KEY POINTS:
Some times it's ugly whatever you do.
The Herald election character poll was just that for Helen Clark this week.
Asked, yesterday, who was the politician most likely to scare little children at Halloween, readers plumped solidly for Helen Clark with a spine-tingling two-thirds of the vote.
Only Rodney Hide (11 per cent) and Winston Peters (nine) registered at all.
This came on top of another negative result when we asked which politician was most likely to have followers who would try to block vote on an online election poll?
The result? Not John Key, who seems to win most of the nzherald.co.nz polls, but Helen Clark with half the 2121 votes cast.
John Key was second and Winston Peters third.
And when it came to who people trust to teach their children at school, Helen Clark came a dismal third behind Jeanette Fitzsimons and John "The Mentor" Key.
All in all a bad week for Helen Clark among Herald readers.
The results come in the daily character poll running on nzherald.co.nz. We have taken the idea from the now defunct Australian magazine, The Bulletin, which asked Australians broadly similar questions in a light-hearted poll.
The polling, they argued, offered as much insight into how people view politicians' character and, therefore, how they might vote, than did polling on policy.
After all it's how we view our politicians as much as their policies that help us decide.
Jeremy Rees is head of the Herald online and deputy editor of the NZ Herald.
