A lot can happen in a year, however, and any big political changes will likely show up in the Poll of Polls.
In early 2023, the Poll of Polls suggested a Labour-led coalition would win the election. That probability diminished as the year went on.
The NZ Herald – Motu Research Poll of Polls, which debuts today, uses data from public polls and other private or less frequent polls and inputs them into a computer model using polling data going back to 2014.
It uses this data to run 4000 election simulations which are used to form probabilities of various election outcomes.
This first edition of the Poll of Polls confirms a trend seen across a number of polls, which shows that the National Party’s vote has declined considerably since the election, while the Labour Party’s has risen.
However, cutting against this trend is the fact that in the last year, NZ First’s vote has skyrocketed to the point the party’s median score in the poll of polls is well over 10%. NZ First’s rise has made up for part of National’s decline, which also registers strongly in the poll of polls.
An opposite trend is occurring on the political left. The Green Party has slowly shed vote through the parliament. Its decline has been so slow as to be almost imperceptible, but it is now comfortably below the 11.60% it scored on election night.
Te Pāti Māori, after initially rising towards 5%, have suffered a polling crash, shedding supported over the course of 2025.
These trends have meant that Labour’s steady rise has not translated into a polling lead for the opposition over the coalition.
The average result of the NZ Herald – Motu Research Poll of Polls’ election simulations is for National to have 37 seats, which, coupled with NZ First’s 16 seats and Act’s 10 seats, is enough to form a government with a three seat majority.
Labour would be the largest party in Parliament, with 43 seats, but the Greens’ 11 seats and Te Pāti Māori’s 3 seats would not be enough to form a government.
Motu Research’s senior fellow Stuart Donovan who designed the model told the Herald, that votes looked like they were sloshing between similar parties, rather than between one bloc and another.
“When you inspect the model results, you can see parties tend to attract support from other parties that you might think are similar to them.
“The net result is you can see in polls and in the model results that there’s quite a lot of variability in levels of … the support for individual parties, but when you aggregate up to the government as a whole or the opposition as a whole, it’s much more stable,” he said.