Mt Albert is going to be one of the seats that may have a significant effect on the next election result.
Last election there was a herculean three way tussle between Labour’s Helen White, National’s Melissa Lee and the Green’s Ricardo Menéndez March.
The Green’s targetting of inner city electorates made some sense to me. In Australia these seats have been rich pickings for the Greens. Getting away from the wealthy part of the city and relying on inner city residents and students was an obvious choice. And with Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai turning Green Mt Albert was obviously another seat to contest.
The electorate is predominately liberal.
White’s and March’s combined share of the electorate vote last election was 57.4% with White gaining 33.7% of the electorate vote. Lee also gained 33.7% of the electorate vote.
FPP can give you interesting results. The electorate came within a whisker of having a National MP represent it, even though most of the votes clearly indicated that their MP should be a liberal.
And it looks like it will be tight this time as well.
A Spinoff poll (warning it is from Curia) suggests that White and Lee are neck and neck with White on 33% and Lee on 32%. Menéndez March was well back on 14% and Opportunity Party’s Qiulae Wong was on 10%.
And the debate between the candidates that the Spinoff recently hosted was fascinating.
I must admit to having a level of nervousness watching it initially.
But Helen White hit it out of the park. She was passionate, knowledgeable, and when it came time to talk about poverty and working class issues her response was sound.
There has been an attempt to construct a controversy in that she did not rate her leader 10 out of 10 but I say good on her. Obsequious media driven lauding of your leader is not helpful. We should expect higher standards of our leaders. And anyone claiming that Luxon Seymour and Peters are tens should have their judgment recalibrated.
Opportunities Party have clearly regarded this seat as a backup. If they fail to make 5% they hope to get Qiulae Wong over the line.
But this clearly will now work.
Voters have a clear choice. Vote for a passionate energised Helen White. Or vote for anyone else and run the threat that Melissa Lee is elected, although this potentially knocking Willis or Bishop out of their list seat does appeal.
Bomber Bradbury has gone all five dimensional chess on it and urged voters to support Wong to get Opportunities Party over the line.
Can I urge people to keep it simple. Opportunities Party are untested, their funding is less than clear, and there is a significant risk that they will line up with National. You may not be voting for a change of Government.
If you want to keep it simple and live in Mt Albert vote White for the seat. And Labour or Green for the party vote.
My more interesting analysis is that in Mt Albert we're seeing the continuation of the “Granola Belt” phenomenon in Auckland, mirroring the arc around Wellington's central city.
Labour no longer seems to be the default left/liberal choice in these electorates. Instead, they're developing their own political ecosystem, with substantial and increasingly independent Green constituencies alongside Labour, while retaining a persistent National vote.
Mt Albert may simply be less mature in that transition than Wellington Central or Rongotai. Auckland Central seems to have gone further again, becoming effectively a Green–National electorate contest at the candidate level.
That potentially explains the strange politics of Mt Albert better than simply adding the Labour and Green votes together. White won by only 18 votes in 2023 despite Labour and Green collectively having a much larger vote than National. The current polling appears consistent with the same underlying dynamic: a fragmented left/liberal vote facing a much more consolidated National vote.
This might mean Helen White is simply the wrong Labour candidate for the electorate. I actually think she's a good MP but a fairly ordinary candidate. But it may also mean that any Labour candidate now faces an uphill battle, because the political geography of Mt Albert has changed underneath them.
There's a reason Qiulae Wong is running there. Mt Albert is almost the prototypical electorate for the teal/“Granola” constituency Opportunity is trying to attract: younger professionals and families, highly educated, socially liberal and environmentally conscious, but not necessarily tribally Labour. Wong herself has identified the Mt Albert–Point Chev–Morningside area and its young professionals and families as fertile territory for Opportunity.
And Mt Albert is immensely symbolically important. This is the electorate formerly held by Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern. Ardern won more than 70% of the candidate vote in 2020; three years later Labour held it by 18 votes. An Opportunity or Green victory there would therefore mean rather more than gaining another electorate seat.
Meanwhile, National has a sufficiently large and consolidated constituency that its candidate can win whenever everyone else fragments enough.
That's why I'm not convinced by the argument that White and Menéndez March getting 57% between them means Mt Albert “clearly indicated” that it wanted a Labour MP.
Those voters chose different candidates. Treating them as an interchangeable liberal bloc assumes away what may be the most interesting thing happening in the electorate.
Lprent….I think you meant "but this clearly will not work"
I agree 100% don't vote for Opp. Any party that has explicitly said many times that it can work with the CoC is not worthy of a left-of-centre vote.
Aye BG. Got to be Labour AND Green for the Win, Nov '26.
Helen White had a tough run in the previous election. She took over late in the piece when Jacinda left politics. She faced a runoff selection with a candidate who had the backing of Head Office and for whom Jacinda put her "thumb on the scales" in support which annoyed a lot of the members in the Electorate where Helen White had lived for 40 years, where she had raised her family and been active in a number of local groups. She was subsequently undercut by several people in her Electorate Committee who chose to put their personal disgruntlement ahead of their loyalty to the Labour Party.
Helen White's support in Mt Albert can be demonstrated to any person who travels on the arterial roads in the Electorate and notes the signs on private fences facing the street. These are not paid sites, they are the fences of local people who are happy to have Helen – and the Labour Party – on their front fence. Many of these have had advertising of Helen's activities in the Electorate for most of the last 3 years. Nobody can say that she is not visible in the Electorate.
Bomber is, as always, a sucker for a new party. A very avid consumer.
I'm living in Invercargill for a few years, so don't have my nose to the ground in my home electorate.
However this increasing looks like a reprise of the 2023 election. Lots of minor parties sucking up the electorate vote, most on the left. But the key difference is the change in the electorate bounds for the 2026 electorate.
The electorate has two well-known main-party local MPs,
Melissa Lee has been competing there since the 2009 by-election. That is where the battle lines are.
Helen White has been active in the electorate since I met her in the Sandringham branch of Labour sometime in the 90s. She stood to be a candidate in the electorate in 2009.
There was a considerable drop in the left liberal vote from the Grey Lynn, Westmere, and Arch Hill going to Auckland Central. And a highly likely boost towards the right in the acquisition of chunks of Mt Roskill and Balmoral.
In theory that should have helped Melissa Lee a lot, However this polling (assuming that that they did a good geographical spread) indicates that isn't happening. The 33/32% between the Labour and National candidates with some very strong third party candidates this far out from an election indicates that National has not retained the surge of support it got in 2023.
BTW: Personally I wouldn't class the electorate in any of its shapes over the decades as liberal. I don't think it was liberal even when I was a kid growing up there (we moved there from Ponsonby in 1964 mainly because of the schools). It tends to get more liberal when it has parts of Grey Lynn included.
But mostly it is a electorate that is interested in working and services. Not ideology. As an electorate it is fiercely inclusive and remains so.
Melissa Lee has managed to carve out a strong foothold there because of that, along with some sheer bloody-minded hard work. Not sure why National dropped her to 30th on the list, but that unwinnable position does mean that she has a really strong motive to compete strongly.
So does Helen White on position 38 on the Labour list. But she has a better local organisation.
The choices are pretty plain. Voting for Greens or Opportunity on the electorate makes it strongly likely that Melissa Lee as the National MP for Mt Albert. Voting Act or NZ First for the electorate vote makes it slightly more likely that Helen White gets to stay as the Labour MP for Mt Albert. The probability of any of the minor parties getting a candidate through to win the electorate is minimal.
Voting Ricardo Menéndez March, Qiulae Wong, Alex Price, and Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri, the other candidates, are pretty much going to be spoiler votes between the two leads. Useful as protest votes only.
Useful poll that breaks through most of the bullshit and hype.