KEY POINTS:
The National Party is on the verge of achieving something historic, something which had been thought impossible.
Apart from National now looking a cert to end its nine-year stint on the Opposition benches tomorrow, for the first time in an MMP election the vote for a major party could reach the kind of levels that saw landslide results in first-past-the-post elections.
The helping hand that proportional representation implicitly gives to third parties had been thought to rule out one of the two major parties ever scoring above 45 per cent of the vote under MMP, which was introduced at the 1996 election.
But National may well record a result as high as 48 per cent tomorrow - a level that produced landslides in first-past-the-post elections, most recently in 1972, 1975, 1987 and 1990.
The current highest party vote under MMP is 41.3 per cent recorded by Labour at the 2002 election.
National now looks like matching the heights it has been hitting consistently in the polls for well over a year. The flurry of polls released yesterday and today may now have a bandwagoning effect at the ballot box, both in strengthening National's vote and collapsing Labour's.
With no prospect of Labour getting anywhere near National, even more centre-left voters may migrate to the Greens - the other likely big winner tomorrow.
The latter party was registering support at 9 per cent in two television polls last night.
Wasted votes could conceivably put National in a position where it might be able to govern alone. If not, it now looks increasingly like a National-Act-United Future coalition will be able to secure a majority.
Key had looked like needing the Maori Party on board. Increasingly, it seems he won't.
If he does, the numbers are such that there would be huge pressure on the Maori Party to back National, rather than be a prop in what would be an ungainly and unpopular Labour-Progressive-Greens-Maori Party-NZ First arrangement.
What is pretty clear is that Key is most unlikely to need to try to invoke what he calls the "moral mandate" - the fiction that the party which wins the largest number of seats should govern as of right.
Things are looking bleak for Labour. That it is in deep trouble could be discerned by the amount of time Helen Clark is spending campaigning in usually solid Labour territory this week.
With a day to go before the election, it now seems Labour has been forced to adopt a defensive strategy to shore up its support rather than taking the fight to Key.
Much now depends on the much-vaunted Labour Party machine getting out its vote. However, it has another worry - people split-voting and giving their electorate vote to Labour while giving their crucial party vote to the Greens or others. Labour MPs and candidates relying on the party list for their entry to Parliament must be shuddering.
Not as much as Winston Peters and his NZ First colleagues, though.
NZ First's recent troubles don't help. But National's surging support along with Key's push to the centre on policy are the primary reasons why the small conservative-stanced centrist party is struggling to beat the 5 per cent threshold.
The political wilderness beckons.
