New data from the 1News Verian poll has offered a look at how Kiwis may have shifted their votes since the last election, and it suggests the rising Opportunity Party is picking up support from both sides of the political divide.
The vote-switching data pools four waves of the 1News Verian poll, held between September 23 and October 19. It does not include the most recent weeks.
The dataset covers 3500 respondents who gave a party preference for 2026, and it has been weighted, though has some caveats for smaller parties.
Opportunity had been sitting at about 7% across four pooled waves of the poll.
According to the poll, about half of Opportunity's current support comes from people who voted for Labour or the Greens three years ago.
The lines show how voters’ support moved from one party to another between 2023 and 2026. Hover over or tap the lines to see the share of respondents who moved.
Another quarter comes from those who backed National, ACT or NZ First.
Former Green and Labour voters each make up about a quarter of Opportunity’s vote (26% and 23% respectively), and former National voters about 16%.
Roughly one in 10 Opportunity supporters didn’t vote at the last election, and about the same proportion say they backed the party in 2023. Both of those figures, and the National figure, are based on smaller sample sizes, so should be treated with caution.
The bigger picture
Another key flow has been those leaving National for its coalition partners.
That’s despite a large spike in insolvency applications in the last 12 months. (Source: 1News)
For the period covered by these polls, former National voters made up about 35% of ACT’s support and about 28% of NZ First’s, second only to each party’s own 2023 voters.
National has also lost voters across the aisle with about 10% of Labour’s current support coming from people who say they backed National in 2023.
On the left, voters have been moving in both directions.
The Greens have gained more from Labour than they’ve lost to it, but about 16% of their 2023 voters have moved to Opportunity, a bigger share than other parties have lost to it.
National has dropped back from last week but Labour has failed to gain. (Source: 1News)
People who didn’t vote in 2023, including those who were too young to, now make up a sizeable part of the main parties’ support - about 18% of Labour’s and 17% of the Greens’.
The 2023 figures are based on how respondents recall voting, not on the election result, and people’s memories of past votes may be imperfect.
Some of the movements able to be derived from the raw data are also based on small numbers of people which makes it more prone to error.
For example, only 78 respondents said they voted for Te Pāti Māori in 2023, which is too few to draw conclusions about where that party’s support has gone. Flows of less than 0.5% of respondents aren’t shown in the chart in this story.
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