Greens on crucial 15% in Mt Albert - Lee toast

TVNZ reporting an opinion poll they commissioned for Saturday's Mt Albert by-election has:
David Shearer (Labour) 59%
Melissa Lee (National) 21%
Russel Norman (Green) 15%
John Boscawen (Act) 3%

I've posted several times before - at the very beginning - that 15% is the magical number a third party must get to to be a viable candidate. With momentum off this Dr Norman should be able to displace the woeful National candidate to come in second. But could he do better?

At 15% he's in the game. It may be a week too late, but if another poll comes out in the next few days at anything more than 15% and Shearer anything less than 50% he becomes a contender.

At this point the National team have to ask themselves whether they can salvage anything from this debacle. If they think that getting Melissa Lee into second spot with maybe 20-25% of the vote is the best they can do to rescue their self-esteem they may be wrong and ought to consider pursuing a more radical idea.

They may find that directing National voters to vote Green will be more demoralising to Labour than a 3rd placing will be to them. As I've said before if the Greens win next week it will make it easier for National to win this electorate (with the right candidate FFS!) at the general election scheduled for 2011 - off the back of a split Green-Labour vote. Clearly they can't win on the split now so being brutally rational they should completely abandon Lee - give the nod to Norman and hope he wins. At least the Nat's could then claim some sort of a victory (over Labour) as authors of that result rather than victims of their own presumptuous candidate selection. A loss for Labour would be devastating and for Goff, perhaps politically fatal, whereas if Lee comes in at 15-20%... so what.

And watching Dr Norman's heckling of the Act candidate on Q+A this morning he may be up to a more aggressive style of traditional campaigning that the Greens have hitherto rejected. For the Greens co-leader "to win this damn thing" (to use Lee's words) is now possible - however unlikely it was before - it is now just possible because of this poll. But he'll need a good chunk of those who voted for National's Ravi Musuku last time and maybe 10-15% off Labour to do it. Labour voters can now vote Green without risking a Tory win - this is an important consideration.

It is up to Russel to now announce that it is a Shearer v. Norman race and everything he says and does must be directed towards Shearer - which I'm sure it will be. The party operatives can send the other tactical messages that the candidates themselves cannot.