Mayors with high approval got re-elected

There is traditionally very little polling data on how people perceive Mayors are doing. So after the 2022 local body elections, Curia asked in the monthly Taxpayers’ Union poll of 1,000 New Zealanders which TLA they lived in, and how they rated the job of their local Mayor. In any one month you only get an average of 20 or so responses per TLA, but over three years it builds up so we could at least 100 responses for 52 of the Mayors. The data is here.

I looked at how their net approval rating correlated to election outcomes. Sometimes you can get re-elected with a poor rating, if voters think the alternatives are not better. And a popular Mayor can be beaten by an even more popular challenger.

• Of the 22 Mayors with a net approval of +12% or higher, we saw 15 re-elected, 3 retirements and 4 defeated.
• Of the 20 Mayors with a net approval of 0% or lower, we saw only 6 re-elected, 6 retired and and 8 defeated.

So, unsurprisingly, the better voters think a Mayor is doing, the more likely they are to get re-elected.

The Mayor with the lowest net approval who got re-elected is Gary Petley (-28%) from South Waikato.

The Mayor with the highest net approval who got defeated is Adrienne Wilcox (30%) from Matamata-Piako.