The full story of Kemi Badenoch’s poll ratings
Welcome to the 209th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which this time turns to the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, to look at her poll ratings. The polls you are most likely to have noticed paint a different picture from the rest. So what’s the overall picture? Read on to find out.
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 analysis, including:
How concerns over immigration are continuing to slip in the polls;
Which local issues people say are most important ahead of the May elections; and
Which party’s supporters are most likely to enjoy eating pickles.
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 before next week’s edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
A quick update on my raised eyebrows two editions ago at The Independent over its reporting of an opinion poll. Another week on, the paper has neither replied to my suggestion that it correct the story nor updated the story. I have just sent them a reminder about this.
Meanwhile my eyebrows have been kept raised by the ITV/More in Common poll for the local elections in Birmingham. More local election polling is good news. But ITV headlined on how many seats Labour are set to lose, with a calculation based on “a uniform swing model, applying changes in vote share evenly across all wards.” The impact of independent candidates, tactical voting, the evidence from recent elections… all subsumed by a uniform swing model. That is… brave.
A reminder too that my page of local council election predictions is continuing to be updated, with new figures added this week.
One other preliminary note: the latest quarterly update of my PollBase database of British voting intention polls is out. Additions this time include extra Gallup data from the 1951, 1955, 1964, 1966 and both the 1974 Parliaments, as well as the latest figures that have come out in 2026.
And with that, on with the show.
The full story of Kemi Badenoch’s poll ratings
The conventional political commentary story about Kemi Badenoch is that last autumn’s party conference went better than feared and that, combined with an improved performance at PMQs in particular, has seen her poll ratings rise along with morale among Conservative Parliamentarians. The last quarter’s by-election results even saw the Conservatives edge up by a net one seat.
Of course, a significant caveat on all this is that support for her party in the polls is little moved - up perhaps around 1 per cent on average over that period. Plus, there are likely to be heavy seat losses coming its way in the May elections.
But what about those poll ratings? Does conventional wisdom stand up to close examination of the data?
Let’s start by looking at her positive ratings since the run-up to that conference last year.
Different pollsters use different question wording, so it’s the common picture across them all that is most useful. There is a bit of an upward trend over to the left side of the graph, though the more recent data on the right side overall looks flat rather than continuing to rise.
Again, there’s a bit of a decline in her negative ratings, though that looks perhaps to flatten out most recently.
Adding them together we get this graph for her net ratings:
Coming after the two previous graphs, this one isn’t a surprise - some improvement last year but most recently, a flat-ish picture.
Even so, it did surprise me seeing this for the first time as it runs against that conventional picture. You may well also be thinking of graphs you have seen from pollsters showing her ratings improving. So what is going on?
One immediate thing is the Ipsos line. This pollster has more than one form of wording for leadership ratings and I’ve plotted the graph using the form of words that, at the time of preparing the data for these graphs, had the most data points. But there’s a new Ipsos poll out this week which brings its other form of wording up to a similar number of data points. That other wording does show a more upbeat trend for the Conservative leader, with her negatives falling and so her net score improving (though with her positives flat). Even so, that data bounces around a fair amount and isn’t enough on its own to change the overall picture.
What does though change the picture is if we separate out More in Common, Opinium and YouGov from the other pollsters. All three have very regular polls (weekly or fortnightly). All three also regularly produce very shareable graphs of leader ratings. That makes the trio the trendsetters for what people are likely to notice about the polls if they are not following all the data in detail.
Here then are Badenoch’s net ratings for that trio, followed by her net ratings with everyone else:
The trio’s picture is of a clear improvement in her ratings, though with a tailing off most recently.
As for the other pollsters:
Here the picture is much flatter overall, though Survation does show clear improvement and this Ipsos line probably does too.
But it’s a much less positive picture than the one from the trendsetting trio.
Where does that leave us then?
There was some improvement in Kemi Badenoch’s net ratings. In the most recent data, however, that has come to an end and may have slipped back a bit. But also the picture you get from the pollsters whose data you are most likely to notice is different from other pollsters, and overall shows a much bigger improvement in her ratings than the less well-noticed polls.
So if you are a casual follower of the polls, the overall improvement in her ratings across all pollsters is less than you will most likely have picked up; and whatever improvement there has been, the general picture is that it came to an end earlier this year.
Elsewhere from me…
The latest episode of Political Fictions is out, taking a look at the classic US political conspiracy drama about Richard Nixon’s shenanigans, All The President’s Men:
Mark and Cory talk about All The President’s Men, which was released 50 years ago this month.
Mark gets to do his rant about how this film is basically Raiders of the Lost Ark,1 we ponder whether it’s got the most realistic rubbish of any movie, get very excited about a door and explain why the film presents Queen Elizabeth as launching a bid for absolute rule.
You can listen to Slate’s Slow Burn series on Watergate which Cory recommends here.
Mark talks about Jane Alexander’s Oscar-nominated role as Best Supporting Actress despite her only being on screen for less than seven minutes. (Apologies for the mistake about saying she won that year.) There is an interview with her in The Guardian to mark the film’s 50th anniversary 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.
You can sign up to the podcast’s email list here.
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 rather than grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation, with my decision being final. Messages about both of those are always very welcome, though.
Voting intention and leadership ratings
Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. Once again, Reform’s numbers have slipped further. The party is still in the lead, but it’s not uncommon for Reform’s lead to be down to low single digits. Although the party may get a boost from the May election results, it’s also plausible that in the next few months we’ll see at least one poll with Reform no longer in the lead.
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. After quite a gap we had a new one last week - from More in Common for The Sunday Times - but no more since. (The recent JL Partners MRP is for the local elections, not a general election.)
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name. Both Nigel Farage’s and Zack Polanski’s net ratings have continued to slip, extending the previous picture.
The table is also online here with additional details and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historic figures for both voting intention and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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The Reform UK voter base is starting to look a little familiar, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
I’ve often covered the differences between Reform voters and everyone else (and hence the risk for any other party that goes chasing after them, as doing so may move them away from where everyone else is). But The Economist has pointed out
