Winner was aided by third man Craig

Colin Craig. Photo / Dean Purcell

Middle-class voters sent in their votes at the last minute in the Super City election - but appear to have given a big chunk of them to newcomer Colin Craig at the expense of their supposed champion, John Banks.

As predicted by all the polls, former Manukau Mayor Len Brown clearly won an overwhelming victory south of the social dividing line in Otahuhu, lifting turnout in Manukau and Papakura by about 12 percentage points and in Franklin by 18 points.

People in the generally better-off suburbs north of Otahuhu filled in their voting papers later, producing a surge in the last few days before voting closed on Saturday and lifting the final turnouts as spectacularly as in the south - by about 9 points in Rodney, 12 points in the old Auckland City, 15.5 points on the North Shore and 17 points in Waitakere.

Yet Mr Banks' vote dropped from 43 per cent in the last Herald-DigiPoll survey in early September to just 35.2 per cent across the region in the end.

Mr Brown's stuck within the DigiPoll survey's 3.6 per cent margin of error - 46 per cent in the DigiPoll and a final tally of 48.6 per cent.

Instead, the big winner of the campaign was Mr Craig, whose support almost trebled from 3 per cent in the DigiPoll survey to 8.8 per cent.

All others dropped marginally from 8 per cent to 7.4 per cent.

An official breakdown of the mayoral vote by ward will not be published until the final result is declared on Thursday. But both Banks and Brown camps and Mr Craig himself believe most of Mr Craig's support came from his home area of the North Shore, plus neighbouring Rodney and Waitakere.

"My sense of it is that I probably have done really well in the northern area, and Banks - I think you will find - has dropped off in the northern area," Mr Craig said last night.

He believes he picked up support especially in Rodney because of widespread opposition to the Super City "takeover".

And on his home turf he believes he may have topped the poll, indicating a lack of enthusiasm for either of the two main candidates.

"I know there are a couple of candidates on the North Shore who were polling as they went along and they had me polling ahead of the other two," he said.

Overall, the numbers suggest that Mr Brown probably won a slight margin over Mr Banks in the area north of Otahuhu as a whole, giving him a stronger mandate to claim the leadership of the whole Super City than he seemed to have before the result was declared.

About 58 per cent of his total vote appears to have come from Otahuhu north.