What to look out for in 2026
Welcome to the 193rd edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), the final edition of 2025 and so a good time to take a look at what to watch out for in the polls for each party during 2026.
That is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intentions polls, seat projections from MRPs, and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read a set of ten insights from the latest polling and analysis, including:
People’s economic expectations hit record levels;
Good polling news for Andy Burnham, bad polling news for Angela Rayner; and
A huge new dataset of British political polling data.
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 during the week, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
And with that, on with the show.
What to look for in the polls in 2026 for each party
There is plenty of politics, and plenty of polling, to come in 2026, including a major set of elections in May. The Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd and a large slice of English local government are all up for grabs. What should we look out for in the polls for each party as the year progresses?
Conservatives
Let’s start with the party that has dominated power in Britain’s modern democratic era. Yet with Reform’s rise there is an existential threat to the party’s future.
There are two things, therefore, to look out for in the polls in 2026. One is the relative popularity of the Conservatives and Reform. National vote share this far out1 from a general election may be of limited predictive quality. But the relative ratings of those two parties will matter for political momentum, and the ability to attract activists, donors and defectors.
The second is what happens to Kemi Badenoch’s bounce in the polls. Her personal ratings have been on the up recently. Is that a short-term bubble, and if not, can it spread? The rise so far has been concentrated heavily on the right; can her appeal broaden?
In other words, did the Conservatives turn the corner in the latter parts of 2025, or was it just a dead cat bounce?
Reform UK
In the 1980s, the Liberal/SDP Alliance threatened on several occasions to break the old two-party system and to remake British politics. But each threat ended in failure.
Sometimes because internal disagreements led to political failure, such as the rows over seat allocations and later over defence policy - and such as over the eventual merger of the two parties which nearly killed off the whole enterprise completely.
Sometimes because the governing party, through whatever mix of external events and its own internal efforts, recovered its mojo.
And sometimes too because the electoral system (and the Alliance’s failure to work it properly) meant that harvesting unprecedented numbers of voters for a challenger party produced only disappointing seat numbers.
All three of those risks now hang over Reform too. While on past form headline grabbing internal falling outs are likely, it is Reform’s standing in the national voting intention polls through 2026 which will tell us how much they matter - and whether or not the government is recovering.
As for the voting system, pay attention to the seat projections from MRPs, along with the patterns of support from actual elections. These will tell us whether Reform’s vote is distributed efficiently or inefficiently and whether tactical voting is helping or hindering, and on what scale.
Politically and personally, there is not much in common between the Alliance and Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle. But for Reform much of 2026 comes down to whether or not it is on track to avoid the fate of the Alliance.
Liberal Democrats
The Lib Dem mantra in recent years has very much been that it is seats, not votes, which matter most. National vote share figures have not been a predictor of future success, but more a trailing indicator, rising or falling following electoral success or failure.
For the Lib Dems, therefore, the figures that matter most in 2026 are likely to be the negative approval scores for both the party overall and for Ed Davey. The lower those numbers are, the more benign the backdrop for a ‘seats not votes’ strategy. The higher those negatives, the harder that is likely to be to execute. The positives and net scores will be worth keeping an eye on too, but it is the negatives that will, or won’t, be a handicap to the seats not votes approach.
Even more importantly, however, will the flow of election results through the year show that the party is continuing to be able to gain seats - and to get into contention in seats where it was previously third, fourth or worse? Tracking the patterns through council by-election results is likely to be more useful than sweating over a few points here or there in national polls.
Greens
Polling carried out wholly or partially in December has shown a huge variation in support for the Green Party: from 9% with JL Partners and the most recent More in Common poll up to 19% with Lord Ashcroft.
So far, both performance in by-elections and the results with the pollsters most likely to be the gold-standard (see last time’s comments on Verian) suggest that the upper end of that range is unlikely to be the right one.
The two big polling questions for the Greens in 2026, therefore, will be whether these large variations persist, and if they do where in that range looks most plausible in the light of other evidence, such as election results.
Election results and polling crosstabs will also shed light on whether success is coming from the strategic choice taken by the Greens in electing Zack Polanski - to be an explicitly left-wing party rather than to be a party that seeks support for the environment from across the political spectrum. Even if successful, it is likely that approach will see the Greens fall back in some places and among some voters (especially in those affluent former Conservative strongholds in southern England where it made many local election gains) at the same time as starting to progress in urban, traditionally Labour areas.
So watch out not only for the headline figures, but within that how well that pivot is working and at what electoral cost.
SNP and Plaid
Both have important elections coming up in May - for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd. But polls carried out across the UK or Great Britain reveal little about either of these parties and their prospects. With their big polling days so close, and both elections using a form of PR but without preferential voting, their national vote shares in dedicated Scottish and Welsh polls - alas all too rare - are really the thing to look for.
Higher is better, lower is worse: there’s not a lot of scope for clever nuance beyond that.
Labour Party
As for the UK government, it is time for a revival of one of my editorially self-defeating views. Because what matters much more for Labour during 2026 is the details of economic statistics, rather than headline voting intentions and PM approval ratings.
There will be plenty of polling about Labour in 2026, and plenty of interesting things to say about it. I’ll even try to cover that in The Week in Polls. There are also big, important elections coming up in May for which Labour’s voting intention ahead of them matters.
But in the longer-term, both for Labour’s future in Downing Street and also Labour’s fate in other elections post-2026, tracking the latest average real earnings data matters more than the latest round of ‘is Find Out Now or Verian the better pollster?’2
You might be thinking ‘but what about immigration?’ Net immigration is already declining rapidly, and given the lag between policy changes and net immigration we can also be pretty confident it will continue to fall notably in 2026. The figures that come out during the year are unlikely to bring surprising news. Which is why it is the far more uncertain trajectory of economic statistics that requires the most attention.
But as this is a polling newsletter, I should end on some polling to look at. It is Keir Starmer’s own ratings relative to that of other Labour figures that are likely to be the most important. The worse those relative figures, the greater the chance of a change of Prime Minister.
Elsewhere from me…
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 12-month free subscription to the paid-for version of this newsletter (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual rather than grammatical errors, and factual errors rather than disagreements over interpretation. Messages about both of those are always very welcome, though.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national voting intentions figures. I am always cautious about polls taken at holiday time given the risks of unrepresentative samples. But if we can rely on the latest trio, it is notable that the slip in Reform’s vote is continuing. Also, for the moment at least, Find Out Now is not an outlier on the Reform vote share:
The table is also online here. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next, the latest seat projections from MRP models and similar, also sorted by fieldwork dates. As these are infrequent, note how old the ‘latest’ data is.
Finally, 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 historic figures for both voting intentions and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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Economic pessimism dominates public opinion, 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.
Ipsos’s economic optimism index has been going for half a century, though pessimism would perhaps have been the better term to give it, as it is so regularly negative. Yet even by historic standards, the current index is eye-catching:
