Less than three months ago Labour's poll support was in the 20s when Andrew Little took the hard decision to fall on his sword and nominate Jacinda as the new leader.
This courageous and selfless act alone makes Little a winner, but he also gets a lot of credit for settling and unifying the Labour Party which enabled it to make the most of its opportunity when it arrived. Andrew will now enjoy a richly deserved career as a senior Minister.
Two winners whose names are not familiar are the president and general secretary of the Labour Party, Nigel Haworth and Andrew Kirton. Andrew also filled the role of campaign manager.
These men have transformed and rejuvenated the central Labour Party administration, slogging through the tough times to develop a modern dynamic political party that caught up with huge developments in communications, fundraising and organisation to create a winning machine.
Both Nigel and Andrew will stay on and their challenge over the next three years is to build up and strengthen local Labour Party organisations whose performance in 2017, though generally good enough, was patchy.
Another winner was the Labour Party's Maori Campaign Manager, Willie Jackson. A key result in the election was the defeat of Maori Party co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell in the Maori electorate Waiariki by Tamati Coffey.
This removed one of National's crucial support parties from Parliament and the possibility of a second "coat-tail" list seat. Without this crucial victory, New Zealand First would have found the choice of a Labour-led government in practical terms, impossible.
Willie is now a list MP and will, in the fullness of time, become a Minister.
Although he won't be feeling like one, outgoing Prime Minister Bill English is a winner in my book.
He came within 2 per cent of winning an unlikely fourth term for National and he established the new mindset for helping the most vulnerable which is now known as "social investment".
I hope that the incoming government builds on the work Bill English did in this area and I hope the man himself does not allow this recent disappointment to define a stellar political career.
Bill English is not yet 55 years old and there is life after politics as Helen Clark showed and Sir John Key is now also demonstrating.
The big loser is the National Party whose ministers will be packing up their offices and ministerial flats as I write.
As the biggest party with 44% of the vote, National people are reprising the emotions I felt as a Labour Party organiser in 1978 and 1981 when Labour got more votes than National but the Muldoon National government scored a majority of seats and soldiered on.
National lost because its vote share was reduced, it lost two out of three of its former coalition partners and, most importantly, its political strategy was, as it turned out, fatally defective.
That brings me to the architect of National's defeat, Steven Joyce.
As National's campaign chair and chief strategist Joyce saw polls going back for at least 2 years that were telling him that Winston Peters would decide the outcome of the election.
An obvious strategy when Winston won Northland in the byelection would have been to make a friend of him and offer support for the electorate vote just as National did for Peter Dunne in Ohariu and David Seymour in Epsom.
Ignoring what the polls were universally telling them, Joyce's strategy was a rerun of what worked in 2008; humiliate Winston and take him out altogether.
So we had the leak about Winston's superannuation overpayments, a well-funded attack on Winston's Northland base and The PM advising voters to "cut out the middle man".
Joyce's strategy nearly worked but ended up costing National the election.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
