Labour did 2-3% better than polls suggested and got 49.1% of the advance and election day votes, equating to 64 of 120 seats. Special votes are still to be counted but they shouldn’t change the overall result much, although it may alter total seats won slightly and may change one or two electorate results.
This is a very good result for Labour, the party’s best result since 1946, and is the first time one party has won a majority of seats under 24 years of MMP (while they got just under half the total votes about 8% of votes will not count for small parties who got under the 5% threshold). This unprecedented result is largely thanks to Jacinda Ardern’s popularity, her and the Government’s handling of Covid, and also Grant Robertsons management of the economy to date.
National did 2-5% worse than polls suggested and had a disastrous outcome, having 26.8% of the vote before official counting and specials. The also got hammered in electorates, losing 15 of them, including Gerry Brownlee, Nick Smith and Chris Bishop (they all get in via the list but Brownlee and Smith and a few others must be seriously considering their political futures).
The other parties got results similar to recent polls. One possible explanation for the shift from National to Labour is that a number of normally National supporters voted Labour to increase the chances of Labour getting a sole majority to significantly reduce the leverage of the Green Party.
Notable election night outcomes – Green MP Chloe Swarbrick has also defied polls and currently leads Labour’s Helen White in Auckland Central by 492 votes. If this result stands after the final count it is a major achievement for Swarbrick and the Greens.
And Māori Party candidate Rawiri Waititi is ahead by 415 votes in Waiariki. If this result survives the final count it gets the Māori Party back into Parliament. Tamati Coffey is the only Labour MP to lose his seat (in a Labour landslide) but will keep his job in Parliament via the list.
As expected David Seymour retained Epsom and ACT got 8% of the votes, which means Seymour will be joined by nine other ACT MPS. That’s a big turnaround of ACT fortunes, in part due to Seymour’s sterling efforts and in part due to National’s poor term and leadership turnover.
A few months ago the Green Party looked like they may struggle to make the threshold, but they fought strongly and came out of election night with 7.6% of the vote and 10 MPs, plus the bonus of their first electorate in fifteen years. They will be celebrating, but may also be disappointed that Labour won’t need them to form a government. They are likely to still be included in some form of governing arrangement but won’t anything like the policy leverage holding the balance of power would have given them.
So for now it looks like a five party Parliament.
The polls were right and Winston Peters was wrong. There was no late surge, and NZ First ended up on 2.7%, with Shane Jones a distant third in Northland. Peters looked and often sounded like a last century politician and was dogged by the SFO investigation of donations. Is this the end of Peters as a politician? Is it the end of NZ First? We will have to wait and see.
No small parties came anywhere near the threshold, with only the Maori Party succeeding by winning one electorate (probably) but will get no other MPs.
Full interim results here: 2020 General Election and Referendums – Preliminary Count
David Farrar has put together an interim list of MPs here: The provisional Parliament.
Also of interest from him:
Interesting to see the difference in support between advance and election day results. This makes the polls for Labour and National look even less accurate.
I’m quite happy with this result. Labour have underperformed on things like housing, poverty, social welfare and tax reform and climate change, but did very well dealing with crises, especially the Covid pandemic, and Grant Robertson has managed the economy reasonably well (the full impact of Covid is yet to be seen).
National had a poor term, a bad year dumping two leaders, and a terrible campaign. They were always going to struggle against Ardern but they made a mess of things regardless. They have a lot of soul searching and rebuilding to do over the next three years.
I’m happy to see ACT in as a party rather than a sole MP, and I’m happy to see Greens surviving and in the mix as well, but without too much influence.
I’m very happy to see Chloe Swarbrick and Rawiri Waititi hopefully win electorates. This is good for smaller parties generally, and should serve as a warning to Labour that they didn’t get everything their own way (they showed some arrogance in the Auckland Central campaign).
And I have no problem with Winston Peters and NZ First dropping out of Parliament. While he has done some good things I have never been a fan of Peters, I just don’t like how he does politics.
Electoral Commission: 480,000 special votes to be counted (in 10 days’ time). Voter turnout est. to be 2.88m or 82.5% of those enrolled, cf 79.8% turnout in 2017.
