Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ
The National Party has narrowly outperformed Labour as the party voters trust the most to manage the economy.
The latest RNZ-Reid Research results would return the coalition government to power with a slim majority of 61 seats, if replicated on polling day.
The results saw New Zealand First climb into third place on party preferences, recording its strongest result in the Reid Research series in more than eight years.
The RNZ-Reid Research poll also asked voters a series of topical questions, including what party they trusted most to manage the economy.
A slim majority of 32.2 percent of voters said they trusted National, with Labour just a whisker behind on 31.4 percent.
The next highest score was those who said they didn’t trust any party to manage the economy (9.7 percent) followed by those who said they didn’t know (7.7 percent).
New Zealand First scored next on (7.6 percent) followed by the Green Party (5.8 percent), the ACT Party (3.2 percent), Te Pāti Māori (1.7 per cent) and those who said other (0.6 percent).
The result will be a worry for the National Party, having battled two years of economic headwinds after promising to get the country back on track.
It will also be a concern that National came in behind Labour when voters were asked what party they trusted the most to assist with the cost of living.
Labour lead on 35.5 percent followed by National (24.6 percent), those who answered none (9.9 percent), the Greens (8.3 percent), New Zealand First (8.2 percent), those who said they didn’t know (7.8 percent), the ACT Party (3.5 percent), Te Pāti Māori (1.4 percent) and other (0.7 percent).
The leaders heading up the two major parties have also returned low results in their performance ratings.
There was a small improvement in the public’s perception of National leader Christopher Luxon’s performance, with a net score of -14, an improvement of 1.2 points over his September 2025 rating of -15.2.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins returned the lowest net score of 0.9 since he has been the Leader of the Labour Party.
This poll of 1000 people was conducted by Reid Research, using quota sampling and weighting to ensure representative cross section by age, gender and geography. The poll was conducted through online interviews between 15-22 January 2026 and has a maximum margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
