Comeback bids, tactical votes and bipartisan hints: a round-up of recent Election 2026 news and analysis, in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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National’s list problem
The 2023 election was, in some respects, almost too good for National. A record 43 electorates went blue – but under MMP, each local win ate into the party’s list seats, bumping out diverse talent the leadership had ranked highly. As Dan Brunskill sets out this morning in The Spinoff, the problem looks set to worsen. NZ First and Act are tracking for around 25 seats combined in 2026, but almost no electorate wins – meaning National’s list will be squeezed again. On current polling, names as senior as Gerry Brownlee, Paul Goldsmith, Chris Bishop and even Nicola Willis could be at risk. Brunskill’s counterintuitive suggestion is that party supporters in safe blue seats consider deliberately voting against their local National candidate, freeing up list space for more senior MPs.
Wood goes all-in on Mt Roskill
One seat that may be up for grabs is Mt Roskill, which former minister Michael Wood is hoping to snatch back from National’s Carlos Cheung. Wood will not seek a place on Labour’s list, Stewart Sowman-Lund reports for The Post, making the electorate his only route back to parliament after losing it as part of Labour’s 2023 drubbing and amid a controversy over conflicts of interest in his transport portfolio.
Forgoing a list placing is a calculated signal, Wood says – it tells Roskill voters he is genuinely all-in. If he falls short in November he won’t put himself forward in Mount Roskill at the 2029 election either, though he won’t rule out “other political opportunities”.
Harawira signals plan to contest Te Tai Tokerau
Among the most tangled contests may be Te Tai Tokerau, where Hone Harawira wants to be Te Pāti Māori’s candidate for the seat he held from 2005 to 2014, before the disastrous Internet-Mana merger cost him his place in parliament. Party president John Tamihere confirmed Harawira’s interest to Stuff’s Steve Kilgallon, saying Harawira had “gone out so hard and so fast, he’s trying to scare everyone else off – which is what you do”.
He will face Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, whose new Te Tai Tokerau Party faces questions on two fronts. Writing in The Weekend Post (paywalled), Josie Pagani notes that during last week’s post-announcement media rounds Kapa-Kingi “could not articulate a single policy” that her new party stands for; her platform of “whare, whānau and whenua” amounts to, in Pagani’s phrase, “less a policy platform than an alliterative series of nouns”. The party may also struggle to use its own name: as Lauren Crimp reports for RNZ, senior Chris Bishop is among those suggesting the Electoral Commission may block it, on the grounds that naming a party after an electorate risks misleading voters.
Hipkins’ bipartisan signal
Against all this tactical scrambling, Chris Hipkins is hinting at something new. After he and Christopher Luxon both flatly rejected Auckland mayor Wayne Brown’s grand coalition call – Luxon calling it “insanity” and Hipkins offering a simple “no” – the Labour leader has signalled that he’d be open to a more modest version of Brown’s idea. Last week he said he was offering voters “a very competitive election campaign but then an ability to say, ‘Okay, the election result has been delivered, the voters have had their say, for the next few years let’s work together’”, Tim Murphy reports for Newsroom. Hipkins promised a Labour government would not abandon National’s initiatives “for the sake of it” and would involve local government, iwi and business in long-term infrastructure decisions.
The bipartisan pitch, Murphy notes, is partly a calculated play for the political high ground: an attempt to position Labour as the grown-up party willing to put governance ahead of politics, six months before the country votes.
