Heather du Plessis-Allan: Are Labour in for a historic loss?

After that poll last night - another one putting Labour in the 20s - the question now is: How low is Labour actually going to go?

And I reckon it’s gonna be low enough to hurt them.

They will keep falling from here, I think, for two reasons. 

1- There is a downward trend already, Labour has fallen in every 1News poll this year. All the other public polls back up that decline trend. 

2- They’ve now hit the 30 percent psychological barrier where voters start abandoning them,  because they don’t want to back a loser.

And that’s real in politics. Most voters, with the exception of the rusted-on diehards, do not want to support loser parties. So they leave, making it worse for the loser party.

That 30 percent barrier is a line, for some reason, and this is now the fourth poll in two months that has Labour below the 30 percent line.

So, how bad does it get? 

Well, the answer to that question is- how many rusted-on diehards does Labour have? How many voters do they have who will never vote for anyone else and stick it out?

Officially, 24 percent is the low mark. That's where Labour slumped in two TV polls in July 2017, just a few days before Jacinda Ardern took over as leader.

But there was a lot of talk a few weeks before that of a New Zealand First internal poll which had Labour falling to 19 percent.

I don’t know that we’re in 19 percent territory right now- and I don’t know if that poll ever existed. But 24 percent? Not impossible.

Voters have gone, and I don’t know what they can announce that will make voters come back.

The GST policy was supposed to be that big announcement, they genuinely thought it was going to be huge. But this poll captured voters’ reaction, and it wasn’t good- it drove Labour under that 30 percent mark.

So brace yourself, because Labour might be about to take a historic - or close to historic - spanking. 

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.