I have thought long and hard about writing this. I wrote a kind of explainer about 6 weeks ago, but I wanted to be sure that I was sharing the best information before really throwing my support behind the strategy. And, to be honest, I have felt really sad for National and the situation they find themselves in. Although, of course, much of it is self-inflicted. I have a great deal of respect for many in the party and I know that they are feeling wounded by the increasing push for strategic voting.
National wheeled out John Key to resist the “overhang” narrative at their campaign launch last weekend. Key said it was “not clever” to consider splitting our votes and that “Two Ticks Blue” is the only strategy to ensure a strong National-led government.
Sadly, he is wrong. As former National Party Minister Maurice Williamson has said repeatedly, Key is right that “two ticks” was the best strategy for National voters in every other MMP election we have had so far, but he is not right in 2026.
The reality is that National and Labour are polling historically low in terms of the party vote. The latest poll had them deadlocked on 28% which means no matter which of party ends up in the Beehive after the election its coalition partners will wield significant power. With Opportunity now sitting above the 5% threshold regularly the chances of the left bloc getting over the line are looking more and more likely.
However, the centre-right have a rare lifeline. A lifeline that National is desperately telling us all to ignore. That means that if the right wing bloc are to get back into Parliament, we may have to drag National kicking and screaming over the line. Put simply, we may have to save them from themselves.
The simplest way (it seems more complex than it actually is) to explain the situation is that under MMP, list MPs only start getting seats once a party’s party vote entitlement is bigger than the number of electorate seats it has won. If the electorate seats won outnumber the party vote seats a party is entitled to, the party simply gets to keep all its electorate seats and gets no list MPs. But because this gives them more seats than their party vote allows it creates an “overhang” or extra seats that are added to Parliament because they cannot be taken off anyone else. That is how we ended up with 123 MPs this term instead of the usual 120. Te Pāti Māori won more seats than their party vote entitled them to.
National is in the unique situation of currently holding 44 electorate seats while polling at 28%. So assuming they won them all back and got 28% at the election, they would end up with 44 seats despite being entitled to only around 34 seats based on their party vote share. This would create an overhang adding an extra ten seats to Parliament.
National aren’t likely to win all of their electorate seats back, but they could well pick up a few marginal ones they currently don’t have too. I have seen estimates of them ending up with 36-42 electorates seats.
Let’s model it. Assuming National wins 40 electorates, they need their party vote to entitle them to at least 41 seats before just one person comes in from the list. So they would need somewhere around 34–35% of the party vote.
That means National needs to gain at least 6 points in the polls in order to just bring Nicola Willis in who is first on the list (after removing likely electorate winners). Election day, on 7 November, is just 39 days away, with advance voting beginning on 26 October. And this assumes they don’t win more than 40 electorate seats.
Could a party move 6 points in the late stages of an election campaign? Of course, in theory. Elections can move quickly and polls are snapshots, not prophecies. But National would need to totally depart from the trajectory we have seen so far this term. The trends are, in fact, going the wrong way. In the 1News-Verian polls National was on 34% in February, 30% in April, 29% in June, 29% in August, and 28% now. Far from recording even one single upward movement in this poll series at any point in 2026, National has instead moved 6 points in the wrong direction.
Nor does the latest result look like an outlier when compared with other pollsters. September’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll had National at 29%, down 2 points, while Roy Morgan had National at 31% in August, down from 32% in July. National’s polling has not been a perfectly straight line down the slope since the 2023 election, but zoom out and the direction of travel is pretty consistent. National won 38.1% at the 2023 election and spent much of 2024 hovering around 37 or 38. During 2025 it largely settled into the mid-30s and this year declined some more.
And that is why, as much as I sympathise with them, I struggle with National’s response to the vote splitting argument. Their determination to push “Two Ticks Blue!” effectively requires voters to assume that National is about to stage a fairly dramatic and unprecedented recovery in its party vote. Sure, it is possible. But is also possible that I will win the Powerball this weekend. Well, if I buy a ticket. There is a difference between something being possible and there being evidence that it is likely to happen.
National has been arguing that giving your party vote to ACT or New Zealand First will result in experienced National ministers being replaced in cabinet by obscure small party candidates. But National is going to lose those ministers anyway. As I said, they will need to gain around 6 points in the polls in order to save just one of them. They would need to surge up the polls even further in the next 5 weeks to save Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith, and Gerry Brownlee.
This is why I do think it is a circumstance that is in many ways self-inflicted. The party made choice after choice throughout this term of government that lost them favour with their voters. What they chose not to do probably hurt them the most. They also made the choice not to have Nicola Willis contest an electorate and they could even have parachuted her into Chris Penk’s vacated seat. Would it have looked desperate? Yeah, probably, but she would likely win the safe seat and not be looking down the barrel of a sabbatical or early retirement.
In any case, those details are distraction. National are in all likelihood going to lose Willis, Bishop, Goldsmith, and Brownlee. A massive loss of experience and institutional knowledge, no doubt. But it is reprehensible to send centre-right voters on a fool’s errand to save them and so all but guarantee that the coalition ends up in Opposition.
New Zealanders who want the centre-right coalition back in, or at least want to keep Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori/Opportunity out, deserve better than to be gaslit into thinking that it is realistic that National will achieve such a massive turn around against the trends.
There is a lifeline to reach for and the opportunity to potentially save National from themselves. The centre-right can split our vote.
Why should we give National candidates our electorate vote?
Because they are most likely to win (except in Epsom and Tāmaki where ACT are incumbents). They can snap up as many of the electorate seats as possible for the centre-right.
Why should we give our party vote to ACT or NZ First?
Moving a party vote from National to ACT or New Zealand First does not manufacture another centre-right MP out of thin air. But because National will be winning so many electorate seats and they won’t be getting list MPs there is no point in giving them the party vote. Reducing their party vote further does not make their electorate MPs disappear. Whereas giving it to NZ First or ACT actually results in more list MPs because their party vote entitlement will be higher than their number of electorate seats won. In broad terms, it increases the size of the centre-right bloc and depending on how much of an overhang is created, will likely get the three parties back into Government.
Can it go wrong?
Yes. Human beings do not tend to vote mathematically or behave rationally. To get the full benefit of this strategy would require a lot of centre-right voters to split their votes. The model works by holding National’s electorate victories steady while reducing its party vote. Real elections do not politely hold variables constant for the convenience of Microsoft Excel. But as things are now in the polls, a small percentage shift in the party vote toward ACT and NZ First could make enough of a difference.
If National’s party vote collapses, some fear that their electorate vote may collapse with it. That is why the strategy relies on NZ First and ACT voters giving their candidate vote to National (except in Epsom in Tāmaki) too. National needs to win the electorates and the two smaller parties need to sweep up the party votes.
The complexities and risks are why I was reluctant to declare this as some kind of genius foolproof strategy several months ago. The principle is real and the maths adds up, but I wanted to see if the party votes would move at all in the polls. With 5 weeks to go I think it is safe to say they simply will not move enough. Vote splitting is a much needed lifeline for the centre-right.
The interests of an individual party and the arithmetic of a governing bloc are not always identical and this is the source of the suddenly rather heated argument on the right. National wants to save National. People promoting the overhang strategy are looking at the coalition as a whole.
MMP was designed to make Parliament proportional. Thirty years later we have arrived at the point where people with spreadsheets are trying to determine how many extra MPs can be produced by deliberately making one party less proportional. Democracy is magnificent.
None of this is a loophole invented by Harry Mowbray or Maurice Williamson or anyone else. It is a quirk of MMP and it has produced overhangs before. Elections NZ describes the phenomenon explicitly on its website. It is totally legal and fair game for Te Pāti Māori to ask for electorate votes while encouraging party votes to go to Greens or Labour. And it is totally fine for the centre-right to use the mechanism too.
All is fair in love, war, and politics.
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
Sadly, he is wrong. As former National Party Minister Maurice Williamson has said repeatedly, Key is right that “two ticks” was the best strategy for National voters in every other MMP election we have had so far, but he is not right in 2026.
The reality is that National and Labour are polling historically low in terms of the party vote. The latest poll had them deadlocked on 28% which means no matter which of party ends up in the Beehive after the election its coalition partners will wield significant power. With Opportunity now sitting above the 5% threshold regularly the chances of the left bloc getting over the line are looking more and more likely.
However, the centre-right have a rare lifeline. A lifeline that National is desperately telling us all to ignore. That means that if the right wing bloc are to get back into Parliament, we may have to drag National kicking and screaming over the line. Put simply, we may have to save them from themselves.
The simplest way (it seems more complex than it actually is) to explain the situation is that under MMP, list MPs only start getting seats once a party’s party vote entitlement is bigger than the number of electorate seats it has won. If the electorate seats won outnumber the party vote seats a party is entitled to, the party simply gets to keep all its electorate seats and gets no list MPs. But because this gives them more seats than their party vote allows it creates an “overhang” or extra seats that are added to Parliament because they cannot be taken off anyone else. That is how we ended up with 123 MPs this term instead of the usual 120. Te Pāti Māori won more seats than their party vote entitled them to.
National is in the unique situation of currently holding 44 electorate seats while polling at 28%. So assuming they won them all back and got 28% at the election, they would end up with 44 seats despite being entitled to only around 34 seats based on their party vote share. This would create an overhang adding an extra ten seats to Parliament.
National aren’t likely to win all of their electorate seats back, but they could well pick up a few marginal ones they currently don’t have too. I have seen estimates of them ending up with 36-42 electorates seats.
Let’s model it. Assuming National wins 40 electorates, they need their party vote to entitle them to at least 41 seats before just one person comes in from the list. So they would need somewhere around 34–35% of the party vote.
That means National needs to gain at least 6 points in the polls in order to just bring Nicola Willis in who is first on the list (after removing likely electorate winners). Election day, on 7 November, is just 39 days away, with advance voting beginning on 26 October. And this assumes they don’t win more than 40 electorate seats.
Could a party move 6 points in the late stages of an election campaign? Of course, in theory. Elections can move quickly and polls are snapshots, not prophecies. But National would need to totally depart from the trajectory we have seen so far this term. The trends are, in fact, going the wrong way. In the 1News-Verian polls National was on 34% in February, 30% in April, 29% in June, 29% in August, and 28% now. Far from recording even one single upward movement in this poll series at any point in 2026, National has instead moved 6 points in the wrong direction.
Nor does the latest result look like an outlier when compared with other pollsters. September’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll had National at 29%, down 2 points, while Roy Morgan had National at 31% in August, down from 32% in July. National’s polling has not been a perfectly straight line down the slope since the 2023 election, but zoom out and the direction of travel is pretty consistent. National won 38.1% at the 2023 election and spent much of 2024 hovering around 37 or 38. During 2025 it largely settled into the mid-30s and this year declined some more.
And that is why, as much as I sympathise with them, I struggle with National’s response to the vote splitting argument. Their determination to push “Two Ticks Blue!” effectively requires voters to assume that National is about to stage a fairly dramatic and unprecedented recovery in its party vote. Sure, it is possible. But is also possible that I will win the Powerball this weekend. Well, if I buy a ticket. There is a difference between something being possible and there being evidence that it is likely to happen.
National has been arguing that giving your party vote to ACT or New Zealand First will result in experienced National ministers being replaced in cabinet by obscure small party candidates. But National is going to lose those ministers anyway. As I said, they will need to gain around 6 points in the polls in order to save just one of them. They would need to surge up the polls even further in the next 5 weeks to save Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith, and Gerry Brownlee.
This is why I do think it is a circumstance that is in many ways self-inflicted. The party made choice after choice throughout this term of government that lost them favour with their voters. What they chose not to do probably hurt them the most. They also made the choice not to have Nicola Willis contest an electorate and they could even have parachuted her into Chris Penk’s vacated seat. Would it have looked desperate? Yeah, probably, but she would likely win the safe seat and not be looking down the barrel of a sabbatical or early retirement.
In any case, those details are distraction. National are in all likelihood going to lose Willis, Bishop, Goldsmith, and Brownlee. A massive loss of experience and institutional knowledge, no doubt. But it is reprehensible to send centre-right voters on a fool’s errand to save them and so all but guarantee that the coalition ends up in Opposition.
New Zealanders who want the centre-right coalition back in, or at least want to keep Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori/Opportunity out, deserve better than to be gaslit into thinking that it is realistic that National will achieve such a massive turn around against the trends.
There is a lifeline to reach for and the opportunity to potentially save National from themselves. The centre-right can split our vote.
Electorate vote → National candidate (except Epsom and Tāmaki)
Party vote → NZ First or ACT
Because they are most likely to win (except in Epsom and Tāmaki where ACT are incumbents). They can snap up as many of the electorate seats as possible for the centre-right.
Why should we give our party vote to ACT or NZ First?
Moving a party vote from National to ACT or New Zealand First does not manufacture another centre-right MP out of thin air. But because National will be winning so many electorate seats and they won’t be getting list MPs there is no point in giving them the party vote. Reducing their party vote further does not make their electorate MPs disappear. Whereas giving it to NZ First or ACT actually results in more list MPs because their party vote entitlement will be higher than their number of electorate seats won. In broad terms, it increases the size of the centre-right bloc and depending on how much of an overhang is created, will likely get the three parties back into Government.
Can it go wrong?
Yes. Human beings do not tend to vote mathematically or behave rationally. To get the full benefit of this strategy would require a lot of centre-right voters to split their votes. The model works by holding National’s electorate victories steady while reducing its party vote. Real elections do not politely hold variables constant for the convenience of Microsoft Excel. But as things are now in the polls, a small percentage shift in the party vote toward ACT and NZ First could make enough of a difference.
If National’s party vote collapses, some fear that their electorate vote may collapse with it. That is why the strategy relies on NZ First and ACT voters giving their candidate vote to National (except in Epsom in Tāmaki) too. National needs to win the electorates and the two smaller parties need to sweep up the party votes.
-------------------------
The complexities and risks are why I was reluctant to declare this as some kind of genius foolproof strategy several months ago. The principle is real and the maths adds up, but I wanted to see if the party votes would move at all in the polls. With 5 weeks to go I think it is safe to say they simply will not move enough. Vote splitting is a much needed lifeline for the centre-right.
The interests of an individual party and the arithmetic of a governing bloc are not always identical and this is the source of the suddenly rather heated argument on the right. National wants to save National. People promoting the overhang strategy are looking at the coalition as a whole.
MMP was designed to make Parliament proportional. Thirty years later we have arrived at the point where people with spreadsheets are trying to determine how many extra MPs can be produced by deliberately making one party less proportional. Democracy is magnificent.
None of this is a loophole invented by Harry Mowbray or Maurice Williamson or anyone else. It is a quirk of MMP and it has produced overhangs before. Elections NZ describes the phenomenon explicitly on its website. It is totally legal and fair game for Te Pāti Māori to ask for electorate votes while encouraging party votes to go to Greens or Labour. And it is totally fine for the centre-right to use the mechanism too.
All is fair in love, war, and politics.
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
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