Luxon - 1, media - 0.

After no small effort on the media's part to drum up a crisis on a bad poll, there's two important points and we can put this whole nonsense to bed.

1) Luxon doesn’t have a coup brewing. Despite all the detractors' best efforts, there is no one counting numbers. The nearest they have managed to get is Chris Bishop, who was more interested in being in India over the weekend than lining up a new job for the new week.

Also, we don’t vote for Prime Ministers. They are not presidents. We vote for parties and policies and results. If you like National you don’t not vote National because the leader isn't to your taste.

2) The revelation from the Curia poll, that on one hand they tried to tell you how unpopular Luxon was with a net negative rating of -19. It turns out Bishop is about as bad on -14. Erica Stanford is -16. Everyone is underwater.

Chuck in Winston, Seymour, and Hipkins, you'll see no one is in positive territory and that tells you a couple of things as well. We live in an era where likeability is irrelevant because we hate everyone.

Post-Covid we have never got over the funk, so as much as you want to bang on about Luxon not connecting, according to the numbers, no one connects.

It's all over the world. Trump is underwater, Starmer is underwater, Albanese is underwater and Macron is underwater.

Chris Minns who runs New South Wales is popular currently because of his handling of Bondi. Apart from that pick a politician because we hate them all.

In the likeability numbers, the likes of which we see in the TV1 poll, if Hipkins was 50% and Luxon was 20% then that's an issue. But they aren't. They both have been stuck at about 20% forever and all the others are below that.

That's why none of this matters. In the past the polls have shown an answer, a suitor, a name that drives a bit of fizz. We have no such names.

Now, you can debate the merits or otherwise of great leaders with great personalities, or lack of them. But we are where we are and none of the current lot will go down as Churchill's, to paraphrase Trump. And Churchill, by the way, for a lot of the time wasn’t popular either.

So let's see this nonsense for what it is: we are voting on the economy, not show-men. There is no coup, this is but one poll. Mountain versus molehill. A waste of time.

Let's all try and do a lot better. There is too much at stake.

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Mike's Minute: Two important points on the Luxon story

The Mike Hosking Breakfast