The Rise of Reform

Since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister Labour’s lead over the Conservatives has barely budged. It was 20 points in December 2022 and it’s 20 points now. Both parties are, though, doing a bit worse. The Tories are averaging 24% down from 27%, and Labour 44% down from 47%. This is more of a problem for the Conservatives than Labour because they are also fighting a lot of seats where the main challenger is the Liberal Democrats, whose support has risen slightly.

The main beneficiary has been Reform, who have risen from an average of 6% to 10%. Back last summer, when I wrote about the prospect of a Tory wipeout, I said that the final factor that could shift a very bad result into an existential disaster, was the potential rise of the populist right party:

“It’s not hard to think of things that could push Reform towards 10% of the vote: a couple of big defections; further prominent failures on immigration; the return of the more charismatic Nigel Farage to lead the party; and so on.”

What should really frighten the Conservatives is that this has now happened and it hasn’t required Farage to return or any defections. As yet Reform’s polling has not been reflected in real life elections: they performed notably poorly in last year’s locals. But I suspect they will have a bit of breakthrough in the Wellingborough by-election tomorrow. The combination of a seat with lots of Reform-friendly voters, and a terrible Conservative candidate choice, should lead them to getting 10-20%. It’s not impossible they come second.

If they do questions about the risk they pose to the Conservatives, and the impact they will have on politics post-election, will be amplified. So in this post I look at the following questions:

• Is the Reform vote “real” or being inflated in polls?

• Who are Reform voters?

• How likely are they to vote Conservative at a general election?

• Could the party grow further? What’s their ceiling?

• What does it mean for the Tories post-election?

In answering them I’ve pulled together data from lots of different polls, and made use of some excellent analysis by Focaldata. I’ve also done some of my own polling via Focaldata (whose platform allows you to run your own properly weighted and sampled polls) used, exclusively, for this post. On Friday, when we have the by-election results, I’ll do a follow up covering that as well as doing the rest of my February election round-up.