Though it’s hardly a record to boast about.
In the exhaust fumes of the botched putsch in the National Party last week, the latest poll by Verian for 1News got a bit lost. There were a few headlines there of note, not least the Opportunity Party hitting 8% to hold, on these numbers, the balance of power, and New Zealand First losing support.
But zoom right out – right out – and there is something in there that has never been seen before.
Across more than 50 years of polling for the news bulletin at TVNZ – polling conducted by Heylen, then Colmar Brunton and its successors, Verian and Kantar – Labour and National have each hit some high highs and low lows. But never before have both, at the same time, returned a result of 30% or lower.
Yet here they are: Labour on 30% and National on 29%. That 59% is the lowest combined support, or purple vote, for 30 years. Then, in 1996, that measure went as low as 50%, but that was mostly because the Labour vote collapsed to 15%.
This latest poll is unique because neither red nor blue is prospering at the expense of the other – they’re practically neck and neck.
This trend has been visible for a while now. It is mirrored in the preferred prime minister numbers. And New Zealand is hardly unique in this regard – in many comparable countries, establishment political duopolies have collapsed from the outside (the UK, for example) or from within (the US).
MMP is part of the New Zealand story. In the election of 1996, the first to be conducted under the proportional system, the two big parties scored just 62% of the party vote combined, with 33.8% for National and 28.2% for Labour. New Zealand First surged into the picture, and into the first MMP coalition, with 13.4%; other chunks of the party vote went to Alliance (10.1%), Act (6.1%) and Christian Coalition (4.3%).
The next lowest purple election tally was 2002, at 62.2%. Then, it was the National Party vote that fell apart, winning just 20.9%.
If recent polling plays out in an election that is now barely 80 days away, 2026 will give us a lower level – sub-60 possibly – than either of those two elections, which would make it the lowest National-plus-Labour result since the National Party was founded in the 1930s.
This time, however, it’s not because one of the parties has fallen off a cliff, but a tandem dive.
