The traditional swing to the left for special votes could be on shaky ground with speculation even safe Labour seat Mt Albert will flip
Analysis: The election night result was crushing for Labour but could get worse with special votes set to be released at 2pm on Friday.
National is currently holding Banks Peninsula, Nelson and Te Atatū by very slim margins (just 83, 54, and 30 votes respectively). The safe Labour seat of New Lynn is also sitting with National on the preliminary count (there’s 483 votes in that one but anything under 500 is usually considered flippable with specials).
These are seats Labour would have hoped to pull back on the final count, but that optimism appears to be slipping.
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Even more of a concern though for Labour is MP Helen White only holding Mt Albert in Auckland by 106 votes.
If Labour loses that seat, previously held by leaders Helen Clark, David Shearer, and Jacinda Ardern, it will amount to one of the party’s worst election results in history.
Two of the Māori seats are also still in play for Te Pāti Māori with Labour MPs Peeni Henare and Kelvin Davis currently holding Tamaki Makaurau and Te Tai Tokerau by just 495 and 487 votes respectively.
Each political party has scrutineers overseeing the counting of specials and rechecking of the preliminary results.
Newsroom understands the messaging coming back from those party representatives is that Labour is not only unlikely to reclaim some of its safer seats, but will struggle to hold Mt Albert, and be lucky to pick up any additional seats through the specials.
Luxon will have an eye to the 2026 election and if New Zealand First was needed at that point its leader Winston Peters wouldn’t look back kindly if it had been shut out this time round.
As it stands on preliminary results Labour has 34 seats and 26.9 percent of the vote to National’s 50 seats and 38.9 percent.
National and Act can form a government for now with 61 seats (Act picked up nine list seats and two electorates) but it looks increasingly likely New Zealand First will be part of the governing arrangement regardless.
Even if National and Act can get to a three-seat majority, it wouldn’t be perceived as the stability National leader and incoming Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has been promising.
There’s also a long game at play and nervousness among the National Party caucus that choosing at the eleventh hour not to include New Zealand First would do more harm than good.
Luxon will have an eye to the 2026 election and if New Zealand First was needed at that point its leader, Winston Peters, wouldn’t look back kindly if it had been shut out this time round.
Luxon also doesn’t know what’s around the corner.
With so many new MPs and a sizeable Act caucus, he’d have to rely on all those MPs keeping on the straight and narrow, and not losing so many that the government’s majority becomes flimsy.
On the other side of course is an expectation from the National Party faithful that Luxon would only go with Peters “as a last resort”.
That was the repeated rhetoric from National on the campaign trail and if New Zealand First gets brought into the fold on a result that some voters think goes beyond the realms of last resort, that could cause problems for Luxon too.
It’s going to be a balancing act, and all of this will have been front of mind for Luxon while he’s continued to meet with both Act leader David Seymour and Peters over the course of the past three weeks.
Newsroom understands Luxon and Peters met for dinner in Wellington on Wednesday night, which comes after Peters hosted Luxon and his wife, Amanda, at his home with his partner, Jan Trotman, in Auckland last week.
Peters and Seymour are yet to meet, but that’s not unusual given they’re both negotiating individually with Luxon, and Peters and the Green Party never met during negotiations with Labour in 2017 either.
The difference this time is that Seymour looks to have extended an invitation to Peters to meet, but so far it hasn’t been accepted.
There’s still one-fifth of all the votes to be released when specials are declared on Friday.
Of the 567,000 specials, 80,000 of them are overseas and dictation votes.
It’s widely accepted the overseas vote, which has traditionally skewed towards the left bloc, will likely swing to the right in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and those living abroad being unable to come home for so long.
And given the thumping Labour got in Auckland and the 17-point swing in the electorate vote from Labour to National it’s not unreasonable to expect votes registered outside of their electorates will reflect that same swing.
