Good day/bad day: Election race ends in a road crash

The campaign wraps up with the most ill-judged wisecrack of all. We report who's in the pink, and who made a blue.

In Newsroom's final Good Day/Bad Day rankings, we'll start with the leader who ended his campaign on the strongest, safest note – and work our way down the grid to the leader who started in poll position (see what we did there?) but went right off-track ...

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Greens co-leader James Shaw was on message as he and co-leader Marama Davidson wrapped up their party's best election campaign. He talked about Fair Pay Agreements, he talked about public transport subsidies, he talked about welfare as key areas of agreement with Labour. "We are in the fight of your lives, don't sit on the sidelines," he said. "We are running a campaign based on hope and there is not a lot of that in the rest of the campaign – it is pretty bleak." He's not wrong ...

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Winston Peters, too, has grown in confidence and poll rankings throughout the campaign. Some say Christopher Luxon opened the door to NZ First's return to Parliament, but the party had been on a rising trajectory well before that. It's more likely that Luxon simply acknowledged the inevitable. Most of all, New Zealand politics' great survivor knows how to play the underdog, the outsider, the little guy taking on the malign forces of the establishment. Sitting down for such at Newmarket's Westfield mall yesterday, Peters was asked if he thought voters trust National Party leader Christopher Luxon. "I'm afraid this is not a day where I'm going to get stitched up this close to the election. Some people get white-line fever, I don't. "

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Apparently Christopher Luxon has been working a new campaign phrase, “up the Lux". Hmmm. In last night's final leaders' debate, he said he's "a verbal guy". But he's not. That was apparent from the moment the two men entered the TVNZ studio when, according to the NZ Herald's Shayne Currie, Hipkins gripped Luxon's hand and whispered in his ear, "are you going to answer any questions tonight?" Throughout the entire debate, Luxon pleaded with the combative Labour leader to "be more respectful" but it only highlighted his refusal to answer the questions. "Mate, look, you need to listen to Taylor Swift when she says I need you to calm down," Luxon beseeched. But Hipkins made it very clear he wasn't going to keep calm and would just carry on.

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Heads, shoulders, knees and a bed leg above Luxon's entreaties was Chris Hipkins' shocking one-liner in the debate. Criticised for overseeing a disintegrating line-up of ministers, he retorted: "I think people shouldn't be throwing stones. Right? None of my MPs beat people up with a bed leg." Earlier in the day, he'd warned of elements of racism in the "right campaign" with some being thinly veiled, such as the discussions on co-governance.

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And that brings us to the leader who ended with the biggest road crash. Those who've watched the minor leaders debates will have seen Act Party leader David Seymour progressively tone down his ebullience and pull back on the one-liners, in an attempt to look more ministerial. But yesterday he started the day’s campaigning at Hampton Downs racecourse, south of Auckland, where he suited up and did seven hot laps in a four-cylinder Radical SR3, much like the Le Mans vehicles seen in endurance races.

Out and about soon after, he rejected accusations from Chris Hipkins of race-baiting. Then a woman passing by in a Suzuki Swift spotted him and shouted out the window: "Racist!"

And Seymour couldn't help himself. "I think she'd seen us racing this morning," he grinned. Yeah, nah, if there's one thing in this campaign that's no laughing matter, it's accusation of racism.