ALL BEHIND YOU, WINSTON!

Well, the unthinkable has happened.

New Zealand First has surged ahead in not one, not two, but ALL the polls!

While we here in NZF don't usually take much notice of polling (and why would we - they customarily *underrate* our support), there's something truly heartening about each of the Reid Research, Colmar Brunton, and National's own internal polling predicting a Win for Winston on Saturday.

Earlier this week, I said that this campaign marked the Turning of the Tide in the fight against National.

With this evening's news showing clips of John Key being booed on the previously blue-ribboned streets of Dargaville; while anecdotal reports circulate that Northland Nats are absolutely furious with John & Joyce's handling of the campaign ... it truly does seem that there's something magic in the air.

People from across the political spectrum - and New Zealanders from all walks of life - have come together up in Northland, and across the country. Whether #Nationalist or Labourite, Greenie or grandmother, and disaffected Nat or disillusioned blogger ... they have all united behind one man.

And while by this late point in the race, there's a certain teleological compulsion to view this coagulation as something of an inevitability ... as someone who's spent much of the last few weeks (if not the last few years) running about madly trying to persuade a diverse milieu of disparate perspectives to back my Leader, I can personally attest it's far harder to pull off than it looks.

As the late, great Terry Pratchett once said "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny ... Free men pull in all kinds of directions."

Ordinarily, that might be true. But in these exceptional circumstances, free men of all persuasions are choosing to push back in one direction and one direction only. Against National.

Against being taken for granted by a government which seems to regard democracy as a once-every-three-years checkbox formality rather than a genuine necessity for consultation. Against the arrogance implicit in National's selection of not one - but two dud candidates, on the assumption Northlanders would just blithely vote for them anyway.

And against the sort of party which sees infrastructure improvements as a pork-barrel bribe to be handed out in an electoral lolly-scramble the moment they fear they might be losing.

When Winston wins on Saturday night, it won't just be his finest hour. Nor, regrettably, will it singlehandedly sound the death-knell for this gangrenous government.

But it will be the start of something glorious. And a moment of sheer, unadulterated terror for the National Party.

To quote The Other Winston ... "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

In the mean-time, and for the next 48 hours ... we truly are ALL BEHIND YOU, WINSTON!