Election campaigns never announce themselves quietly. By the time they arrive, they’ve been announced so often in so many columns (like this one) that the question isn’t so much “when does the campaign begin?” as “when will it end?”
The beginning is subjective. For some, it is the second MPs return to work in an election year. It could be when the ads become more frequent, at the start of the regulated period three months before polling day, after Parliament rises, or when the parties hold their campaign launches.
For me — and all of this is subjective — this week truly felt like the first week of campaigning. MPs stepped up their media engagements, doing several debates in a day. Julie Anne Genter, for example, crossed swords in a sober infrastructure debate hosted by BusinessNZ on Tuesday morning, then spent the evening at a somewhat less sober Taxpayers’ Union electorate debate.
Diaries are crammed and stump speeches are being delivered again and again ...
Parliament is still sitting. In fact, urgency means it is sitting more than usual, but MPs’ minds aren’t in the chamber, they’re on the hustings.
Time accelerates during a campaign. The metabolic rate for political intrigue and scandal increases. What seemed unthinkable one week becomes policy the next.
So now is a good time to put a stake in the ground and describe the political landscape. Here’s the state of the race:
Voters want change
One defining trend is the clear desire for change. In all recent polls, voters conclude the country is on the “wrong track”, a metric that can herald a change of government. The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll did show an eight-point positive movement, suggesting voters are starting to feel slightly sunnier.
Voters don’t like Christopher Luxon. His preferred prime minister rating is about half that of other prime ministers — sometimes even worse — and his net favourability isn’t merely negative; it’s underwater.
A pollster told me a few weeks ago they wouldn’t want to enter a campaign with those numbers. Voters aren’t inclined to listen if they can’t stand the sight of you. Strip everything else out and look at National’s polling, Luxon’s polling and the national mood: most people would deduce this is a government about to be voted out.
... but not that change
Then you look at the Opposition, where things hardly look better. Labour leader Chris Hipkins’ relative unpopularity would be a talking point if most, though not all, polls didn’t still show him as better liked than Luxon.
Labour’s in something close to freefall. The Herald-Motu Research Poll of Polls suggests it has lost roughly seven points since February-March. What’s remarkable isn’t the extent of the fall but its velocity. National has lost about eight points, but over two years; Labour lost a similar amount in a handful of months.
It has reversed almost all its gains this parliamentary term and now sits, on average, just above its election-night result in 2023. Momentum counts for a lot in politics, and Labour seems to have lost it.
Poll of Polls: Party support
Click a party to show or hide its support. Double-click/long-tap to select one party. Adding or removing a party will change the scale.
NationalLabourGreensActNZ FirstTe Pāti MāoriOpportunity
Show polls
5.0%10.0%15.0%20.0%25.0%30.0%35.0%40.0%Jan 2024Apr 2026
Lines indicate the average support for each party and the shaded region shows where their support would fall 90% of the time.
NZ Herald / Motu Research poll of polls. Model updated on September 14, 2026.
One theory holds that Labour entered a long-term structural decline after Helen Clark’s leadership. Election after election, it posted results in the mid-20s. The prospect of Labour repeating its dreadful 2023 result makes you wonder whether the lofty heights of the Ardern years were an aberration — a blip in a longer decline. National, which once seemed immune to this, now appears to be on the same trajectory. The big two are dying.
The Opposition suffers from the inverse of the problem on the right. While most data points towards a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori-Opportunity government, that bloc doesn’t feel like the sort of new administration New Zealand’s ever so marginally centre-right electorate would choose.
Small changes matter
But under MMP, voters aren’t asked to choose one government over another. They vote for a party and a candidate.
This gives the left a structural advantage this election.
The four parties comprising the alternative government can speak to a broader swathe of voters than the three coalition parties. Because the election is likely to be close, small shifts matter. The two to watch are Opportunity and Te Pāti Māori. Opportunity’s rise maps almost perfectly onto Labour’s decline; it seems very likely the former has risen as the latter has fallen.
It is now imperative for the left that Opportunity crosses the 5% threshold. Barring the ever-quirky Roy Morgan poll, all but one of the polls putting Opportunity above 5% have also shown a change of government; the exception showed a hung Parliament. A coalition victory is much more likely if Opportunity falls short. That makes its fortunes integral to the campaign.
It’s not hard to see the appeal. At a Gas NZ-sponsored energy debate on Wednesday night, leader Qiulae Wong won one of the biggest cheers for advocating more expert input into energy policy and less political interference. It was quite a sight, conjuring a metaphorical menagerie of pigs flying and turkeys voting for Christmas at once. Needless to say, Opportunity’s teal-like energy and climate policy sits somewhat at odds with the gas industry’s priorities. But Wong is such a breath of fresh air in a stale, grumpy election dominated by men called Chris that it didn’t seem to matter.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins and the Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong during their chance meeting at the NZME Tory Street news centre in Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The question is whether Opportunity can sustain it. At BusinessNZ’s election conference, Green MP Teanau Tuiono held the party’s feet to the fire over its ambiguous position on Brooke van Velden’s Holidays Act and health and safety reforms. Both reforms are antithetical to the Greens and, presumably, to some left-wing voters Opportunity has won from Labour. It’ll be hard for Opportunity to continue maintaining the pretence it is a centrist party while also taking positions that alienate the apparently left-wing voters that are flocking towards it.
The other big variable is whether Te Pāti Māori’s overhang gamble pays off.
The party is competitive in five Māori seats; Labour seems likely to retain Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and win Te Tai Tonga. If Te Pāti Māori triggers a three- or four-seat overhang, that could change the government.
But if a deliberate overhang did so, it would likely start the countdown to abolishing the seats themselves when a right-wing government next took office.
This small trend could grow into one of the defining political stories of the 2030s, as we scrap over the end of the seats and, potentially, Te Pāti Māori with them.
National is very good at elections
This week also showed how good National is at elections. The party clearly got wind of Labour’s supermarket announcement — it denies this — and rushed out a bigger, bolshier announcement, locking Labour out of the conversation.
It also demonstrated National’s terrifying malleability and the lengths it will go to to win. This is a party that went from representing the command-and-control economy in 1984 to embracing laissez-faire economics in 1990. If the current caucus thinks it must embrace trust-busting to win an election and save capitalism, it has shown it will do so.
The competition debate has shifted over the past 15 years. Indeed, one of the vanishingly few things American Democrats and Republicans agree on is the need to challenge monopolistic or duopolistic practices.
Which version of Labour will we get?
One of Luxon’s cringeworthy inspirational quotes is that you must “happen to your future” rather than have your “future happen to you”. It’s horrid stuff, but not a dreadful philosophy. Luxon really does happen to his future, and it works for him.
Labour is less consistent. The start of its 2023 campaign was dreadful: lacklustre and heavily skewed towards Wellington rather than marginal Auckland voters. The second half was the opposite, it had a kinetic quality and robbed National of momentum and a few points right when it mattered.
We saw both versions of Labour this week. On Tuesday, Hipkins seemed tired and grumpy. He was grumpy with Morning Report host Ingrid Hipkiss during his weekly interview, delivered a dreadful speech at BusinessNZ’s conference and appeared to be a bystander in a campaign in which he should be central. Labour’s public meetings and much of its campaigning have again been heavily skewed towards Wellington, repeating the mistakes of 2023.
Chris Hipkins cycles to work. Photo / Instagram
The next day, after posting a picture of a pleasant ride to work along Wellington’s splendid new harbour shared path, Hipkins was far better, skewering Luxon on the cost of living and the economy in the House.
National should worry about that performance. Hipkins regularly gets the better of Luxon in the House. It doesn’t usually matter because most voters aren’t tuned in to Question Time. But in a few weeks Luxon will square off against Hipkins in the first televised election debate, moderated, ironically, by Jack Tame, a journalist Luxon conspicuously avoids. Hardly anyone watches Question Time; lots of people watch TVNZ.
The biggest campaign moments are still to come. After Treasury’s Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update, Labour will have to explain how it will pay for some of its costly promises. That will almost inevitably mean shrinking promises, breaking others and sending another shiver down homeowners’ already fragile spines with a decision on interest deductibility.
National has its own rat to swallow: it still hasn’t announced its superannuation policy.
And then there’s the question of the Nicky Hager book out next week. What’s it about? Potential topics include the influence of the Taxpayers’ Union, lobbying related to Fast Track, or the extent of New Zealand’s involvement in Aukus and America’s war. The only thing that seems fairly certain is that readers won’t leave with a favourable impression of the coalition.
That’s the state of the race at its beginning. Elections are famously unpredictable, and this one feels unpredictable even by election standards. Newspapers are famously tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper, but by November this column — like most election commentary — could read like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
