What the polls tell us about the Labour leadership
Welcome to the 213th 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’ve got a smattering of Labour leadership-related polling along with my views on why, this time, the polling doesn’t really matter. Normal service will return next week, I promise.
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:
Good news in the latest Ipsos polling for the Liberal Democrats;
Why the polls show it is a five-horse race at the next general election; and
What Steve Akehurst’s analysis says about who Labour lost support to.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now:
My heart was set racing this weekend by a new publication from the House of Lords Library, Hereditary by-elections results: 2002 to 2024. For an added quirky twist, these by-elections used the Single Transferable Vote (STV). Fill your electoral geek boots here.
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.
Would-be Labour leaders and the polls
The basic situation in the polls for Labour is clear, and dire. Their 2024 landslide has been followed by a rapid descent into deep unpopularity. All the main measures - voting intention, party brand, leader ratings and election results - look bleak. There are occasional glimmers of hope, as I’ve covered in previous editions. But those glimmers are faint and rare. With Labour now actively debating changing leader, is there hope to be found in the polls for Labour if it does change leader?
Let’s see.
Andy Burnham: wins on many, but not all, measures
There has been a simple and consistent story in approval ratings of various forms from different pollsters: Keir Starmer does very badly, all but one other Labour figure also does pretty poorly, but that other figure, Andy Burnham, does well.
It was the same again this week with YouGov:
Then there’s this from Opinium:
But… when it comes to head-to-head PM contests, Burnham’s polling looks much less stellar. As I’ve previously commented:
If I were spinning against Andy Burnham, I’d be WhatsApping the following Ipsos graph all over the place asking, ‘So you want to plunge us into civil war just to be a net three points WORSE OFF?!
Although Ipsos does now have some other polling, more helpful for Burnham:
Ed Miliband: relatively popular even while losing
Chris Prosser has helpfully plotted the popularity ratings for Conservative and Labour leaders at the last four general elections. The fun, and possibly instructive, point to note is that in losing in 2015 Ed Miliband polled as well as Keir Starmer did in winning in 2024:
Starmer was helped by being up against a hugely less popular Conservative leader, of course.
I’ve been a bit of a ‘Miliband for leader’ sceptic as, although he seems to have been one of the most competent Cabinet ministers at picking a policy agenda and then implementing it rather than complaining about how hard it is to do anything, he has been a leader before and it did not end well. I know fans of his claim that he’s learnt, and improved, a lot in the decade since. This polling also, perhaps, suggests that it isn’t such a big step up that he would need to take to be successful a second time around.
What Labour members think
LabourList has a new poll out with Survation:
A reminder that, as well as the usual caveats about one poll for a hypothetical leadership contest, this is a poll of Labour members but the electorate for a Labour leadership contest also includes affiliated supporters (members of affiliated organisations, such as trade unions, who pay the political levy). As with the deputy leadership contest, it’s not that clear how similar to, or different from, party members their views are likely to be in such a contest.
Could Burnham win in Makerfield?
Normally, Labour would look likely to lose this Parliamentary by-election: unpopular government, only a 6% swing against Labour is needed for them to lose and they were mullered in the local elections there this month.
But, Stack Data Strategy has a useful graph showing the Andy Burnham vote-winning premium in Wigan, which covers Makerfield and surrounding areas:
Why, this time, the polls don’t really matter
The poll findings set out above are, I hope, interesting. There is, though, a clear limit to what they can tell us.
In particular:
They don’t tell us about the power dynamics within Labour that will determine if Andy Burnham is the Labour candidate in the by-election (which is now looking very likely). In particular, while the poor polling ratings for other rivals to Starmer compared to those for Burnham might mean it’s not only Starmer who wants to block the Greater Manchester Mayor, that does not appear to be how things are playing out.
‘Vote for me so I can try to remove my own party leader’ is going to be a very odd electoral pitch for Burnham if he gets that by-election opportunity. A contest in which everyone, including the Labour candidate, is saying ‘vote for me to get rid of Starmer’, is pretty much unprecedented territory with dynamics that are hard to judge in advance.1 So hypothetical constituency polling (a phrase which should, in any case, strike dread into any pollster) is likely of limited value.
Part of Labour’s problem is Starmer’s unpopularity, and polling can shed some light on that and whether a leader change may help. But another, perhaps the biggest, part of their problem, and a significant factor in Starmer’s unpopularity, has been how poorly the government has been run. It’s worth emphasising how many people inside the Labour government, who have been Labour all their lives, think this too.2 (Enough even for me to have heard plenty!) The lack of a clear overall plan, consistently followed and with people supported when they run into trouble following the plan, has been a problem. As a result, different bits of government have pulled in contradictory directions or run into the sand. Sam Freedman has a good piece touching on this.
All the plausible successors to Starmer have track records against which we can judge their likely ability to do better on this score.3 Fun though it is to look at Ed Miliband’s poll ratings, it is detailed insider accounts of what he’s been like as a Cabinet minister that matter more.
For what it’s worth, there is one I’ve made up my mind on following his New Statesman article calling for action, not strategy:
When General Pinochet held a referendum
The latest episode of my podcast Political Fictions is out:
Cory and Mark talk about the political film that’s probably most likely to be accidentally bought on Amazon: Pablo Larraín’s No. It’s about a referendum, and one with several parallels with the Brexit vote. Mark fact-checks Cory on a number of occasions, they discuss how successful campaigns always seem to have three-word slogans, and chew over the significance of a scene involving baguettes.
You can view the IMDB page for No 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 also watch the film’s official trailer 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; 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. With only three polls out so far which have been wholly conducted after the May elections, 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.
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. Note that only two of these are from this year.
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name. Again, too early to pick post-election trends with confidence, though all of those leader ratings out so far show Ed Davey’s figures improving, the only leader for whom that is true.
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 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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A new party tops the Ipsos favourability rankings, 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.
There’s a new party top of the Ipsos net favourability rankings. No surprise that Keir Starmer’s Labour is bottom. But top for the first time in this or the previous Parliament are Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats. Here are the details:
