Labour’s campaign to rebuild its position across the Māori electorates is facing fresh scrutiny as Election 2026 enters its final month, with new polling showing an increasingly fragmented Māori vote and significant gains for the Greens.
The latest nationwide RNZ-Reid Research poll has Labour down 1.4 points to 30.8 percent, while the Greens have climbed 4.6 points to 14.8 percent. National is also down, recording 25.9 percent. The poll surveyed 1,000 eligible voters between September 24 and October 1.
But the more significant numbers for Labour may be emerging among Māori voters. A recent MATA-Horizon survey of 1,089 Māori found 28 percent of respondents on the Māori roll intended to give their party vote to the Greens, compared with 27 percent for Labour and 16 percent for Te Pāti Māori. The overall poll had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Those numbers come as Te Pāti Māori pursues its unusual one-person party list strategy, with General Secretary Lance Norman its sole additional list candidate outside the seven Māori electorate candidates. The party has been encouraging supporters to give their candidate vote to Te Pāti Māori while considering Labour or the Greens for their party vote.
That raises an intriguing question about who ultimately benefits from the strategy. Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere has attributed some of the Green surge to split voting, but analysis suggests Green policies, candidates and Māori representation may also be contributing to the movement.
For Labour, the picture is complicated. The party entered this election determined to rebuild after losing five of the six Māori electorates it held going into the 2023 election. But polling across Māori voters suggests support is now being distributed across several parties rather than simply returning to Labour.
Individual Māori electorate contests are also producing different results around the motu, meaning nationwide party polling cannot determine what will happen in the seven seats.
The bigger question for Labour is whether its Māori electorate strategy is delivering the rebuilding it hoped for, or whether Election 2026 is revealing a fundamentally different political landscape in which Māori voters are increasingly willing to split their candidate and party votes between kaupapa Māori, Labour and the Greens.
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