In the year and a half since Labour won a landslide in the 2024 general election, over 400 polls have been published. Combined, these polls tell a story of a government and its traditional opposition party losing support and fringe parties gaining ground. The big question this poses is whether Reform can win the next general election.
When these polls are combined into weekly averages since the general election, they show that Labour and Reform have averaged 25% in vote intentions over this period. The Conservatives have averaged 21%, the Liberal Democrats 13% and the Greens 9%.
Vote intentions since the 2024 election:
The post-2024 polling outlook.
P Whiteley, CC BY-ND
The trends show that support for Labour has declined continuously since the election. In the case of the Conservatives, they were ahead of Reform until shortly after Kemi Badenoch was elected as leader. From this point on, Nigel Farage’s Reform party moved well ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.
It appears that Badenoch’s strategy of trying to outdo Reform in rightwing rhetoric has failed. The Liberal Democrats have remained close to their 13% support throughout. The Greens received a boost when Zack Polanski was elected leader in September 2025. The Greens are now a strong rival to Labour, hoovering up leftwing voters who supported Labour in the general election. This is particularly true if the new leftwing Your Party cannot settle its internal squabbling.
Where does the Reform vote come from?
It is interesting to know where the Reform vote comes from – and especially whether it is taking more votes from Labour or the Conservatives. One way of finding this out is to conduct a panel survey to ask the same people about their voting intentions over time, to see if it changes. Unfortunately, this cannot be done with polling data since it’s too difficult and expensive for pollsters to keep contacting the same people.
An alternative and much easier way of finding out where the vote comes from is to look at the strength of the relationship between trends in Reform voting and voting for the other parties. To do this, we need to look at the changes in support for all five parties. As an example, the correlation between changes in the Reform vote and changes in the Conservative vote over this period is -0.40.
If the correlation were -1.0 that would mean a decrease of Conservative support by 1% would produce an increase in Reform support of 1%. If the correlation was zero it would mean the Conservative vote did not influence the Reform vote at all. It appears that there is a moderately strong negative relationship between Conservative and Reform voting. Put another way, a fall of 10% in Conservative voting translates into an increase in the Reform vote of 4%. A fall of 10% in support for Labour delivers an increase of 3% for Reform.
The effects of changes in vote intentions for the national parties on changes in Reform voting since the general election:
It’s been downhill all the way since the election for some parties.
P Whiteley, CC BY-ND
However, there is a complication arising in the calculation when looking at each of the other parties and Reform voting separately. This approach fails to account for the relationships between these other parties.
If, for example, Reform does well against the Conservatives, this will help Labour because the Tories are a strong challenger to the Labour party. If Reform weakens support for the Tories, this could rebound to give Labour an advantage over Reform.
We need to look at the interactions between changes in support for all parties at the same time to get a clear picture.
This is done using multiple regression, which is a statistical technique that predicts changes in the Reform vote from changes in all the other party votes at the same time, thereby taking into account interactions between them.
The effects are quite strong, and they are roughly the same for Labour and the Conservatives. A fall of 10% for each of them boosts the Reform vote by 6%. The effect of Liberal Democrat voting on Reform, meanwhile, is negligible, with a coefficient of -0.08.
However, the Green vote does affect Reform, having a coefficient of -0.34. In other words, a fall of 10% in the Reform vote will boost the Green vote by about 3.4%.
The pattern observed in the polls is of Labour’s vote share continuously declining and of the Conservative vote increasing to begin with and then subsequently declining. This situation looks different when you consider their individual relationships to Reform but, in the event, when all the interactions are taken into account, they both end up losing votes to the newer party to the same extent.
This has implications for the May 2026 local elections. The leadership positions of both Keir Starmer and Badenoch are at risk if these contests turn out to be a disaster for their parties.
Unless Reform’s support starts to weaken, both parties could lose the same proportion of votes to Reform. And at the moment the party shows little sign of doing so. That said, there are four years to go at the outside to the next election – and with volatile polls like these, anything can happen.
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