Where's the centre?

An exclusive new poll challenges conventional wisdom on one of the biggest questions in British politics

One of the problems with talking about the “centre ground” in politics is that it can mean several different things.

Sometimes it refers to the ideological centre, usually seen as a Blairite mix of economic liberalism tempered by redistribution and a focus on social equality. Or it can mean the median voter, who holds the most common set of views. Right now that person is distinctly un-Blairite; being suspicious of big business and AI, very concerned about immigration and deeply distrustful of politicians.

A third option is to define the centre as swing voters, people willing to vote for parties of left or right. For the purposes of political strategy this seems like the most useful approach. And it turns out that when you look at this group, they’re not who most people in Westminster seems to think they are.

To get a better sense of who these swing voters are I ran a poll with Peter McLeod, the founder of Hold Sway Insight and Strategy. Previously Peter ran the London office of GQR Research, a Washington DC-based campaigns pollster, for five years, and worked on Labour’s 2024 and 2015 General Election campaigns.

We asked 3,000 people not only who they would currently vote for but who they’d seriously consider voting for.

This allowed us to split the electorate into three groups: a left bloc who will only vote for a progressive party; a right bloc who will only vote Conservative or Reform; and a centre bloc willing to consider at least one party on the other side from their current preference. As you can see this produces three roughly even segments.

We wanted to work out who is in this centre bloc – their demographics and beliefs. One might assume they are median voters with the most commonly-held opinions - after all they’re in the middle. But they’re really not. This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive aspect of British politics at the moment. On many issues left and right bloc voters are more similar in their views than either are to the centre bloc.

For Labour and the Tories this is particularly problematic. Both parties used to be able to rely on solid support from their ideological bloc, but now they face sustained competition from the Greens and Reform. This means they have to fight for within-bloc votes. At the same time they are more dependent on the centre than their competitors. Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage are quite happy hoovering up votes within their main ideological bloc through left/right populism. Keir Starmer (or whoever replaces him) and Kemi Badenoch need to find a way to appeal to the centre too. If the voters making up the centre bloc are really quite distinct from either left or right, that gets much harder.

In the rest of the post we’ll look in detail at who these centre bloc voters are, and why they’re so different from the median voter. Then we’ll consider what this means for Labour and Tory strategy and what both parties are getting wrong at the moment.