CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA: One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson, walks to a press conference at Parliament House on September 15, 2026. Photo by Hilary Wardhaugh | Getty Images

The nationalist party is riding high, but will struggle to convert its poll leads into parliament seats

CANBERRA — One Nation is riding high in Australia’s national opinion polls, averaging 28% support since June. But there’s a problem with the numbers: They tell us remarkably little about how close Pauline Hanson’s party is to winning power.

The same polling that suggests One Nation is on the brink of a political breakthrough disguises a fundamental weakness in its electoral prospects.

The party is on track to replace the Nationals at state and federal level — and could end up holding the balance of power in the New South Wales, Victorian and federal parliaments.

But Australia doesn’t elect governments through a national popularity contest. It elects them seat by seat, with victories determined by how voters rank candidates and where their preferences end up.

One Nation’s biggest risk is that its support remains clustered — mostly in regional seats held by the Nationals. On current numbers, its thinner support in cities is not enough to get beyond second place in most of those seats, which are needed to govern.

Labor won 33 percent of the primary vote in 2022 to form government, and 34.6 percent in 2025 to achieve its record 94-seat House representation. Both times it achieved an efficient distribution of votes in cities and their outer suburbs, and strong preference flows from Greens voters, including 88% of Greens preferences in 2025.

One Nation does not benefit from either of these advantages, meaning it would need a higher primary vote share to get close to forming government.

Smart preference arrangements can help a candidate who finishes second, or even third, on primary votes to win after all preferences are distributed — but they almost never compensate for candidates getting a primary vote below 25%.

At the federal level, just two MPs have won their seats with a lower primary vote share: the Country Party’s Arthur Hewson won his Gippsland seat in 1972 with 17%, while current MP Andrew Wilkie won with 21% in 2010.

Victoria, with its state election on Nov. 28, offers One Nation’s first sustained test since rocketing to the top of national polls.

Roy Morgan seat-by-seat analysis published Oct. 9 puts One Nation on track to win 11 of the 88 lower-house Victoria state parliament seats, mostly in regional and rural electorates. The model identifies some openings in outer suburbs. One Nation itself is targeting around 20 seats, and thinks it has a lock on just six.

Election analyst Antony Green told POLITICO that, while One Nation will do well in rural and regional seats, it may struggle to break into outer-suburban Melbourne where Labor is vulnerable.

“If their vote’s too evenly spread, they’ll just get a lot of second place finishes,” he said.

“Its problem may be just sweeping up all the Liberal votes in those areas, the Liberals get reduced to third, and One Nation can’t win those seats.”

One Nation voters are the party’s biggest hurdle in NSW

In NSW, the Legislative Assembly has 93 single-member seats and optional preferential voting — meaning voters may choose vote only for their preferred candidate, rather than ranking each candidate.

Analysis from strategy firm DPG Advisory suggests One Nation has a chance at winning 26 seats across outer Sydney, Newcastle, the Central Coast and the Hunter Valley. Add winnable seats in inland NSW and the North Coast and South Coast, and the party could come close to unseating the Labor government.

The complication is that in 2023, 62% of One Nation voters didn’t preference another candidate, meaning their influence was exhausted early in the tally process. The high rate of exhausted preferences poses a problem for One Nation party officials seeking preference deals: there’s a clear limit to what they can promise.

If One Nation voters’ preferences once again exhaust at high rates in 2027, that could fragment the right-wing vote and allow Labor to limp back into government.

Reform UK shows what inefficient geographic spread can cost under a different system. In Britain’s first-past-the-post election in 2024, Nigel Farage-led Reform won 14.3 per cent of votes. It finished first in five seats out of 650, and second in 98 seats.

Australia’s preferential system gives One Nation more paths to victory than Reform had, but in most instances it would need established party voters to preference One Nation once their candidate had been eliminated to win.

France’s National Rally provides the most useful comparison for the importance of alliances: the party led the first round of the 2024 legislative election with about 33 per cent, but then won only 143 seats out of 577 after run-off votes took place.

In France’s runoff voting system, tactical withdrawals by rival candidates reshaped many of the second round votes and helped block an RN parliamentary majority, though the party still made a major breakthrough.

For Australia’s next federal election there is a clear warning, and some hope, for established parties: 28 per cent nationally would give One Nation bargaining power and a sizable parliamentary bloc. It does not, by itself, demonstrate a path to government.

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One Nation is soaring in polls. Winning power is much harder.