Aotearoa’s most popular mayor Dan Gordon of Waimakariri
It was a shock to Dan Gordon when he found out he came top in a poll for the highest approval rating, reports Sapeer Mayron.
When Waimakariri mayor Dan Gordon discovered he has the highest approval ranking of any mayor in Aotearoa, he thought someone was pulling his leg. “My immediate thought was, is this a stitch-up by one of my colleagues?” But it’s no prank: according to new poll results by research company Curia, in collaboration with the Taxpayers’ Union, Gordon has the highest approval rating in the country, sitting pretty at 51% approval.
His score is five percentage points higher than second-place mayor Adrienne Wilcock of Matamata-Piako, and 63 points higher than Auckland mayor Wayne Brown, whose rating is -12%. Even lower-scoring than Brown are the commissioners appointed to run Tauranga, whose score is -18%.
Once he’d realised the scores were serious, Gordon gave some thought as to how he may have come out on top.
“It’s pretty humbling,” he said. “It completely took me by surprise. It’s also a reflection on the incredible community we have in the one district. I’m a part of it, and honoured to be leading it, but my team is very important.”
For Gordon, doing his best every day and being there for his community of some 70,000 people in the North Canterbury towns in good times and bad is “the best job ever”.
“The key is we’re very close to our community and when you’re close to it and you care about it, it’s not difficult to do your job because you just want the best for your community. I pride myself for being accessible and available, because I genuinely want to help people.”
Gordon made headlines in 2023 as the leader of a mayoral campaign against the proposed Three Waters programme, which intended to improve the supply and regulation of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater across the country.
“I get stopped all the time around Three Waters,” Gordon said. “That was a very informative process from our community and I knew from the reaction what I needed to do as a result, and I knew how we wanted to lead through that time.
“I think as a leader and as mayor what’s important to me is keeping in touch with people, because that’s how you can deliver
for them.”
Curia founder and researcher David Farrar is careful to point out how the ratings are generated. A survey cohort of more than 1000 people has been asked monthly over the last 16 months how they rate the job their mayor has been doing since the last election, from very poor to very good.
Survey respondents are 18 and older, live in New Zealand and are eligible and likely to vote. With smaller population samples from places like Waimakariri, there are higher margins of error, which tells us how certain Farrar is about the validity of the score.
Gordon’s approval rating of 51% comes with a margin of error of 7.5%, meaning his score could be plus or minus 7.5%. Across the board the margin of error is 3.1%.
Farrar said because of that, the approval ratings are more useful to look at in terms of groups of mayors rather than individual results.
“The safer ground of looking at them in groups shows you’ve got the clearly very
high-performing mayors, you’ve got those who have moderately good ratings, those with sort of slightly good ratings and those with poor ratings.”
And while 51% approval may not look so good to the uninitiated, Farrar said it was rare to get much higher. Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern hit 80% at the height of her response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Prime ministers around the world – and that’s not quite a comparison with mayors – would be happy with a 20% rating,” he said.
“In reality, most prime ministers have slightly negative ratings, so any positive rating by a significant margin is pretty good.”
That may be welcome news to poorly-ranked mayors Tory Whanau in Wellington, Wayne Brown in Auckland and Janet
Holborow in Kāpiti, the bottom three mayors (except for Tauranga’s commissioners, who take out the bottom spot).
Curia’s polling researchers go deeper for larger constituencies, who have more than 700 responses in their survey. Waimakariri had 172 responses, so each month’s responses were averaged out to create an overall picture of mayoral approval.
But Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch have enough numbers that Curia breaks down approval by quarter, so mayors and their people might watch how their ratings have changed over time.
Brown started his term with a 10% rating in January 2023, but fell to -33% after the Auckland Anniversary and Cyclone Gabrielle flooding events. His ratings have recovered somewhat since then.