Three less conventional ways of looking at who supports Reform

Welcome to the 161st edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which delves into some more tangential questions that throw a light on who votes for Reform.

Then it is a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings.

Those are followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis.

This time, those ten include how belief in the Moon landings having been faked varies by party affiliation.

If you are not yet a paid-for subscriber, you can sign up for a free trial now to read that and all the other stories:

This week an eyebrows of puzzlement is raised by Survation who are now on their fifth different question wording in this Parliament alone for leadership approval ratings questions.¹

And with that, on with the show.

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Understanding Reform with less conventional questions

“If a politician was an envelope, what sort of envelope would they be?” is the sort of question that - more usually featuring animals rather than envelopes - can be great at teasing out the underlying perceptions and motivations of voters.²

Back in the last Parliament, for example, the number of people in focus groups who picked “eagle” for Keir Starmer said something substantive about perceptions of him. Eagles are impressive, but also distant, a bit detached from the hurly burly - and certainly not cute or cuddly. Admiration rather than warmth is the emotion. Even if you are not a verbose, eloquent focus group participant, your animal selection packs in a lot of meaning.

So too with quantitative research, where the tangential question can nicely tease out intriguing aspects of what voters think.

And so here are a trio of questions from the last few months which delineate what makes Reform voters tick, and different from other voters.

Let us start with a relatively traditional question, courtesy of More in Common:

Those results remind me of the post-Brexit referendum analyses which pointed out that although support for Leave was higher in ‘left behind’ areas, within those areas the support for Leave often came from those discontented with the state of things but also (via home ownership and pensions) personally insulated from the risks of change.

Then there is this from YouGov about the different attitudes towards fellow humans:

That negativity of Reform supporters again reminds me of data from the past, in this case how UKIP supporters were those most likely to think that the world will end in a nuclear holocaust.

Next there is, by smaller margins than in the above, the finding, again from YouGov, that Reform voters are those most likely to be comfortable with confrontation:

But finally, a reminder from Paula Surridge that not everything is neat and tidy when it comes to categorising voters:

More conventional analysis will return next week but if you would like a final fix of unconventional, take a look at the Moon landings finding right at the end of this edition.

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates.

We now have a regular pattern of Reform in the lead, Labour ahead of the Conservatives who are in third, and the Lib Dems and Green on, by the standards of recent years, high poll ratings for both parties.

Next, the latest seat projections from MRP models and similar, also sorted by fieldwork dates:

Rob Ford has a good thread on the limitations of such seat projections this far out from a general election.

Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster.

Ed Davey generally continues to come out best, though there has been a bump in Nigel Farage’s ratings since the local elections:

For more details, and updates during the week as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.

For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Catch-up: the previous two editions

What will, and won't, work for Labour in the face of Reform's rise?

Reality arrives, 2025 edition: how did the polls and projections do?

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Is politics still about pro and anti-Brexit camps?, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.

1. Two different big pictures for British politics make for slightly uneasy bed