What's happening in the voting intention polls?

Welcome to this week’s edition which is a return to the basic bread and butter polling question: how are the parties faring in national voting intention polls? For a long time the story has been ‘not much change to see here’ but with the media talk of a Sunak recovery followed by the excitable, and sometimes implausible, reactions to the local elections, it’s time for a more detailed check-in.

But first, a glare of disapproval at The Guardian’s headline writers for putting the word ‘poll’ in the headline on a story about a focus group. A focus group is only a poll in the sense that New Zealand is Germany.

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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The state of the voting intention polls

We’ve now had six pollsters produce voting intention figures based on fieldwork conducted after voting ended in the local elections.

The Conservatives range from 24% to 30%, all still putting the party on less than John Major in 1997, William Hague in 2001, Ed Miliband in 2015 or Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. Three of them even - albeit by very small margins - have the Conservatives on less than Michael Foot got in 1983.

Yes, there is still time, yes the figures have recovered by a handful of points from the Truss-meltdown, and yes, as

Rob Ford

has pointed out, history suggests there is likely to be a recovery in the Conservative poll ratings. But these figures are grim for the Conservatives. Every story boosting a possible Sunak recovery, there should be at least one speculating on what a meltdown might do to his party.

On to Labour: that half dozen polls have Labour varying between 41% to 51%. That’s enough to produce some nerves as it if you knock four points off the Labour figure - the over-estimate of the Labour vote in the big polling misses of 1970 and 1992¹ - the bottom of that range starts dipping into the sweaty reaches of the upper 30s.

The polls also show that Labour’s lead varies between 12% and 27%, or rather between 12% and 19% with one pollster putting it at 27%. Again, the bottom end of that is nearly low enough to be not quite safe territory given the uncertainty in how big Labour’s lead needs to be to win an overall majority on its own.

Projections on the lead required vary and, for all the sophisticated sheen the deployment of decimal points can convey, the projections are all really based on guesswork. In particular, how much tactical voting there will be is an unknown. It’s ferociously difficult to measure in advance people’s likelihood to vote tactically, as the answers vary widely even between different respectably worded questions. What’s more, we know that voters start out not being that knowledgeable about the tactical voting situation in their constituency. But how much will that change under a blizzard of bar charts?

Labour isn’t doing as well as it did under Blair in the run-up to 1997, but so far this year it’s averaging a lead 6 points higher than Harold Wilson did in 1963 (the year before his 1964 victory) or 1973 (the year before his double wins in 1974), and even doing better than Clement Attlee did in 1944 (the year before his 1945 victory).

That 1944 comparison is rather daft as it was wartime and there was only one national voting intention poll that year (one all year!)² But Labour hasn't left us a large volume of data points for winning an election from opposition to compare with.

Plus I can't quite resist pointing out that you could argue therefore, if you really want to, that Rishi Sunak is doing worse than Michael Foot and that Keir Starmer is doing better than Clement Attlee. A bit of a stretch, but more evidence-based than plenty of recent Conservative boosterism.

On to the Lib Dems: those last six polls give the party between 9% and 16%, or rather five put the party on between 9% and 11% with one on 16%. There has been a small but sustained rise in the party’s ratings through April and so far a further nudge up in May. The shifts are relatively small, but enough to put the party within touching distance of its 2019 vote share - and with the Conservative vote so far down, that means a big swing to the Lib Dems from the Conservatives. That is the key metric for the party’s chances of winning more seats at the next general election.³ The local elections have also shown how focused effort by the party can turn a welcome vote rise into a much more dramatic rise in seats won.

For the Greens and Reform, the polls are less illuminating as there have been some large variations in how many voters for other parties different pollsters find. We don’t know which pollsters are getting it right and which are consistently under/over reporting Green and Reform support. Plus in both cases a national vote share is not so illuminating given they may not stand candidates in significant numbers of seats.

But for what we can tell, it’s one of flat-lining for both on lowish single digits. While the Lib Dems have had a couple of recent poll results to get excited about, even the post-local election polls haven’t produced a similar one for the Greens. Reform are faring less well, with not only no polls to get excited about but also, unlike the Greens, no local election gains to get excited about either.

On to the full figures…

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National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, see PollBase.

Last week’s edition

How did the pollsters do in the local elections?

Know other people interested in political polling?

Why people say they have switched to Labour, and other insights from this week’s polling…