What will, and won't, work for Labour in the face of Reform's rise?
Welcome to the 160th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which takes a look at Reform/Labour swing voters courtesy of some excellent analysis by Steve Akehurst.
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 a return to the mystery about polling on Winter Fuel Payments, with a new poll once again apparently showing the public fairly evenly split on the issue even though political conventional wisdom1 is that it is hugely unpopular. As so often, however, you need to look at more than one type of question wording…
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:
Last week’s post about how the local election predictions and polls performed contained an error regarding Electoral Calculus. I included in their figures those areas which were due to have elections but had the elections cancelled. Thank you to Martin Baxter from Electoral Calculus for pointing this out, especially as the corrected figures make his Reform prediction look less accurate. I will update that post and include next week the fully corrected figures.
Finally by way of introduction, I made my second speech in the House of Lords this week. My first having been about email newsletters, this one was about opinion polls, following up the issues with Defra’s use of polling which I had covered earlier in the year:
The government, as I mentioned in the speech, has added to its impact assessment document a footnote linking to the YouGov polling. It feels very on-brand that my first ‘achievement’ in Parliament has been to get a footnote added to a document…
And with that, on with the show.
Want to know more about political polling? Get my book Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.
Labour vs Reform: evidence from the polls
Steve Akehurst has another excellent piece out concentrating on detailed polling analysis regarding Reform curious Labour voters in the Westminster constituencies which are key for Keir Starmer’s party.
The full report comes with a handy eight point summary of the findings. These draw on a national poll with a booster sample for Reform curious voters, a Welsh poll, four focus groups, an MRP, an online experiment and other data analysis. In the ‘don't draw conclusions from just one poll’ class,
is the star pupil.Those eight points are:
Historically speaking, there is not much overlap between the Reform and Labour voters.
A pool of potential switchers to Reform does exist inside the Labour vote. However, they are only one small part of what is an increasingly complex electoral coalition for the government.
Reform curious Labour voters are demographically similar to the Reform vote, and have in common a strong social conservatism. However, unlike the Reform vote, they generally have left-leaning populist views on economics.
Asylum and the small boats crisis appears a big push factor to Reform, as well as a general nihilism and pessimism with the two party systems.
However, Reform curious Labour voters differ in important ways to the Reform vote. For instance, they are less drawn to Reform's anti-Net Zero positioning.
Anxieties over Reform's proximity to Trump, Putin and extreme figures generally give these voters pause for thought.
Labour can unite its coalition with relatively moderate stance on cultural issues while leaning into progressive positions on economics.
Reform can win more of these voters by combining robust, but not overly extreme, anti-immigration and asylum positions with running to the left of Labour on economics.
That first point is worth emphasising given the amount of political commentary which assumes the opposite. To quote Steve’s own article:
The first thing – and I really cannot emphasise this enough – is that historically speaking Reform voters are not ‘Labour’s lost voters’. In fact, looking at British Election Study (BES) data, 74% of Reform 2024 voters did not vote Labour in a single general election between 2005 and 2019 (and this is only as far back as we have data).
Instead, Reform voters can largely (of course not exclusively) be thought of as historic anti-Labour voters who have bounced around between UKIP, the Conservatives, non-voting and even the Lib Dems.
And on the second point:
‘Green curious’ or ‘Lib Dem curious’ voters comfortably outnumber Reform curious Labour voters even in the Red Wall (!). They are an especially big deal, though, in the Blue Wall seats Labour won across swathes of the South of England especially.
Overall, this research adds to the picture that trying to tilt populist on culture war issues is unlikely to succeed for Labour, as those issues divide its own coalition of support while uniting Reform’s coalition.
By contrast, sticking to green policies does better at uniting Labour and dividing Reform (the opposite of the much touted advice from some that Labour should drop green policies).
And above all, delivering on the economy is what matters - both because of its general importance for any government2 and also because economic issues tend to unite the Labour coalition and divide the Reform one. A tax slashing, small state, public service shrinking vision is espoused by many in Reform but is also one repels many of its voters.
To quote Steve himself:
All evidence I’ve seen is fairly consistent. If Labour wants to keep its existing coalition together, it is questions of economic justice, redistribution and the role of the state that binds it together – and culture which tugs it apart. This dynamic is the reverse of what we saw in the 1990s.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates and showing a consistent Reform bump since the local elections:
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 the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:
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.
Catch-up: the previous two editions
My privacy policy and related legal information is available here. Links to purchase books online are usually affiliate links which pay a commission for each sale. For content from YouGov the copyright information is: “YouGov Plc, 2018, © All rights reserved”.3
Quotes from people’s social media messages sometimes include small edits for punctuation and other clarity.
Please note that if you are subscribed to other email lists of mine, unsubscribing from this list will not automatically remove you from the other lists. If you wish to be removed from all lists, simply hit reply and let me know.
Do people know who did best in the local elections?, 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.
How good is the public at spotting who won the most seats in the local elections
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Week in Polls to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.