Was there an overhang strategy all along?
The vote-splitting campaign did not appear from nowhere. The billboards were booked before the excuse arrived.
The goal was simple: make National unpopular and give ACT and New Zealand First the attention.
Minor coalition partners usually bleed support. Not this term. The Taxpayers’ Union spent it needling National’s front bench, even packaging a fudge to mock Finance Minister Nicola Willis. Every embarrassment for Willis, Chris Bishop and Paul Goldsmith consolidated the vote further right.
The electorate half of the equation was built long ago. Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics documented Simon Lusk’s effort to build a hard-right bloc of National MPs, citing Mark Mitchell’s selection in safe Rodney as a good example. Safe blue seats deliver MPs who would never rank highly on the list.
In April, I predicted an overhang. New electorate boundaries, the run of bad stories about Christopher Luxon’s leadership, and Taxpayers’ Union–Curia polling diverging from other firms told me something was amiss.
After that column appeared, senior people in ACT and New Zealand First contacted me and asked me to take it down. That told me it was in play.
Then came the candidate lists. ACT fielded no candidate in Wairarapa, Hamilton East or Hutt South. New Zealand First stayed out of Nelson and Mt Roskill. By August, ACT’s Tamaki campaign showed it saw the overhang coming.
When Te Pati Maori asked voters for the candidate vote only, the right’s equivalent finally had cover to come out of hiding.
By then the money was committed. Billboards and full-page advertisements are not booked overnight. A registered third party promoter is capped at $424,000. Was a bigger war chest split between several promoters to stay under it?
Consider the sequence. Harry Mowbray launched Split Your Vote, urging electorate votes for National and party votes for ACT or New Zealand First. The Electoral Commission is investigating whether his advertising was properly authorised.
Reality Check Radio went off air in 2024, pleading for donations. Yet its company, RCR Media, registered as a promoter on 9 October, the day after nominations closed. I then watched billboard sites that had carried Sensible Sentencing Trust and Taxpayers’ Union attack ads switch to vote-splitting material.
Don Brash wrote the newspaper advertisement Reality Check Radio placed. ACT’s fourth-ranked candidate, Paul Henry, urged Kaikoura voters to give their electorate vote to National with ACT’s own candidate beside him. ACT then gave permission for the radio station’s advertisement. New Zealand First approved another.
Election night told its own story. National’s Mike Butterick held Wairarapa by 139 votes. Ryan Hamilton held Hamilton East by 456. ACT won more than 5,000 party votes in Wairarapa and almost 3,000 in Hamilton East, with no candidate to soak up a single electorate vote.
And the headline result? Labour won the party vote, 710,330 to 706,680. Yet National’s 42 electorates put it six seats ahead in a 131-seat Parliament.
That is as perverse as the First Past the Post results of 1978 and 1981, when Labour won more votes and National kept power. Those results are why we adopted MMP. Are we surprised that the same people who bankrolled campaigns to get rid of MMP also ran the vote-splitting campaign to produce this overhang?
Every narrow seat counts. Strip out Wairarapa and Hamilton East and the right’s 67 seats of 131 become 65 of 129: the barest majority.
Was the overhang avoidable? Look at where the Greens stood. In Wairarapa, their candidate took 1,098 votes; National won by 139. In Nelson, 2,952 against a margin of 1,210. In Hamilton West, 3,349 against 2,181.
Hand Labour those three seats and National’s overhang halves. The right’s 67 seats of 131 become 64 of 128. The blocs would be tied at 64 each, with Opportunity holding the balance.
I warned in April what was coming. When Te Pati Maori asked voters to split their votes, Labour and the Greens backed their own candidates anyway. The Greens have their best result ever. It came at the cost of power.
No electorate polling for either seat was released. Yet days before the vote, the Taxpayers’ Union told its supporters that its pollster, David Farrar, was calling a hung Parliament. If Curia could see a tie coming, what else could it see?
The Electoral Commission said one day that there were some 700,000 special votes remain to be counted before 27 November. [Then Jack Tame said the figure was 400,000.] Specials usually cost National a list MP or two and lift the Greens. This time National has no list MPs to lose. Its overhang absorbs the hit.
The wildcard is overseas. The Opportunity Party courted expatriate voters hard, and the foreign press followed. The Guardian covered it repeatedly from August, casting it as kingmaker in its final pre-election piece. CNN profiled leader Qiulae Wong on 5 November. The ABC likened her rise to Australia’s teal independents. Expatriates cast specials.
Either marginal could still turn.
Chris Hipkins spoke hours before Luxon, who stalled until broadcasters were itching to cut away.
The only people truly celebrating were at The Platform, Reality Check Radio and the Taxpayers’ Union. AAP called it a high-wire plot. I suspect its backers were as surprised as anyone by how much they mattered.
The broadcasts exposed the real problem. Analysts such as Professor Nigel Roberts and Dr Bryce Edwards watched from home while panels of operatives fed lines to presenters. When so much rides on these decisions, the networks should have done their homework.
An overhang can be an accident of arithmetic. This one had a booking schedule.
