The ODT moves to the North Island today with a focus on talking to voters about their concerns leading up to the election.
The political leaders will still be campaigning and their paths and mine might cross, but it is not a priority as we visit parts of the country which will have a significant effect on the shape of the next Parliament.
Although the party vote is the most important in the election, for some MPs their futures hang on winning electorates.
The Otago Daily Times will take the pulse in some of those electorates and report back.
This year, the ODT has had a presence in the Parliament press gallery, providing readers with an independent view of the proceedings.
Each day on the way to the gallery office, this writer passes two photographs of his grandfather, who was for nearly 20 years the MP for Hurunui.
For a short period before my grandfather's sudden death, he was a minister of agriculture.
Apart from the warm family feeling of seeing his face each day, there seems to be a message in his career that is long forgotten in the rush to each election.
My friend Harlan Christianson in the United States is feeling the same way as he awaits the US election result.
Democrat candidate Barack Obama was doing "not too much" because he did not have to.
All he has to do is hang back from making campaign promises because the world is changing so quickly that voters are becoming scared and are looking for stability.
An active campaigner and supporter of the Democrats for more years than he cares to remember, Mr Christianson (72) told me yesterday that people needed a good excuse to "vote differently".
"A theme that I always develop when explaining how people vote is - we vote for candidates that we would like to be like. And we vote for candidates that reflect our own 'support group'."
Voters did not want to commit a social error when voting, either intellectually or socially.
That was hard to do with issues.
Most people did not know much about history, and if they did they tended to find perspectives supporting their presuppositions, Mr Christianson said.
"We need a good excuse to vote differently - new friends, a personal economic situation that cannot be rationalised, illness, family or a personal crisis.
That seems to be happening in many ways in the US right now. Listening to the news sheds little light on what is happening on an individual level."
At the last election, Taking the Pulse visited rural communities where people could not recall the last time they saw a local MP. This time, the route will be different, but it would not be surprising to find a similar outcome in some centres.
My grandfather covered an electorate from Belfast, in Christchurch, to Kaikoura and along the northern banks of the Waimakariri River to the Southern Alps.
Although pressures are different for MPs these days, he made it a point to attend every annual meeting of every branch in the electorate, often accompanied in later years by my father, who did some of the driving.
Before he was an MP, my grandfather represented ratepayers as an Oxford county councillor and served on a myriad of local community committees.
These days, it seems the path to Parliament for some is accelerated and to heck with the voters.
Taking the Pulse will endeavour to talk to voters in key swing electorates - both for the party vote and the electorate vote - where sitting MPs are low on the list because they are not in favour with the ruling hierarchy.
No matter that they might be an effective local MP for their party, their survival depends on reflecting the image of the voters and making the connection at the ballot box.
We hope to shed some light on what is happening in the electorates.
National Party leader John Key resorted to regional politics by announcing National would complete the the construction of the Waikato Expressway within 10 years, while Prime Minister Helen Clark promised $25 million for the next 10 years to develop the New Zealand Innovation Centre in Auckland.
No-one bothered with the voters in the South.
A draw.
