page_title: 2011 New Zealand general election
section_title: Opinion polling
hierarchical_section_title: 2011 New Zealand general election / Opinion polling
caption_attribution_description: English: Graph showing support for political parties in New Zealand since the 2008 election, according to various political polls. Data is obtained from the Wikipedia page, Opinion polling for the New Zealand general election, 2011
context_page_description: The 2011 New Zealand general election on Saturday 26 November 2011 determined the membership of the 50th New Zealand Parliament.
  One hundred and twenty-one MPs were elected to the New Zealand House of Representatives, 70 from single-member electorates, including one overhang seat, and 50 from party lists. New Zealand since 1996 has used the Mixed Member Proportional voting system, giving voters two votes: one for a political party and the other for their local electorate MP. A referendum on the voting system was held at the same time as the election, with voters voting by majority to keep the MMP system.
  A total of 3,070,847 people were registered to vote in the election, with over 2.2 million votes cast and a turnout of 74.21% – the lowest turnout since 1887. The incumbent National Party, led by John Key, gained the plurality with 47.3% of the party vote and 59 seats, two seats short of holding a majority. The opposing Labour Party, led by Phil Goff, lost ground winning 27.5% of the vote and 34 seats, while the Green Party won 11.1% of the vote and 14 seats – the biggest share of the party vote for a minor party since 1996.
context_section_description: The nature of the Mixed Member Proportional voting system, whereby the share of seats in Parliament a party gets is determined by its share of the nationwide party vote, means aside from normal polling bias and error, opinion polling in New Zealand is fairly accurate in predicting the outcome of an election compared with other countries.
  Opinion polls were undertaken periodically since the 2008 election by MediaWorks New Zealand (3 News Reid Research), The New Zealand Herald (Herald Digipoll), Roy Morgan Research, and Television New Zealand (One News Colmar Brunton), with polls having also being conducted by Fairfax Media (Fairfax Media Research International) since July 2011. The graph on the right shows the collated results of all five polls for parties that have polled above the 5% electoral threshold.
  After the 2008 election, National gained in popularity, and since 2009 has regularly polled in the 50-55% range, peaking at 55% in August 2009 and October 2011, before falling to 51% in the week before the election. Labour and Green meanwhile kept steady after the election at 31-34% and 7-8% respectively until July 2011, when Labour started to lose support, falling to just 26% before the election. The majority of Labour's loss was the Green's gain, rising to 13% in the same period. No other party peaked on average above 5% in the period.
caption: Graphical representation of poll results
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