New Zealand General Elections
These visualisations explore New Zealand's historic general election results and compares them with current polling.
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, R (packages: ggplot2)
Visualisations by Sarah C Gall.
Created 19 August 2023.
The cartogram shows the Labour Party's impressive number of electoral gains in 2020 compared with 2017. The party dominated cities, such as Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton, and Christchurch. It also won seats such as Ilam in the South Island which has been held by the National Party since 1978.
The upcoming general election - which will be held on 14 October, 2023 - is looking dire. According to current polling, the party is set to lose the rare majority government that they have held since their 2020 victory.
There is, however, a potential path to victory. If the party can cauterise the bleeding of votes before the election, it may still be able to retain a minority government in coalition with the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori.
Based on average polling for the past month, Labour can afford to lose no more than 19% of the party vote; bringing it back to 2017 results (42 seats).
The issue for the National Party is that while Labour is losing a considerable number of voters, these voters are not turning to National. Instead, there appears to be a rejection of the two major parties, with 38% of voters opting for minor parties instead.
The polling figures are similar to the 1996 election results which saw neither major party achieve a majority and need to rely on a coalition partner to form government.
