Heather du Plessis-Allan: What has happened to David Seymour?

With a week and a day to go voting, you would have to say the biggest disappointment of this campaign is Act.

We have got a couple of polls out today:

The Taxpayers Union Curia poll and the Talbot Mills research poll both have Act in the single digits for the first time in their polling since April.

ACT has been sliding this entire campaign and a lot of it will be because of David Seymour’s performance.

In the debate last night, and in the TV3 minor leaders debate 2 weeks ago he was not flash. 

He was like a robot.

He was too serious.  

The fighting with Winston is getting a little silly and he just over-talked.

He was like AI: you type in a question, hit enter, and it just keeps going for minutes on end 

And it’s a bummer because this is not the David Seymour that we know.

We got used to the guy with the sense of humour, who said the French the coq, who twerked on TV against all advice, who was basically the leader of the opposition for most of the last three years.

Where's that guy gone? 

I think he’s lost his confidence.

Political insiders know that he lost his star staff member, his media advisor earlier this year and I think we expected ACT to sort of stumble a bit after that but not this much. 

On the polls out today, ACT has lost as many as a third of its voters.

I can’t think of a bigger collapse in a vote during a campaign since Metiria Turei blew up the Greens with her benefit fraud admission 

But for the Greens, at least you could blame it on one single bad decision. 

For ACT, it’s baffling, and it’s more like they’ve run out of steam.

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