About Kiwi Polls
Kiwi Polls shows the published results of New Zealand's political polls, alongside a forecast of the 2026 election from Quasimodo, the Kiwi Polls election model. We don't run polls of our own.
- 6pollsters in the polling table
- 129polls collected since November 2023
- 50,000simulated elections in each model run
- 71electorates in 2026: 64 general and 7 Māori
Poll counts as at 27 October 2026.
What we do, and what we don't
Kiwi Polls is an aggregator. The polling is done by other organisations; our job is to put their results side by side, next to Quasimodo's forecast of what they add up to.
We do
- Collect the published party-vote results of the major New Zealand pollsters into one table.
- Publish the forecast from Quasimodo, our election model. It weights the polls so a single poll doesn't swing the picture on its own, models every general and Māori electorate, and simulates the election 50,000 times to estimate seats and the chances of each outcome.
- Show prediction market prices from Polymarket next to the model, for comparison.
We don't
- Run our own polls or survey anyone. Every poll on the site belongs to the pollster that ran it.
- Predict coalition negotiations. A bloc winning a majority is not yet a government.
- Foresee scandals, late swings or a miss shared by every pollster. If all the polls are wrong in the same direction, so is the model.
How the numbers are built
What Quasimodo does with published polls to produce the odds on the front page, in four steps. The full method is on The Model page.
Collect
Quasimodo works from published polls.
Weight
Quasimodo combines the polls into its polling average. Each poll is weighted by the polling house's track record, the poll's recency and its sample size.
Simulate
Quasimodo runs 50,000 simulated elections. We decide which parties sit in which bloc. Parties in the same bloc can rise and fall together.
Allocate seats
Every simulation is turned into a Parliament under New Zealand's electoral rules: the 5% threshold, the exception for parties that win an electorate, electorate winners keeping their seats when their party misses out, and overhang seats.
What the model produces
- Electorate seats won by each party.
- Seats for each party, as a central projection with the spread around it.
- Each party's chance of getting into Parliament.
- The chances that the government bloc wins, the opposition bloc wins, or Parliament is hung. The front page calls a hung Parliament a disputed outcome.
Where the uncertainty comes from
- How tightly the polls pin down each party's support today.
- Drift: how far support could move before election day. This grows the further away the election is.
- A residual allowance for election day itself.
So a forecast 18 months out is vague, and one in the final week is sharp, without anyone adjusting it by hand.
Electorates
General and Māori electorates are modelled as separate contests. Calibrated relationships turn a party's vote into electorate results, including the edge the stronger major party has in first-past-the-post seats.
Parliament size
The size of Parliament is a result of each simulation, not a fixed 120 seats. When there's an overhang, the majority line moves with it.
Calibration
The settings aren't hand-tuned guesses. The electorate relationships, how parties move together, how uncertainty grows and the pollster weights are estimated from past election and polling records using machine-learning and statistical calibration, then checked against past elections. The electorate model reproduces recent results to within about a seat.
What the model said on 27 October 2026
Kiwi Polls model estimate, not a pollAverage seats across the simulations. A projected four-seat overhang takes Parliament from 120 seats to 124, so a majority needs 63.
Labour · Greens · Te Pāti Māori
unaligned
National · ACT · NZ First
What's on the site
The main front page sections, in order, plus the write-up of the model.
- Forecast
The chance of each outcome and the seat projection.
- Party by party
Each party's latest figure on the tracker's 30-day trend line, and its change on 30 days earlier.
- Odds over time
How the model's outcome odds have moved, one point per model run, and projected seats by party.
- Polling tracker
Every poll in the table on one chart, with a 30-day trend line for each party.
- All polls
The full table of individual poll results, by fieldwork end date.
- Scenarios
What happens if the Opportunity Party commits to one bloc.
- Prediction markets
Real-money odds from Polymarket, shown for comparison.
- Election news
The latest campaign coverage, with links to the original reporting.
- The Model
The full method, what the model is good at, and what it can't do.
The front page's polling tracker, Party by party figures and polls table display published polls. They are a separate display, not Quasimodo's forecast. Each tracker line is a 30-day rolling mean of that party's polls, with a band of one standard deviation either side, and the Party by party figures are read from those lines with all pollsters selected.
Sources and pollsters
Six pollsters, with the number of their polls in our table.
| Pollster | Notes | Polls |
|---|---|---|
| Curia | Includes 33 polls commissioned by the Taxpayers' Union. | 35 |
| Roy Morgan | 34 | |
| Talbot Mills | Includes polls published under the Anacta name, and 2 polls commissioned by Labour. | 23 |
| Verian | 21 | |
| Freshwater | 8 | |
| Reid Research | Published as RNZ–Reid Research. | 8 |
129 polls in total, from 6 November 2023 to the latest poll, whose fieldwork ended on 25 October 2026. Each poll is dated by its final fieldwork day, not the day it was published. Prediction market prices come from Polymarket. It is illegal for prediction markets such as Polymarket to allow New Zealanders to place bets on them, and their prices are set by traders, not by Kiwi Polls.
Who's behind it
Kiwi Polls is independent. It is not affiliated with any New Zealand political party and takes no funding from any political organisation.
Benjamin Dodds
FounderLLB, LLM. Benjamin is a legal professional and a researcher in international law and international relations, with published work on the way. Before law, he built cybersecurity products.
How it was built
Quasimodo began in late 2023 as a solo project and became a working prototype in 2024. A statistician at the University of Canterbury then audited it and worked with Benjamin to bring it up to its current standard. Since about 2025 we've added features and fixes suggested by AI tools, but the model itself isn't vibe-coded. Kiwi Polls was built to show what the model finds.
Source code
We may publish Quasimodo's source code on GitHub after the election.
Corrections and contact
Media enquiries, corrections and arguments about the model all go to the same address.
Spotted a mistake?
If a poll figure or date looks wrong, tell us the pollster, the fieldwork end date and the number you think it should be.