Before and after

We’re in the interesting situation this election where it looks like political preferences are actually changing quite rapidly (though some of this could be changes in non-response that don’t show up in actual voting).

On Thursday, One News released a poll by Colmar Brunton that found Labour ahead of National by 43% to 41% for the first time in years.  Yesterday, NewsHub released a Reid Research poll with Labour back behind National 39% to 43%.

“Released” is important here. The Colmar Brunton poll was taken over August 26-30. The Reid Research poll was taken over August 22-30. That is, despite being released  later, the Reid Research poll was (on average) taken earlier. Comments (and even analysis) of polls often ignore the interview time and focus on the release date, but here we can see why the code of conduct for pollers requires the interview period to be described.

A difference of 4 percentage points in Labour’s support is quite large for two polls of this size (though not out of the question just from sampling error). If the polls were really discrete events four days apart, it would be plausible to argue they showed Labour’s support had stopped increasing — that the Ardern effect had reached its limit. If the two polls were taken over exactly the same period, the most plausible conclusion would be that the true support was in between and that we knew nothing more about Labour’s trajectory. With the Sunday poll actually taken slightly earlier, the difference is still likely to mostly be noise, but to the (very limited) extent that it says anything about trajectory, the story is positive for Labour.