On current polls, around 16 National MPs will be out.

If they don’t lose electorate seats, then Nicola Willis and Speaker Gerry Brownlee could be at risk because they are running on the party list, and Chris Bishop needs a list place. For them to be re-elected, they need National to lose electorates. So senior members of the National team have an interest in sitting National MPs losing seats.

Like desperate punters taking ever longer shots to recover their losses, backbenchers will be telling themselves that Christopher Luxon can turn things around. Nothing in public opinion polls supports the case. The public have made up our mind about the Prime Minister. His high negatives are locked in and placing a hard cap on National’s support.

National’s own strategists know he is a drag on the ticket. Local MP flyers usually feature the party leader’s picture alongside messages from the candidate and bullet points of policy wins. Luxon does not appear on the leaflets I have seen. On a drive across the countryside, National’s billboards bang on about tax, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. They do not mention National or the PM. He may not have noticed this, as those hoardings are hard to see from the window of an Air Force plane.

Which brings us to the other problem: the daily blunder.

Josie weighs in on The Post.

Josie joined the Huddle on Newstalk ZB to discuss a poll of polls and National's bad political week.

I have heard about a poll that shows three-quarters of us rank the cost of living in our top three issues. But the other quarter don’t rank it in their top 10. We call that slice of society “breakfast radio hosts.” Luxon has put himself on their team.
You can tell that his strategy team know he is a liability because he is not exactly prominent on National’s billboards. There’s only one reason for leaving the leader out of your pitch to voters.

The problem with Luxon is not his personality. It’s tempting to assume that leaders who repeatedly put their foot in their mouth have hidden depths that haven’t yet been revealed. Tempting but usually wrong.

When business was Fifa-flopping, Luxon made an apology he didn’t mean for a statement he didn’t really regret. He could have held to principle. Sure, businesses are struggling but for National, the way out of the darkness isn’t government handouts. I am old enough to remember when business would preach to the rest of us the soul-cleansing virtue of self-reliance and self-respect. They used to say the market should solve our problems. Now? Now the queues of lobbyists out the Beehive door are longer than the queues for food banks and social housing. Every dollar that goes from government to a Rotorua business is a dollar that isn’t going to a hip operation, a child’s reading lesson, or a cop preventing a ram raid. That makes a high bar for helping businesses.

Luxon didn’t say any of that. He caved.

https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/361058286/make-change-national-or-country-will

Josie joined Phil O'Reilly and Andrew Dickens on the Huddle. The Migrant Association is under fire for their stunt where they guillotined an effigy of Winston Peters.

Josie joined Ryan Bridge and Trish Sherson to discuss Christopher Luxon ruling out working with the Opportunity Party after the election, and the Green Party calling for a moratorium on data centres.