 You're listening to The Crunch with Cam Slater, right here on RCR, Reality Check Radio. This week on Political Tragics, we go to dig deep into the political intrigue and behind the scenes fun and games of political pollster and blogster David Farrah. You've been involved in politics for about as long as I have. Yeah, I joined the young nationals in my first year of university, 1986. And I wasn't really intending to, but there was a, they advertised meeting with Lockwood Smith. And I just thought, that sounds really interesting. I knew him from his TV personality days, et cetera. So I went along really to hear Lockwood and then found out that it's actually their AGM. And somehow we ended up being made branched secretary because I actually had a computer, et cetera. So it was almost about accidental. Well, you're the person who got me into blogging back in 2005 when I started, you'd already been doing it for a couple of years before that. But we started blogging before it was that popular and I had a little goal there. Years and a week I would have been going. Yeah. And I'm close behind you on that. And I said a little goal you probably didn't know back then, but there's no point in coming second in my view. And I always set a goal to try and beat you. And it took me a few years, but I got there in the end. Oh, you did. And it wasn't that well into the goal. I was barely open about it. Yeah. And as I said, if someone has to get more numbers than me, I glad it was you. Now, didn't you get sacked by the prime minister once? No. Oh, come on. Tell the truth. No. It wasn't sacked. No. No. Oh, come on. You're going to share something surely. Well, what I can share, this is quite a good little story, is in 1999 election, I was doing the polling for it. And we were meant to finish polling on the Wednesday night because doing a Thursday night poll is pretty useless because Friday it's all over. There's nothing you can do or announce Friday, et cetera. So I told the staff we were finishing up on Wednesday, but then got told, no, no, we really want to just, for curiosity's sake, know what the final night's like. So can you organize a shift on Thursday night too? So I said, OK, we'll do it. So we had the staff party and the polling that night. And it came out that National was around 8% behind Labour, which happens to also be the exact amount that the election result was. But the campaign manager was Jeff Grant. And when he called me up, normally I do a written report, but this time it was just give us the number. So when Jeff called me up, I thought, ah, I don't want to depress them too much. I'll just say it was around 6% because I just sort of cushioned the blow away bit. And Jeff says, oh, thanks. And then I'm with Jeff, and then his phone goes, and it's Murray McKay. Murray's asking Jeff, oh, how's the polling looking? And Jeff goes, oh, yeah, we're around 4%, 5% behind, et cetera. So he cushioned the blow a bit. And then the next morning at the 5 or 6 AM meeting, we're there and the Prime Minister's there. And... Which was Jenny Shipley at that time. It was Jenny Shipley. And she goes, Murray, how was the polling last night? And Murray goes, we're only 2% behind. We should win. So I'm sitting there thinking, oh, my goodness. And I've told the story to a few people, including Dave, and to no great friend of yours, but I think you'll enjoy this. I mentioned this at some stage to Michelle Bogue just before the 2002 election. And Michelle made me repeat this story to the entire campaign committee so that they would know this is not to happen this time. There is to be no cushioning the blow. And as you probably know, 2002, the blow was so bad, it couldn't be cushioned. No, there's no way you can mitigate that disaster. Now, I don't know if you want to share this, but you were the numbers man for Bill English once, weren't you? It's an interesting one there. It wasn't quite the numbers, man, but I was very involved with helping with the numbers with the coup that Don Brash led against him. And what happened is we had the numbers. And so we went out that night and we went to the back bench to celebrate. So it was the Brack pack and me and a couple of others having drinks there, et cetera. But then as happens, and we can speculate on who, one person flipped. And so, and I was a staffer in the leader's office at the time, right? I was also a national activist, but I was a staffer, I worked for the leader. And they had the caucus and to pretty much everyone's surprise, Don Brash walks out first and they've announced he's the leader and everyone's pretty stunned, et cetera, and this is pretty big. Anyway, I kick into professional gear. I'm the leader, doesn't matter what my opinion was. So I end up spending quite a bit of time with Don that afternoon saying, look, this is what we need to do. I've already changed the website. We need to do a photo shoot. We need to get your business cards. We need to do this, that, et cetera. And I also knew Don. It was like, I thought Bill should have stayed on, but I had huge respect and time for Don, too. So it wasn't personal, but anyway. So I spent the afternoon with Don and at the end of it, he goes, oh, you've been so great, David. You've been so good. Look, why don't you come watch the six o'clock news with me and Gillian? I go, oh, that'd be great. And we're seeing the office. It was pretty much only three of us. Maybe there was one or two other people. Yeah. And of course it's the lead item, but around two minutes into the item, TV1 news has, meanwhile, the English camp had premature celebrations last night and there's me with Bill English in the backpack and Bill King in the back feature, obviously celebrating through the window from outside. And you can imagine Gillian's looking at the TV screen, looking at me. How was this there? Huge credit to Don Brash. He kept me on staff. Well, he was a consummate professional, but of course he was the first person to get knobbled in the National Party by Nicky Harger. You've got some thoughts about how he managed to get all those emails, don't you? Well, my best guess is every email was to or from Don or a guy, Brian, who worked for Don. And my guess is that someone got into Brian's laptop somehow. This wasn't our inside job, you know, where someone noble was printing out their own emails. Someone deliberately got into a laptop, copied the emails, could probably do it in, you know, two minutes, et cetera, and let them through. Because I can't believe there's a single National MP or staffer who, even if you thought, you know, I'm not a big Don Brash supporter, you wouldn't go give information to Nicky Harger. You know, you give it to the media or something. And of course, Nicky Harger used criminal means to get at me and you and everybody else as well with dirty politics. Yeah, I just buy it, send it to my office because there were documents taken from my office that turned up in one of his box. And there's no way that a random staffer happened to just think, oh, I'll take these home and, oh, who might I give them to? Oh, Nicky, you know, it's obviously he got someone to go into my office and take a job there. So, you know, 2005, Nicky Harger had an impact in the election, 2014. Well, he helped get national majority. Well, that's right. 2014, he again came into the election campaign with dirty politics and National increased its vote. That's the one I mean, sorry, yes. Yeah, yeah. I hear he's planning something for this election. Do you think it will have a positive impact on the victims of his book? You know, he never ever talks to the victims of his book. Well, all I'll say is his last book resulted in a commission of inquiry led by a former Prime Minister and Attorney General and a former Supreme Court Justice. So you can't get much higher than that. And their conclusion is the principal allegations in the book are incorrect. So that's on the record, Supreme Court Judge, former Attorney General and PM looked into everything he had months about. His next book, let's just say I hope you won't need a commission of inquiry to reach the same conclusion. Well, yeah, you and I were subject of the dirty politics book and, you know, having read the book, it shows the fevered imagination of a conspiracy theorist in reality. I mean, he was ascribing all sorts of nefarious activities that you and I were supposed to have been up to for some sort of agenda. And I think he just failed to understand that you and I do what we do for sheer entertainment. There's no actually actual agenda. And, you know, remember when Helen Clark's husband, Peter Davis, said, wrote about you saying that you're fermenting happy mischief. And I thought that was a perfect description about what we used to do back then. And it was all just really for laughs and giggles. And they thought it was all serious. And, you know, like there was things about, oh, the Prime Minister directed Cameron Slater to do this and do that. If they'd heard the phone calls that I'd had between me and Jason Eade sometimes when he'd ring me up and say, you know, Cam, you need to take down that post. The boss is really upset about that. And I'll just say, well, tell the organ grinder to ring. I don't want to speak to the monkey. And that's the sort of way that I treated phone calls from anybody in the National Party back then. And I imagine by that stage, you were the same as well. You were kind of out of the party, not had anything to do with it officially in any sort of capacity other than you with a pollster. And we were just writing what we thought and it was bizarre. Anyway, it's what happened. And I guess it helped make us more famous than we already were. It did. Now, just a quick, let's have a quick, you know, a few bullet points on some of the key things that you get asked as a pollster. Like, I imagine you get questions about what does the margin of error mean? Yeah, like, margin of error, you know, on a poll of 1,000, that's 3% for the big parties. And all that means is like, if it says Labour's on 45%, it means they're actually probably somewhere 95% confident they're between 42% and 48%. So if the polls are really close, like in the New Zealand polls, it's saying actually, you know, it's so close, either party could actually be ahead. If there's a 20% gap, like we're going to talk about in the Northland poll, then doesn't the margin of error can't affect the result, basically. You've got so large gaps. So really, the margin of error is just saying, if it's really close to each other, you can't put too much weight on it. What about sample sizes, David? Does that make a huge difference? Is it better to have 10,000 people polled, or do you get the same sort of number with 400 or 500 or 1,000? Yeah, look, at 1,000 is a 3% margin of error. If you did, I have to check the exact numbers. But I think if you go up to 1,500, it's still a 2.5% margin of error, and it's really not worth doing an extra of that. 1,000 is the gold standard, basically. If you go much under 500, the margin of error is getting over 5%, and that's getting, you know, bit too much for those close results. So generally, most polls, we between, say, 400 and 1,000 people. So if you say polling of 400 people and you've got a clear result of 20% difference, the margin of error you've just said is largely irrelevant. There's almost no point in polling an extra 400 people because you're going to end up with the same sort of numbers. Yeah, the only reason you might poll more is if you want to place a lot of reliance on the breakdowns by gender and age. Because a 400 poll, then you've got 200 women, 200 men. That's getting like a 7% margin of error. So if you're a political party, you'll probably do bigger samples because they do need to know how are we dealing with men, women under four years. But if it's a media poll, actually that top-line figure is still quite robust. The polls seem to show that at the moment, it might be slightly different with all of this, you know, Kerry Allen stuff impacting the government, but let's just put that to one side. This poll shows that it's almost hard to depict in a broken nose. Would you agree with that at the moment? When I speak to groups around New Zealand, I say, like, the sure answer is it's very close. The long answer is it's very, very, very close. No poll for the last 18 months has had either block get more than 62 or 63 seats out of 120. You need 61 to one. And that's partly because, you know, you've got two centre-right parties. You've got New Zealand first if they make it. And you've got three centre-left parties. And, you know, the two blocks are very balanced. As a professional pollster for this election, do you believe that... Let's just talk about the minor parties. National's going to get there. Labour's going to get there. The Greens are going to get there. ACT is going to get there. To party Maori, let's not talk about them because they've got, you know, kind of a bent system that helps them get there. For the minor parties, including New Zealand first, what are you seeing as seeing now as a gut feel on who is likely to get there and who's likely to not get there? New Zealand first is the most likely my party outside Parliament to make it. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the odds are 50-50, but they're definitely better than last time because I think the issues they're campaigning on, especially around co-governance, are striking much more resonance. They have some competition there. My general rule of thumb is, like, if Winston goes into the election with a public poll showing him at 4% or above, he'll make five because we know he campaigns well. If he's below 4%, then the chance for them is going to be that sort of relevance, wasted vote, et cetera. So I think the public polls over the next two months will be quite important, but he's definitely got the best and you could almost say the only chance of making it from the parties that are not there at the moment. What are the headline numbers there, David, and what is it showing, especially for democracy in New Zealand, what are these numbers show? Remember, this is exclusive. Everyone's polled in Northland, and we've got a stake in the ground here so that we can, you know, hold the feet to the fire of all the candidates. Yeah, well, on the candidate range, we can talk about the Pahi vote also, of course, but you've got Grant McKillum, the National Candidates at 28%. Then you've got Willow Jean Prime, the incumbent MP, a pre-disasterous result. She's only 18%. So she'll be hoping for a high list ranking then, won't she? Yeah, and she'll need a very high list ranking because at the moment, Labour's only going to get around five list MPs, and she was number 10 on their effect of list, i.e. when you take account of who wins electorates there. So it's not looking good for her. You've got Shane Jones next on 6%, and then the ACT candidate, who's a list MP, Mark Cameron, in fourth place on 3%, and Matt King, the former National MP and leader and candidate for democracy ended on 2%. Now, there are a few percent undecided, and we talked about Marja Vera. Yeah. So what that says is you can't totally rule out that 20% between National and Labour could maybe get closed if National Candidate has a bad campaign and the other ones, there's three other centre-right candidates ACT New Zealand, First Democracy New Zealand. They all had really good campaigns and got up to 5%, 10% each, and Labour going to throw possibly it's plausible that, you know, there. But outside those two, if you're polling three months out at 3% or 6% or 2%, it's very, very hard to see that there's any pathway to you winning. You'd have to win two thirds of the undecided voters, and minor parties have never done that. So very much my reading is this is National seat to lose, and there's no big surprise. It has, with the exception of Winston Wonah and Abah election, has been, and last election where Labour won it, has been a pre-solid National seat for a long time. So what we're really seeing is a sort of return to normality. But at the Pahi vote, that shows how much things have swayed against the government, because you've got National at 36% and ACT at 16. And those two get together, 52%, and Labour and Greens together 23%, and you've got 16% undecided. So on the Pahi vote, it's very clearly going back to the centre right. And when you ask people to do this one most powerful questions, I think, do you think your country's here in the right or the wrong direction? I'm just bringing up the exact numbers there, but they're pretty terrible. 19% of Northland residents in this poll say we're hitting the right direction, 71% the wrong direction. So again, you're the Labour candidate, you've got to win against that. And people have worked out, I think in that seat, yo, they're actually quite smart. ACT's got 16% party vote, but only a few percent electorate vote. So they know if you want to change the government, yo, you have Pahi vote for any of the centre right Pahis. But if you want to win the seat, you get behind the centre right candidate who's most likely to win. And that's clearly what they're saying. So just to clarify, you asked people which candidate from which party you would give your candidate vote. You didn't ask about names, you just said who would you vote for the National Candidate, and then they said I'll vote for the National Candidate. Yeah, we say which candidate or parties can date. So they might just say the National Candidate or if they know the name, they might say Grant McCallan. A list, we just say which parties candidate or candidate will you vote for. What we did do though is after we ask that question because we don't give them names, we then just ask can you know the candidates for those five parties. That was interesting. Those numbers are fascinating. Yeah, because the Labour candidate who's the current MP through he 9% knew she's the current MP. That's low. Electric MPs generally should be at 70% name awareness. 7 out of 10 people should be able to say who the local MP is. There is only 4 out of 10 for Willow Jean. The National Candidate's not got a great name recognition at 29%. Admittedly he's been selected but later but you know, he should be aiming for 70% also. He has to really double his name recognition there. The at list MPs only at 7% name recognition which surprised me because normally list MPs do have a local profile. Jane Jones actually of the candidate's not in parliament. It's an impressive number for him really. Yeah, 34% could name him as the New Zealand first candidate etc. So he's certainly known there but mostly though people are still not saying they're going to vote from just because they know he's the candidate. Now, Matt King former MP bit once in 2017 there but having defected to and set up democracy in New Zealand even though he's very active with his meeting only 1 in 5 or 19% knew that he was a candidate and we actually tried to help them a bit because we actually said can you name the leader and local candidate for democracy New Zealand. He's half of Shane Jones. I found those numbers fascinating and I was talking to Morris Williamson offline earlier and he said to me when he first got selected and panker panker anger for the election there that he spent 6 months going to basically the opening of every envelope and public meetings and getting in the local paper and the entire team worked 24-7 to get the name awareness out and he had this big meeting with the committee and said we've done an amazing job we're going to do some polling on name recognition I expect our name recognition to be massively up there and when he got the results a week later he had 17% name recognition he says it sort of popped his balloon a bit that all of that work was almost for nothing Look it is hard hard work some candidates are 10-12% name recognition and the challenges they're now in the last 90 days which means they've got a spending cap I always think you should select candidates the year before the election and from generally three to three months before you should be spending 50 to 75,000 at least on name recognition public meeting billboards mail drops door knocking turn up to all the meetings etc for it really does make a big difference So your call on Northland based on this poll is that it's pretty much a lock for the National Party and the National Candidate both of them They did something really bad Grant McCullum is not known for that No I know Grant he's pretty solid I've known Grant for nearly 30 years he's a board member of the National Party and he's just a solid farmer he's never going to set the world off of He also has a very big membership based on the electorate I understand the former MP John Carter is in charge of membership and in the past I don't know how many they have at the moment but he's had them up to nearly 2000 members at times and they might be $1 members or $5 members but still on your mailing list and they'll probably be putting hoardings up Northland's always had one of the biggest memberships in the National Party from the time that I can remember my father talking about membership in Northland was always rated as a high they're from the old school of get as many members as possible club rather than the Murray McCully Club which is to have as few members as possible because they're a pest king Exactly So you're the ultimate political tragic really David you're the one who got me started into blogging and people would curse me for that I don't know if you know this but in 2008 remember when we did the blog mobile trip all around the country and we spent 2 or 3 hours with Jacinda Ardern having lunch in Morynsville remember that and I understand that when dirty politics came out that David Cunliffe who was the leader at the time called all the caucus together and said right now who's met these characters David Farah and Cameron Slater and apparently Jacinda Ardern to her credit actually put her hand up and admitted to the fact that she had had had a lunch with us back then so I thought that was funny I was told that by several Labour Party caucus members and I challenged them and said well you've had something to do with me did you put your hand out and they said oh hell no thank you for coming on the crunch with me today David and sharing the numbers about the Northland poll and I look forward to touching base on some other polling questions closer to the election looking forward to it I will say fantastic thank you as you can see David had some good insights there into the challenges for both Matt King and Shane Jones in Northland the margin of error is irrelevant here as the gap is too large for that to take into account and it would be a miracle really on these numbers to defeat the current national candidate Grant McCullum this is the crunch with Cam Slater conversations with a side of controversy right here on RCR