Craig speaks out on poll dip, hears MacGregor is 'sleeping'

The last DigiPoll before Saturday’s election shows support for Colin Craig’s Conservative Party starting to slide after a steady climb.

In July’s DigiPoll the Conservatives were on 1.2%; in August, 2.6%; and then in weekly polling 3.3%, 3.8% and 3.8%.

Today’s poll shows Mr Craig’s party back down to 3.3%.

Mr Craig, however, remains upbeat.

“It is only one poll and inevitably polls do fluctuate, so I’m not too concerned about it, particularly as the DigiPoll doesn’t have any proven track record for getting it right,. So I’m not at all concerned about that,” he says.

“At the moment we’re very comfortable that we’re 5.5-ish% . There was the report earlier in the week about National’s internal polling having us at 6, and of course there’s Reid Research, which is the poll that actually reads people the options they can vote for so it tends to be more accurate.

“Obviously it’d be lovely if every poll went up but the reality is all the ones that matter to us are,” Mr Craig says.

Asked if he would welcome National giving a nod and a wink to its Napier supporters to get in behind Conservative candidate Garth McVicar –as National has already done for Act’s David Seymour in Epsom and Labour’s Kelvin Davis in Te Tai Tokerau  – Mr Craig briefly sounds a little wistful about the prospect.

“Well, they’ve always had that option,” he says. “I think John Key was asked about it and said it might be a little bit confusing for voters this late in the piece... But we are doing well in Napier, no question about that, so it may well be we get over the line.”

He quickly gets back on message: “As far as we’re concerned it’s always been about the 5%. We launched our campaign saying it was all about the 5% and we’re on track for that, so we’re pretty happy.”

Mr Craig says he still hasn’t managed to talk to his ex-press secretary Rachel MacGregor about the reason for her abrupt resignation this morning, but he has now received notice of her resignation via email.

“We exchanged an email today – she sent an email to say she’d officially resigned and we’ve gone back to say, ‘we just want to know you’re all right.’ We have heard from a third party that she’s got friends with her and she is sleeping, so that’s good,”  Mr Craig says.