Sunday night’s two political polls showing a jump for Labour wasn’t surprising.
A new leader almost always improves a party’s favourability.
What was surprising was that among the preferred Prime Ministers in the Newshub-Reid Research poll was Leighton Baker on 3.9% even though he doesn’t lead a party.
He was leader of the New Conservative Party a couple of years ago.
More recently he was an anti-mandate protestor who was charged with trespass after last year’s protest at parliament. The charges were later withdrawn.
What can be read in to that level of support for someone who doesn’t lead a party, keeping in mind that people polled are not prompted with names?
It shows there is a sizeable number of people who are still very angry about the mandates.
They are likely to be still very angry when they vote and 3.9% added to someone who does lead a party could get past the 5% threshold.
Apropos of this, RNZ reported on the poll and gave the support for preferred PM as:
- Chris Hipkins: 19.6 percent
- Christopher Luxon: 18.8 percent
- David Seymour 3.9 percent
- Jacinda Ardern: 12.4 percent
- Winston Peters: 2.9 percent
There’s no mention of Leighton Baker and the Newshub poll it’s reporting on gave David Seymour 8%.
It’s most likely an unintended error, although conspiracy theorists among whose numbers might be counted some of Baker’s supporters, could read something sinister into it.
Homepaddock 
30% of us supported the Freedom Protest at Wellington. Baker (and to a lesser extent Matt King) stood out as potential leaders for our next Parliament. There is still a huge amount of anger at NZ citizens being mandated to take any medication at all, let alone this one which used a technology never before successfully used on humans. The failure of any of the 120 MPs in Parliament to publicly admit this was wrong means the anger is still there, policies like those expressed by DNZ are resonating strongly in parts of NZ.
I hosted a field day on my farm about 6 months after the Wellington Protest. I jokingly told the organiser that anyone with a vaccine passport needed to stay outside, he said it would not be a problem…. sure enough a bunch of 30 or so farmers and not a single one of us was vaccinated. But we were all angry about yet another reason why our Govt seemed to hate us and see us as second class citizens.
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