The overhang is real — and ACT saw it coming
Richard Prebble’s column this week caught up with maths this website published in April. ACT’s own campaigners are proving the point.
Richard Prebble set out the numbers this week.
National could poll 30 per cent. It could win dozens of electorates. It could still elect zero list MPs.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis would be wiped out. So would Attorney-General Chris Bishop.
I made this argument in April.
This isn’t new. In September 2023, before election night, I called the Maori Party overhang that made Winston Peters kingmaker. I was the only one who did.
I set out this year’s version in “The overhang trap” back in April.
ACT and New Zealand First voters give National their electorate vote. They park their party vote elsewhere. National’s electorate wins fill its whole proportional entitlement. Its senior list-only MPs get nothing.
Prebble has now run the same numbers, seat by seat. He reached the same conclusion. Win Tamaki. Hold Epsom. Win enough marginals. National could hand its own Finance Minister the exit.
I revisited the maths in June. A 1News Verian poll had the left governing without Winston Peters. That poll wasn’t modelling the overhang building on the right at all.
A fortnight earlier, I wrote about New Zealand First running marquee candidates in seats it doesn’t need to win outright. A strong third candidate reshapes everyone else’s arithmetic.
I named that mechanism explicitly — Stuart Nash, Taine Randell — in the NZ Herald at the end of June.
I made the same argument about Te Pati Maori’s overhang strategy in August. And about who benefits when National looks divided, in the aftermath of Chris Penk’s failed move on the leadership.
None of this was hidden. It was published. It was dated. It was available to anyone covering the election.
It has taken four months and a leadership scare for the press gallery to catch up. Audrey Young’s column this week, on the coalition’s eroding trust in Luxon, describes the same leverage NZ First and ACT are extracting on the ground.
Which brings us to Tamaki.
A Facebook exchange this week undercuts ACT’s public framing of that contest.
A prominent ACT campaigner responded to Prebble’s column. She’s a former National Party volunteer. She insisted James Christmas is the right candidate on merit. She cited his years advising National ministers.
Fair enough, as a character reference.
But her own account of her connections tells the real story. She’s well-connected. She has friends across National’s front bench and Cabinet. And she’s campaigning hard for an ACT candidate whose win, on Prebble’s own numbers, keeps Willis and Bishop in Parliament.
That’s not a contradiction of my argument. It’s confirmation of it, from inside the tent.
Christmas himself is instructive.
He was on National’s list in 2023. He was tipped as a future Attorney-General. He missed out by three places.
He’s since crossed to ACT. He’s fighting the seat Brooke van Velden won from Simon O’Connor. The Taxpayers’ Union’s own polling helped deliver that seat in 2023.
Whether or not Christmas has run the numbers himself, ACT’s hierarchy plainly has.
Winning Tamaki doesn’t add ACT a single extra MP. It already has its insurance seat in Epsom.
What it does is stop that electorate vote falling to National. It stops National’s proportional entitlement swallowing the very list places Willis and Bishop need.
Act's strategy in Tamaki is to campaign for a former lowly-ranked Nat (James Christmas) so a highly-ranked Nat (Nicola Willis) keeps her job.
That’s the pattern across the right bloc this year.
ACT and New Zealand First’s polling has held up. National’s has slid. Both trends are boosted by the same network — the Taxpayers’ Union, Curia, the Free Speech Union — that has spent a decade sharpening National’s edges from outside the party.
A weaker National isn’t a threat to that network’s coalition partners. It’s the mechanism. It’s how they gain leverage over a Prime Minister, a Finance Minister and an Attorney-General who may end up owing their seats to the parties they’re supposed to be leading.
I’ve been told by people close to the coalition negotiations that Luxon, Willis and Bishop were the weaker hand at the table last time. ACT and New Zealand First extracted more than they expected to.
An overhang delivered by ACT’s own electorate machine wouldn’t weaken that hand.
It would make it permanent.
The commentariat is only now catching up. The candidates were always the tell.
