrong direction, nominating cost-of-living, the health system and crime as the top three issues when voting begins on October 2.
The latest The Post/Freshwater Strategy Poll shows that 63% of voters think the country is heading in the wrong direction, while only 21% think it is headed in the right direction, followed closely by 15% who said it was not moving either way.
For most of the John Key/Bill English years and continuing through most of Jacinda Ardern’s tenure as prime minister, most polls showed New Zealanders through to 2022 thought that the country was going in the right direction.
It is generally considered in New Zealand that negative campaigns only work when the public think that the country is going in the wrong direction. When most people are happy, the message doesn’t resonate.
The Post
Labour has to go negative because they simply have no achievements on which to hang their hat.
Labour has now entered a doom spiral, where negative polls get progressively worse.
Labour politicians will know this because Kiwi voters will now be crossing the road to avoid being near them. Because politicians normally live in a bubble surrounded by sycophants they won’t have noticed the general turning-away.
But with the election campaign underway it is now unavoidable. They have relentless bad news dumping on them, with polls arriving every week and policies being torn apart in the news cycle.
Have a care for those poor Labour MPs watching their political careers burn on the election bonfire. They’ve studiously ignored all the bad polls until now…and now they can’t avoid them.
The turning away is happening.
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