Burnham, Makerfield and Labour: the latest polls
Welcome to the 214th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), a polling newsletter that always welcomes new readers. So please don’t keep TWIP secret; please share it with your friends and colleagues:
This time, it’s the same topic as last time because we have a bounty of new polling about Labour members and the Labour leadership.
This is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polls and analyses, including:
Shifting public opinion on HS2;
Shifting public opinion on Brexit; and
Shifting public opinion on immigration.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now:
My eyebrows were raised this week by a Public First poll which shows more Labour (19%) than Conservative (12%) supporters having a positive view of Tommy Robinson. Sunder Katwala has wisely pointed out that other data gives a different picture, and it acts as a handy reminder about the need for caution in reading too much into the crosstab figures in any one poll.
For more polling news as it comes in ahead of next week’s edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
And with that, on with the show.
What this week’s polls have told us
Would Burnham boost Labour?
Deltapoll and More in Common have new polls this week which both asked their standard voting intention question and then also asked about voting intention if Andy Burnham was Labour leader. Both show Labour doing better if he were leader.
But, as Deltapoll’s extensive caveat near the start of their own write-up puts it:
This does not mean that, if Andy Burnham were to become Prime Minister, we can guarantee Labour’s vote share to increase by 8%, Labour to overtake Reform etc. This is a future hypothetical question and us human beings are not great at predicting our own behaviour, particularly in a low information context like a Burnham PM. Very few (perhaps even Burnham himself) know his position, let alone his policies, when it comes to the economy, the NHS, immigration, the cost of living, Brexit etc.
What polls like this demonstrate is the lack of support for Starmer and support for the principle of change.
I would add one further caveat, namely that the standard voting questions didn’t name any leaders and the alternative ones only named Andy Burnham. Badenoch, Davey, Farage and Polanski all remained unnamed. It’s plausible that such non-symmetrical question wording, while pragmatically understandable, tilted the results a little.
With that in mind, here are the figures from those two polls:
Deltapoll
Labour 20%, rising to 28% with Burnham
Reform 28%, falling to 27%
Conservative 17%, falling to 15%
Green 13%, falling to 10%
Lib Dem 11%, falling to 8%
More in Common
Labour 22%, rising to 30% with Burnham
Reform 29%, falling to 27%
Conservative 19%, rising to 20%
Lib Dem 13%, falling to 11%
Green 11%, falling to 7%
Even with those caveats, it is easy to see why a Labour supporter might be thinking that Andy Burnham could be their saviour. That said, those caveats still very much apply, and these two polls would put Labour under him at the sort of vote share that in normal political circumstances leads to crushing defeats for a government. Being in first place is definitely better than not, but it’d be a fragile first even if reality lives up to the hypotheticals.
But could Burnham win a Labour leadership contest?
We have new polling from both YouGov and Find Out Now of Labour members. Two main caveats on these. First, the Labour leadership contest sees affiliates vote as well as members. No-one really knows how good a guide to overall support are numbers which only tell us about support among members. Second, polling party members is hard, and while such polls just before actual voting are good at getting the winner right, the errors on vote share are not infrequently large.
With that said, here are the numbers.
Find Out Now
Asked “Who would you prefer to be the Leader of the Labour Party?”, Labour members told Find Out Now:
Keir Starmer 36%
Andy Burnham 36%
Angela Rayner 7%
Ed Miliband 4%
Wes Streeting 2%
Al Carns 1%
The poll doesn’t give us second preferences, so we don’t know whether the votes for the bottom quartet are more likely to switch to Burnham or Starmer if it becomes a two-horse race between them.
YouGov
With YouGov, the picture is much stronger for Andy Burnham:
Given how much his leadership ambitions have been talked about, it’s notable how many members put Wes Streeting last:
Both these polls paint a similar picture to the Survation survey of Labour members I covered last week. That too had Starmer losing heavily to Burnham, but performing significantly better against other figures, including beating several of them.
Other views of Labour Party members
The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot has highlighted another finding from all this polling:
Here are the details:
As Stephen Bush and others pointed out, it is likely, however, that polling asking about specific elements of her approach would get less positive responses, at least for some of the measures.
Finally, YouGov also finds that:
Labour members are more likely to believe Reform UK (53%) are a bigger threat to the party than the Greens (15%) nationally.
53% of Labour members believe that a new leader should take the party in a more left-wing direction.
Makerfield by-election
We have the first opinion poll, from Survation and published in The Sunday Times:
That sample size is a little on the low side, but constituency polling is tough, and it's large enough to give reasonable confidence that if there is something off with the poll, it isn't due to the sample being too small.
Survation’s press release about the poll adds that:
On a generic Westminster ballot, with no candidate names attached, Reform UK leads
Labour by eleven points in Makerfield. The eleven-point Reform lead in a generic ballot, set against a three-point Labour lead in the named-candidate by-election ballot, is the size of the Burnham effect in this poll: enough to put Labour narrowly in front of Reform, not enough to put the seat beyond reach.
Meanwhile, Rob Ford once again has an excellent constituency profile:
UPDATE: We have now had a handful of polls for the Makerfield by-election, so I’ve returned to the topic in Makerfield’s verdict: what the polls say before Britain’s most consequential by-election.
Two great speeches in the House of Lords
There was a treat in the House of Lords this week - two great maiden speeches from new Liberal Democrat peers, Rhiannon Leaman and Mike Dixon:
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a free 12-month subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify; grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation do not and my decision is final. Messages about both of those are always welcome, though.
Voting intention and leadership ratings
Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. Last week I wrote that, “it’s too early to spot with confidence any new trends, though it may well be that Reform is back up a bit and Labour is sliding further.” Wise caution as the latest polls this week tentatively point to the opposite. So let’s just conclude for the moment that nothing dramatic has happened to voting intentions following the May elections and Labour leadership troubles.
The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next, the seat projections from MRPs and similar models, also sorted by fieldwork dates. We now have a third from this year.
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name. Again, not much new data this week, but enough between this week and last that we can conclude that Polanski’s slide in poll ratings has continued, rather than being reversed either by the May election results or by the Golders Green attack and Green local election candidate problems moving further into the past.
The table is also online here with additional details and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historical figures on both voting intention and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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How public opinion on HS2 has changed, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analyses are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
YouGov periodically asks people whether they “support or oppose plans to build a new High Speed rail line linking London, Birmingham and Manchester”. There’s been an overlooked trend in the answers received.
