Te Pāti Māori holds five seats despite turmoil, as Greens surge

Te Pāti Māori looks set to retain five of the seven Māori electorates, but Labour has dominated the party vote.

After a year of bitter infighting, expulsions and legal challenges that threatened to tear the party apart, Te Pāti Māori has emerged from election night on course to win five of the seven Māori electorates.

Despite the intense scrutiny and internal turmoil that engulfed the party over the last year, preliminary results show Te Pāti Māori leading in Te Tai Tokerau, Tāmaki Makaurau, Hauraki-Waikato, Waiariki and Te Tai Hauāuru. Labour looks set to retain Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and reclaim Te Tai Tonga.

It's one fewer seat than Te Pāti Māori won in 2023, but a significant result for a party that spent much of the past year fighting for its political survival. It also represents an endorsement of its remaining MPs and candidates, even as the party vote tells a very different story.

It was only a year ago that Te Pāti Māori was engulfed in one of the most serious crises in its history. The expulsion of Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris triggered legal challenges, public condemnations and calls for a change of leadership. Questions were raised about the party's future, but president John Tamihere and co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer held firm.

Now, both expelled MPs look set to lose their seats, while the party they left behind has survived largely intact.

The biggest contest of the night for Te Pāti Māori has been Te Tai Tokerau, where Aperahama Edwards is narrowly leading Green Party candidate Hūhana Lyndon. With close to 98% of results counted, Edwards had 8,289 votes to Lyndon's 7,792, a margin of just 497 votes. The result remains too close to call with confidence until the remaining votes, including special votes, have been counted.

The electorate has been one of the most closely watched contests of the election, particularly following Kapa-Kingi's expulsion from Te Pāti Māori and subsequent decision to stand under the banner of the newly formed Te Tai Tokerau Party. But the incumbent MP has finished a distant fourth on the preliminary count, with 3,962 votes, behind Labour's Willow-Jean Prime on 6,083. Edwards and Lyndon, who were once colleagues and are whanaunga, have instead emerged as the leading contenders.

The result will feel familiar to those who followed the seat at the 2023 election, when Kapa-Kingi overturned an election-night deficit to win the electorate by just 517 votes after special votes were counted. Three years later, Te Tai Tokerau could once again be decided by the final count.

Elsewhere, Te Pāti Māori's remaining MPs have held firm. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke has recorded the party's most commanding electorate lead, sitting more than 10,400 votes ahead of Labour's Kingi Kiriona in Hauraki-Waikato. Oriini Kaipara has comfortably seen off Labour-turned-independent candidate Kerrin Leoni in Tāmaki Makaurau, leading by more than 7,200 votes, while Ngarewa-Packer is ahead of Labour's Te Pūoho Kātene by almost 4,000 votes in Te Tai Hauāuru.

In Waiariki, Waititi has faced a considerably stronger challenge than in 2023, this time from Green Party candidate Tania Waikato. Waititi leads by around 2,300 votes, a much narrower margin than his nearly 16,000-vote victory three years ago.

For Labour, the most significant electorate gain has come in Te Tai Tonga, where Mananui Ramsden looks set to reclaim the seat won by Ferris for Te Pāti Māori in 2023. Ramsden leads Green Party candidate Lisa Te Morenga by more than 2,700 votes, with Te Pāti Māori's Lisa Murch in third and Ferris, now standing as an independent, in fourth. Cushla Tangaere-Manuel has also retained a comfortable lead over Te Pāti Māori challenger Haley Maxwell in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti.

But while Te Pāti Māori has held on to most of its electorate seats, Labour and the Greens have dominated the party vote across the Māori electorates. Labour leads the party vote in all seven seats, a pattern also seen in 2023. The more dramatic change has been the rise of the Greens, whose share of the party vote has climbed to between 32% and 37% in every Māori electorate. Across the seven electorates combined, the Greens' share has risen from around 9% in 2023 to 36% on the preliminary count.

The Greens have been a major beneficiary of Te Pāti Māori's unconventional election strategy, which saw the party encourage supporters to give their electorate vote to Te Pāti Māori candidates while directing their party vote towards Labour or the Greens. MPs Kaipara and Maipi-Clarke were among those who openly encouraged their supporters to party vote Green. But the Greens' growing popularity among Māori voters can't be attributed solely to Te Pāti Māori's strategy. The party has been building its own support among Māori voters over successive elections, while prominent Māori candidates such as Lyndon and Waikato have mounted serious challenges in electorates previously dominated by Te Pāti Māori.

The strategy was designed to maximise representation for the left bloc in parliament by creating an overhang. By winning more electorate seats than its share of the party vote would ordinarily entitle it to, Te Pāti Māori could increase the overall size of parliament without taking seats away from Labour or the Greens.

But National has also generated an overhang, with preliminary projections pointing to a 130- or 131-seat parliament, with 10 or 11 overhang seats divided between the two blocs. The full implications of Te Pāti Māori's overhang strategy, and the final composition of parliament, will not be clear until special votes are counted and the official results declared on November 27.

For Te Pāti Māori, election night has provided an answer to one of the biggest questions hanging over the party: whether its internal divisions would cost it the confidence of voters in the Māori electorates. For the most part, its candidates have held their ground. But the party vote reveals an increasingly complicated picture of Māori political support, with Labour retaining its dominance and the Greens emerging with a substantially larger share.

The message from the Māori electorates is that voters are increasingly comfortable separating their support for individual candidates from their choice of party. Te Pāti Māori may have survived the election, but how those competing loyalties shape Māori politics over the next three years remains an open question.