With just two months until Election Day, a new political poll has delivered a brutal warning for Labour and a potentially devastating result for Opportunity, while showing the National-ACT-New Zealand First coalition with enough seats to return to government.
The September Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll puts National on 29 percent, down two percentage points, while Labour has fallen 1.9 points to 25.9 percent.
But the headline numbers hide a much more complicated political picture.
Both major parties have gone backwards, while the Greens and ACT have surged, suggesting voters are increasingly looking beyond National and Labour as the November 7 election approaches.
Opportunity, meanwhile, has fallen below the crucial 5 percent threshold, dropping from 6.1 percent to 4.5 percent. Without an electorate seat, that result would leave the party outside Parliament entirely.
The numbers
The decided party vote in the September poll is:
- National — 29.0%, down 2.0
- Labour — 25.9%, down 1.9
- Greens — 13.9%, up 3.8
- ACT — 10.5%, up 3.2
- New Zealand First — 8.4%, down 0.7
- Opportunity — 4.5%, down 1.6
- Te Pāti Māori — 2.0%, up 0.5
The biggest winners are therefore not the two parties traditionally competing to lead the Government.
They are the Greens and ACT.
The Greens have jumped almost four percentage points to 13.9 percent, while ACT has climbed more than three points to 10.5 percent.
That potentially strengthens the negotiating power of both parties within their respective blocs.
Coalition back with 64 seats
The poll’s seat projection is where the political consequences become clearer.
National would receive 39 seats, Labour 35, the Greens 18, ACT 14, New Zealand First 11 and Te Pāti Māori three.
Opportunity would receive none.
That gives the existing governing combination of National, ACT and New Zealand First 64 seats, compared with 56 for Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori under the pollster’s assumptions.
On those numbers, Christopher Luxon could remain Prime Minister without needing another party.
But there is an important caveat.
The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia projection assumes current parliamentary parties with electorate representation retain at least one electorate seat and specifically assumes Te Pāti Māori wins three seats. It also assumes no overhang seats.
That makes the Māori electorates particularly important to interpreting any national seat projection.
Labour’s problem — voters appear to be moving left, but not necessarily to Labour
For Chris Hipkins, the result presents a difficult political contradiction.
National has fallen to just 29 percent.
Ordinarily, a governing party dropping below 30 percent might provide the opposition with an obvious opportunity.
Instead, Labour has fallen as well.
At 25.9 percent, Labour is more than three points behind National and has lost support while the Greens have surged to 13.9 percent.
That suggests at least some of the movement within the opposition side of politics is strengthening the Greens rather than Labour.
Combined, Labour and the Greens would hold 53 seats.
Interestingly, National and ACT would also hold 53.
Neither pairing could govern alone.
That leaves New Zealand First and potentially Te Pāti Māori holding considerable strategic importance depending on the final election result.
Opportunity’s rise suddenly hits a wall
The biggest casualty of the poll is Opportunity.
The Qiulae Wong-led party had been attracting significant attention after climbing to 6.1 percent in the previous Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll.
At that level it was projected to enter Parliament with eight MPs and potentially occupy a powerful position in coalition negotiations.
September changes everything.
Opportunity has dropped 1.6 points to 4.5 percent.
Under MMP, a party generally needs at least 5 percent of the nationwide party vote or an electorate seat to qualify for proportional representation.
On the assumptions used for this poll, Opportunity therefore goes from eight projected MPs to zero.
That demonstrates just how unforgiving the MMP threshold can be.
A party polling at 4.9 percent could attract well over 100,000 votes nationally and still receive no list representation if it fails to win an electorate.
For Opportunity, the remaining campaign may therefore increasingly become a fight simply to stay above five percent.
Te Pāti Māori rises — but party vote tells only part of its story
Te Pāti Māori has moved in the opposite direction, rising half a percentage point to 2 percent.
On party vote alone, that remains well below the threshold.
But Te Pāti Māori is running a fundamentally different electoral strategy.
Its pathway into Parliament depends heavily on winning Māori electorates, which would allow it to receive representation despite polling below five percent nationally.
The Curia projection assumes the party wins three electorate seats, giving it three MPs.
But Te Pāti Māori has made clear it wants considerably more than that, targeting all seven Māori electorates.
That means national party polling can provide only a partial picture of the party’s potential parliamentary strength.
The contests in Te Tai Tokerau, Tāmaki Makaurau, Hauraki-Waikato, Waiariki, Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Te Tai Hauāuru and Te Tai Tonga could ultimately have consequences reaching well beyond those electorates.
Māori voters could still reshape the parliamentary maths
That becomes especially important if electorate results create an overhang.
An overhang can occur when a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote would otherwise entitle it to.
The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia projection explicitly does not attempt to model an overhang for Te Pāti Māori.
So the apparent 64-56 division should not be interpreted as a prediction of the final composition of Parliament.
It is a snapshot based on a specific set of assumptions.
If Te Pāti Māori performs substantially better across the Māori electorates than those assumptions anticipate, the final parliamentary mathematics could look different.
That places enormous significance on the Māori electorate campaigns over the next two months.
Luxon still ahead of Hipkins
Christopher Luxon also remains ahead in the preferred Prime Minister measure, although both major-party leaders have lost ground.
Luxon is down two points to 21.2 percent.
Hipkins has fallen 2.9 points to 16.9 percent.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters is on 10.7 percent, ACT leader David Seymour has risen four points to 7.8 percent, while Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has climbed to 7 percent.
Again, the movement towards smaller parties is visible.
Seymour and Swarbrick both recorded substantial increases while Luxon and Hipkins declined.
National leads economy — Labour leads health, poverty and housing
The poll also asked voters which party they considered best on a range of issues.
National led on the economy, inflation, education, safety, government spending, the environment and not increasing taxes.
Labour led on health, poverty and housing.
Those issue ratings provide an indication of where the major parties’ political strengths may lie as the campaign intensifies.
For Māori voters, several of those issues intersect directly with some of the biggest pressures facing whānau — employment, housing affordability, health access and the cost of living.
But the Māori political debate also extends into areas not captured neatly by those categories, including Te Tiriti, constitutional reform, whenua and mana motuhake.
A poll is a snapshot — not November 7
There is an important warning attached to all these numbers.
The poll was conducted by Curia Market Research for the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union between September 1 and September 3.
It surveyed 1,000 adult New Zealanders, with 700 respondents reached by phone and 300 through online panels.
There were 939 decided voters on the voting questions, while 4.1 percent were undecided.
The maximum margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That margin matters.
The difference between National at 29 percent and Labour at 25.9 percent is almost exactly the poll’s maximum margin of error.
Opportunity’s 4.5 percent result is also close enough to the five-percent threshold that relatively small movements could dramatically alter its parliamentary fortunes.
This is therefore not an election result.
It is one poll taken two months before the country votes.
The minor parties are becoming major players
What the poll does suggest is that Election 2026 is becoming increasingly fragmented.
National and Labour together account for just 54.9 percent of decided party support in this survey.
The Greens are approaching 14 percent.
ACT is above 10.
New Zealand First remains comfortably above the threshold.
Opportunity is hovering just beneath it.
And Te Pāti Māori’s strength could ultimately be determined more by electorate victories than its national party vote.
That creates the possibility of an election where the most consequential decisions are made not simply by which major party finishes first, but by the strength of the parties surrounding them.
For Māori voters, that makes both votes particularly significant.
The electorate vote will determine who represents each Māori electorate.
The party vote will largely determine the proportional strength of Parliament.
And with the blocs so dependent on smaller parties, every movement of a few percentage points could reshape the negotiations that follow November 7.
Two months out, National and Labour are both going backwards, the Greens and ACT are charging forward, Opportunity is fighting for parliamentary survival — and the Māori electorates could yet throw another variable into an already volatile election.
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