Tim Dower: There's a reason ACT continue to trend upwards

You have to take the polls with a pinch of salt right now, although we're closing in on the election and neither of the two main blocs has a clear lead.

This time around the 1News Kantar poll puts National and ACT in the driving seat with 62 seats on these numbers - enough to govern alone.

Bear a couple of things in mind though. Number one; this is another small survey with only 1000 people over the course of two days.

Small polls mean a bigger margin of error and in this case it's a gnat's more than three points.

Also in this poll around 12 percent said they didn't know, haven't made up their minds, or won't vote, or just refused to answer.

Those people aren't counted when it comes to working out the party vote figures.

Now look, any survey is basically a snapshot isn't it and it can be influenced by recent events, so it's more interesting and more useful to look at trends.

Which direction the party or person you're interested in is travelling - is there a trend?

When you look over time at the Kantar survey, what you see is this.

Labour's lost a big slice of the ground it had back in 2017, but National's been too obsessed with its own navel it's failed to make good gains.

It's actually also gone backwards since that election, but over the past year or so it's got really tight between those two - and remains that way.

Down in the trenches where you've got the likes of Te Pāti Māori the Greens and ACT scrapping it out - there's really one clear trend there.

And that's ACT, which has been on a steady upward trend for the past three years.

Any why's that?

They're disciplined and focussed and because Seymour works so damn hard, sticks to his knitting, and pumps out a consistent message.

It's not rocket science.

Tim Dower is a New Zealand journalist who works for Newstalk ZB as a newsreader and substitutes talkback announcer. This article was first published HERE