Good day/bad day: Red heads, red faces and red cars

With the parties failing to deliver policies that pass the sniff test, one leader is hoping his 'good looks' will win over voters

After touring a Christchurch EV dealership yesterday, Chris Hipkins was asked what colour car he would choose. There was only one possibility for the Labour leader: "Red." Yes, red, like a fire engine. And on that note, I'd share his response when my 13yo daughter encountered him on the campaign trail and asked whether Labour had drawn the short straw with the colour red. "We're quite proud of the history of the Labour Party using a red logo and a red banner in its campaigns," he replied, somewhat indignantly. "I know the Act Party seems to have moved from yellow to pink in this campaign – you probably want to ask them why they chose to switch their colours. But in the case of the Labour Party, it's really just history that's the reason that we still use red."

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Christopher Luxon doesn't want to go red. So he's shared his morning skincare regime in a Tik Tok video, showing how he protects his dome on long sunny days on the campaign trail. "A lot of you have said to me, look Chris, a good-looking bald man, how do you keep your skin in such good condition?" He combines a CeraVe moisturer with a good 50+ sunscreen on his head. "I've got a lot of real estate to cover as you can see." And when the clouds do obscure the sun with the slight decline in the party's vote in yesterday's polls, there's a silver lining. An online calculator shows that with a uniform swing across the country, one less low-ranked National candidate will win his electorate – meaning the party would get deputy leader Nicola Willis back on the list even if she doesn't topple Labour's Greg O'Connor in the Ōhāriu-Belmont electorate.

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Winston Peters had a good day, with three polls confirming National/Act (or a Labour-led coalition) would need the resurgent NZ First to lock in a governing relationship. But as he prepares to celebrate election night in at the Duke of Marlborough in Russell, he may be somewhat red-faced if he plans to hold his traditional morning-after press conference on the town's promenade. Behind the Duke, reports the NZ Herald's veteran Northland correspondent David Fisher, the RSA will be opening for the All Blacks v Ireland game from 7.30am – a noisy distraction from the sage insights of the veteran politician.

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With the Act Party continuing its downward slide, leader David Seymour remained bullish. Asked whether he had lost serious ground to NZ First, he stayed on message: "A stable and united government is National and Act, only a couple of votes away on that poll. A lot of people have not voted." But his usual flippancy has disappeared over the past few days.

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Advance voting opened yesterday at New Plymouth’s wānanga campus and other sites across New Zealand, in a late push to get more Māori to the polls. Yesterday's polls show Te Pāti Māori's tracking to win three seats, and co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says history shows they'll improve on that. But she criticised the Electoral Commission’s efforts as too little, too late. "They’re really slow to respond to communities that are offering to host, communities that are trying to communicate, communities that are trying to remove barriers in this system that has inhibited our people from participating."