Election 2026: Should Labour roll Chris Hipkins after dreadful poll?

The result is lower than Labour’s 26.9% at the 2023 election, by far the worst result recorded by a major party after a stint in government during the MMP era.

You have to go back to the Great Depression to find a major party that’s recorded a similarly dreadful result after a stint in the Beehive (which at that time was still four decades away from being built).

Labour was deeply, deeply unpopular in 2023. This poll suggests it is even more unpopular now.

The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll didn’t exist in 2017 (Curia was doing National’s internals, but these were not regularly published).

However, back then it was a 24% result in the 1 News-Colmar Brunton Poll that helped convince Labour leader Andrew Little to quit the leadership and install Jacinda Ardern.

So the result is bad, very bad. Critics of the current iteration of the party argue it hasn’t adequately grappled with just how profoundly voters rejected it in 2023.

Leader Chris Hipkins seemed to defy these critics over the course of the term, clawing back support, and incredibly, lifting Labour’s performance to the point where some polls had it winning office.

But as National fires up its tax attacks and as voters tune back in to politics closer to the election, Labour’s gains have been unwound. Other polls, barring the, shall we say, quirky Roy Morgan, don’t have Labour this low, but most show it losing support or plateauing.

This negative momentum, occurring as the party should be gearing up to fight an election campaign, is devastating.

So, the question everyone is asking: will Labour pull the leadership lever and roll Hipkins?

No, probably not yet.

There are two reasons for this. First, Labour is a little less bloodthirsty than National.

The joke around Parliament is that the National Party mainly exists to win elections (David Seymour has joked that if Labour managed to implement full socialism in government, National would campaign on managing it better).

Its principles, in so far as any political party has them, lie in winning.

It’s obviously a dig, but there’s a bit of truth to it. National exists to win, and once it’s won, to implement a broadly centre-right agenda.

Those dreadful Depression-era results recorded by governing parties resolved in those parties combining to form the modern National Party. This vaunting ambition makes the party arguably the most bloodthirsty of the two majors – sometimes to a fault.

While Labour isn’t immune from leadership drama (let’s not forget 2008-2017), the party seems to have lost its appetite during the Ardern-Hipkins years.

For that reason, the party looks likely to ride this particular result out, despite the fact that a similar result for National may well have ended the leadership of Christopher Luxon.

There’s also not much point for an ambitious Labour MP to roll Hipkins now.

If you think Labour is likely to lose, let it lose and take the prize then. The strongest reason to go early would be to cut in front of potential candidates who might come in at the election, like ex-MP Michael Wood, running to retake Mt Roskill.

The other reason Labour is likely to wait is the vast divergence in polls at the moment. Labour dismissed the last Taxpayers’ Union-Curia result as a “rogue” (interestingly, it’s not doing the same this time).

Labour’s internal pollster, Talbot Mills, apparently has the party in the low-to-mid-30s. A leaked corporate version of that poll from early August had Labour at 34%, miles away from Curia’s result over a similar period, which was 27.8%.

Political parties are often slightly distrustful of someone else’s pollster. If today’s result had come from Talbot Mills, it’s possible the conversation about Hipkins’ leadership would be very, very different.

One of those polls is probably right, the other is probably wrong (there’s a chance they’re both wrong and Labour’s polling is somewhere else entirely).

If other polls, which become more frequent as the election approaches, have Labour low, then there very well could be some chatter when Parliament returns from a one-week recess for its last sitting block later this month.

If this poll is correct, the reverberation won’t just be felt in the Labour Party.

If Labour is really polling that low, then it could very well be because of National’s tax attacks claiming, misleadingly, that Labour would bring in an absurd number of new taxes.

The campaign runs right up to the line of being a lie – and Labour argues, with some validity, that it has crossed it.

MMP elections mean that a major party cannot ever definitively rule in or rule out the policies of its minor coalition partners, but that sort of subtlety is lacking from National’s campaign, which could only be more on the nose if its final frames featured a line of dancing Cossacks floating across the screen.

It’s not for nothing that these campaigns are being called the “nuclear option” – and as with its literal namesake, the most terrifying thing about nuclear warfare isn’t the first strike, it’s the retaliation, which can be more destructive.

Anyone can mislead their way through an election campaign.

National’s just shown how effective that can be. Could we be on the verge of a United States-style fact-free election?

No one, not even National, knows how to fight one of those. But National has given Labour every incentive to try.

National will be celebrating a quiet sort of victory tonight. They should actually be worried about retaliation.