November 6, 2026 11:00am by David Farrar

Tactical voting adds to polling uncertainity

The track record of polls in New Zealand has generally been pretty good. 1993 and 2005 not so good, but most other years pretty reasonable.

If ever there is an election where the polls are more likely to diverge from the results, it has to be this one. And this is because there are so many competing tactical voting campaigns out there, and with significant interest in them. This means more people are confused about how to vote to get the outcome they want, and that polls even a week out from the election may differ quite a bit from the final result. That is on top of the normal issues from the sampling margins of error and non-sampling errors.

We currently have:

  • National Party voters being told by one former leader that the best way to help National is not to vote for them, and being told by another former leader to two tick National.
  • Left voters being told to vote Opportunity to ensure they make 5%
  • Left voters being told not to vote Opportunity because they may go with National
  • ACT voters being told to give their electorate votes to National to help with overhang seats, except in Epsom and Tamaki where they should vote ACT candidates
  • Te Pāti Māori voters being told not to give their party votes to TPM, to the extent that even TPM MPs are not voting for their own party!
  • Green voters being told by Labour activists they must give their electorate votes to Labour candidates to stop overhang
  • Uncertainty over whether a vote for Opportunity will be “wasted” or not

There has never been an election campaign where tactical issues has been so much to the fore. I think there will be people voting on Saturday who know what outcome they want, but will only decide at the booth how to vote to achieve that.

The size and time weighted average of the public polls has the following

Government

  • National 28.1%, 34 seats
  • ACT 10.2%, 12 seats
  • NZ First 10.1%, 12 seats
  • Govt total 48.4%, 58 seats

Opposition

  • Labour 28.8%, 35 seats
  • Greens 14.8%, 18 seats
  • Te Pāti Māori 1.2%, 1 seat
  • Opposition Total 44.7%, 54 seats

Opportunity 6.2%, 8 seats

The seat projections are on party vote only. No assumptions are made on overhang.