8:59 – National has picked up a 42nd seat, increasing their overhang to 7.
8:58 – Right now National is leading in 41 electorates, although some of those leads are very narrow. Labour leads in 21, Greens in 3, ACT in 1 and Te Pati Māori in 5.
Why is National winning so many electorates on such a small share of the national vote?
Some of the story is undoubtedly voters choosing to vote for a smaller party on the list vote and sticking with Labour or National for their electorate vote – just like how minor parties often do better in the Senate than the House in Australia. Te Pati Māori has been explicitly encouraging voters to just vote for them on the electorate vote. Some people may be doing this tactically but it seems to mostly be sincere.
But there is also the reality that bigger parties get a big winners bonus under a FPTP system and the 71 electorates remain a FPTP system. National also has a more efficient distribution of the vote than Labour, so still pick up a lot of electorates despite a vote trending under 30%.
8:51 – Opportunity remain steady on 5.4%. If they can stay above 5%, I think they’ll will hold the balance of power. But if they fall behind, the right wing government will maintain its majority.
8:49 – The results show the parliament expanding to 130 seats, with the right bloc holding exactly half. National’s list vote is now 0.5% behind Labour so I suspect their fair share of seats has fallen from 36 to 35, with Opportunity increasing to 7, and the National overhang has thus expanded to six seats.
8:46 – In Nelson, National candidate Blair Cameron is just 235 votes ahead of Labour MP Rachel Boyack. Another National seat which is unlikely to hold.
8:43 – In Hutt South, senior National minister Chris Bishop trails his Labour rival Ginny Anderson by 815 votes with 39% counted. It’s very unlikely Bishop will make it in on the list due to the National overhang and right now it’s hard to see him catching up.
8:41 – Cheung’s lead has already shrunk further to 131 votes.
8:39 – As far as I can tell, the narrowest National lead in an electorate right now is Mount Rosehill, where Carlos Cheung leads by 206 votes over his Labour rival with 21% counted. Every seat Labour takes from National reduces the right-wing position by one seat because of the overhang. It’s hard to see National holding this seat.
8:35 – The right-wing lead has narrowed, they now are on 65 seats, the left on 58 and Opportunity on 6. If one more seat flips from right to left it will put Opportunity in the balance of power.
8:33 – On the left, Labour is on 36, Green are on 17 and TPM are on 5. That’s a gain of two each for Labour and Green and a loss of one for TPM.
8:30 – Within the right wing bloc, National is currently on 41 seats, ACT is on 13 and National is on 11, for a total of 65 (down one from my last update).
This would be a loss of 7 seats for National, a gain of two for ACT and three for NZF.
8:24 – Let’s talk overhangs. If a party wins more electorates than it’s share of the national vote justifies in seats, then those extra seats are added to the parliament as a bonus that doesn’t fit with national proportionality.
Right now there would be a lot more potential for electorate leads to change while the number of proportional seats that might change is much smaller, so there’s plenty of room for change. But right now the results sites have Labour and National on pretty much the same list vote but have National winning five more seats – that would be an overhang of 5.
On the other hand, Te Pati Māori is on 0.6% yet are winning five seats – that would be an overhang of 4. So that is two overhangs mostly cancelling each other out.
8:12 – A topic of great interest is whether Opportunity clear the threshold. Without Opportunity, the right has a decent lead on the left. With Opportunity, the right’s lead is quite narrow. Right now, with 24% counted, Opportunity are on 5.4%. If they fall below 5%, they don’t win a single seat.
8:07 – So far results have the right wing bloc winning a majority, but it’s still quite early. With 22% counted, the right wing government is currently on 66 seats, with Labour, Green and Māori on 56, and Opportunity on 7. That’s a narrow right wing majority but also implies a large overhang.
7:00 – It is now 7pm New Zealand time. Polls have just closed in New Zealand.
We should be getting the first results shortly. Advance votes – what we would call ‘pre-poll’ votes in Australia – are counted during the day on election day, and should be reported very shortly. This will result in a large volume of votes being reported very quickly.
Unfortunately I am double-booked, visiting Parramatta’s new Powerhouse museum. I will post a couple of quick updates while I’m out, and then analyse the results in much more depth later this evening.
It is worth noting that in the past there is often a right-wing skew in the early results – in 2023, the TV analysts seemed to be surprised by this, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Despite having the data to do it, it doesn’t seem like booth-matching results happens.
I will be posting updates using New Zealand time, which is two hours ahead of AEDT – 7pm in New Zealand is 5pm in Sydney and Melbourne.
