Has the Conservative Party become a party of Remain supporters?
Welcome to the 215th 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, I’m looking at a striking poll finding - and why it isn’t quite what it seems.
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:
New data on who people most want to vote against;
Both Survation and YouGov find measures by which they can claim to have been the best pollster in the Scottish Parliament elections; and
Which party’s supporters are most against garden gnomes. (It will surprise you.)
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now:
For more polling news as it comes in ahead of next week’s edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
A quick update on one story from last week: I pointed out that the pair of voting intention polls showing the hypothetical impact of Burnham as Labour leader was lopsided in that they only named Burnham, not other party leaders, and also didn’t name Starmer in the comparison voting intention figures. We now have a less lopsided set of polling questions from BMG, which name Starmer and Burnham but not other party leaders. That gives a cleaner picture of the hypothetical impact of Burnham, though it still doesn’t treat all parties equally. This less unbalanced pair of questions shows a smaller, two-point, boost for Labour with Burnham. That is much less than the pair of eight-point boosts in the more unbalanced questions last week. However, it’s only one poll, and it’s still only a hypothetical question, so don’t read too much into it.
Meanwhile, thank you to Luke at Stonehaven for helping me fill some gaps in my coverage of Stonehaven’s MRPs during this Parliament. The table further down this newsletter is now fully updated, and all the backfilled data will appear in the next quarterly update to PollBase.
And with that, on with the show.
Poll shows the Conservatives now have more Remain than Leave support
At first glance, the polling from More in Common was clear:
The more striking thing from this is that more current Tory voters voted to Remain than Leave the EU: as they have shed votes to Reform the party is now not only less Leave than 2019 Johnson coalition, but also more Remain voting than those who voted for Cameron in 2015 - Luke Tryl
Although the margin is relatively small, 47%-43%, the poll seems to clearly show that those who now say they’d vote Conservative have very different views on Remain versus Leave than the Conservative Party’s leadership. Their voters are, by a narrow margin, majority Remainers while their leadership is very much not so.
However, there is a complication. It’s not that this is just one poll. Other polls paint a similar picture.
Rather, it’s that people are not terribly accurate at telling pollsters how they previously voted. As I previously explained:
People don’t recall their past votes accurately. Their recall tends to get more inaccurate over time, with more people claiming to remember that they voted for the winner than actually did and also with people who changed their minds, particularly for a last minute tactical vote, progressively forgetting that they did so.
Nowadays, some pollsters with big panels have the actual records of what people said at the last election to go by. In addition, some pollsters, because of the problems with false recall, avoid past vote weighting. But for those who don’t have the exact historical records but find that past voting recall is useful to factor in, they can modify the answers to try to overcome the false recall issue.
As Leonardo Carella pointed out, there is both data from the British Election Study (BES) and from YouGov which allows us to match up which party people currently say they will vote for with what they said at the time of the referendum about their in/out voting choice.
This gives a rather different picture. Both the YouGov and BES data show that among those now voting Conservative, there are still significantly more people who voted Leave than Remain. The catch is that some of those who voted Leave in 2016 are now saying they didn’t:
As I mentioned, it’s not unusual for people’s memories to change. But the way memories change is away from choices that are regretted or didn’t win and towards choices that appear to have done better or did win.
So in some ways this is worse news for the Conservatives and for Brexiters. If the Conservatives had lost so many Brexit supporters to Reform that their remaining voting base had more Remainers than Brexiters, that would be a fun quirk. It would not, though, be a crisis for the Conservatives as those Conservative Remainers are signed up for a party that has very clearly signalled its Brexiter credentials; it hasn’t put them off.
But the fact that a batch of previous Brexit voters now say they didn’t vote Brexit shows a rather tarnished reputation for that referendum outcome, even among people who voted for it. That is a rather bigger problem.
King’s Game: leadership plotting, Scandi-style
The latest episode of my podcast Political Fictions is out:
In a scheduling choice completely unconnected to any contemporary political events, Mark and Cory talk about the 2004 Danish film full of leadership plotting, King’s Game. This is a proper conspiracy thriller, where even the children are Machiavellian geniuses. They question whether it really makes sense for plotters to document their evil schemes in such meticulous detail, bemoan the bad use of political polling in the film and debate how useful this film is as a how-to guide for potential leadership candidates.
You can view the IMDb page for King’s Game here.
Cory’s email newsletter is Paperback Rioter and Mark has a family of email newsletters.
Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
As well as listening here, you can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or in your favourite podcast app.
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. Across all of May we’ve seen Reform’s decline in the polls come to a halt, though not reversed, the Greens continuing to slide from their peak earlier in the year, the Lib Dems up a little and Conservatives and Labour locked close to each other in the high teens.
The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next are the seat projections from MRPs, also sorted by fieldwork dates. Due to their infrequency, most of these are somewhat dated.
Finally, here is a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name.
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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New data on who people would vote against, 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.
With tactical voting looking to be a sustained large part of our politics now, and not just something that faded after the 2024 general election, knowing who people most want to vote against is an important part of the picture. And we have new data on that from More in Common:
