Labour have fallen a long way since their landslide victory last summer.
Testament to just how serious the challenge from Reform is, they held the voting intention lead for the whole of February. Both major parties had not been pipped in more than 100 years.
Could Reform win the next election?
By law, the next general election must be held by August 21, 2029 at the latest. The road ahead is long, and everything is liable to change.
Will Labour find its stride? Will the Conservatives bounce back from the worst defeat in their history? Will Reform’s momentum last five years, and if so, could Nigel Farage win enough seats to become the next prime minister?
How did we get the data?
To answer these questions, the Telegraph has compiled polls from a range of pollsters approved by the British Polling Council.
These are transparent, reliable and respected bodies like YouGov, Opinium and Redfield and Wilton.
The result of each survey published since July 2024 has been weighed upon how well that pollster performed last time around, with scores taken from the UK Election Data Vault, and the size of the sample. The trendline displayed is the outcome of a local regression.
How support for the parties breaks down
In the days following the last election, YouGov sampled more than 35,000 voters to see how support varied across different bases.
On election day, right-leaning women proved more reluctant than men to side with the insurgent Reform over the Tories. The most recent polls show female voters have been increasingly won over.
The dividing lines of age are also being blurred: support for Reform has grown across all demographic groups, but the surge is strongest among the young.
Support for the Conservatives remains robust with pensioners, but Farage’s grip is tightening in this age group as well. Labour, meanwhile, is slumping with all generations.
We know exactly how many ballots were cast for national and regional parties in all corners of the UK.
Labour’s share has declined across the country. The latest polls show Reform in the lead in the Midlands and the South outside of London.
Plaid Cymru and the SNP have also both enjoyed some success in capitalising on the ruling party’s declining fortunes in Wales and Scotland.
How well is Starmer doing as PM?
The Prime Minister’s honeymoon was very short-lived. Last July, he was a neutral figure in the eyes of the public – as many people reported viewing him favourably as unfavourably – making him one of the most popular party leaders at the time.
But this soon changed. By October, he was more negatively perceived than the notoriously divisive Nigel Farage.
How many seats could Reform win in an election?
The first-past-the-post system has long led to an imbalance between national vote share and the number of seats in the Commons. 2024 was the most skewed election in history when it comes to comparing vote share and seats won.
Predicting the winner of 650 constituency-level races is no easy feat. Pollsters have in recent years taken to conducting what are known as MRPs – standing for “Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification”.
These combine a mega-poll, typically with a sample size of more than 10,000, with a range of characteristic data about the local population, from gender and age to education level and voting history.
How accurate are the polls?
Every poll comes with a measure of uncertainty. Although all pollsters strive to interrogate a representative sample, and weight the results to reflect the makeup of the wider country, a margin of error is unavoidable.
In practice, the true position of a particular poll is likely to fall within 2 points of the quoted figure.
Each pollster also has a bespoke approach to establishing headline voting intention. The precise wording of questions can vary, as does the way “don’t know” responses are handled.
Studies have shown that an aggregated “poll of polls” helps mitigate the potential biases emerging from individual pollsters.
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