Dr Patrick English is the Director of Political Analytics at YouGov.
Last week, Reform overtook the Conservatives for the first time on headline vote intention, registering 19 per cent to the Tory 18 per cent figure in a YouGov poll. Technically, a gap of one point in a poll of 2000 people is a statistical tie, but it was nonetheless a symbolic moment and one which Nigel Farage seized upon with great vigour. This week, Redfield and Whitton had the two parties tied on 19 per cent.
Pollsters disagree on exactly how close Reform UK is to the Conservatives with the gap ranging from anything to +1 (YouGov) to -11 (More in Common). But they all agree that the party has been on the march since Nigel Farage’s announcement that he would return to lead the party and to stand as a candidate in the Essex seat of Clacton.
The announcement struck fear into Conservative hearts – their eternal tormenter returned to the stage to take the fight directly to them. Analysis of results data from the 2019 General Election suggested that the Brexit Party, then led by Nigel Farage, stopped the Conservatives from winning up to 25 extra seats that they otherwise would have taken from Labour.
This time around, in an election where Conservatives are declining rather than growing, the problem is existential. Reform UK is making stinging interventions right across the Conservative board, from North to South and East to West, deepening Sunak’s party woes by further fragmenting the Tory 2019 voter coalition.
Clacton of course is a Conservative-held seat having briefly been held by Douglas Carswell of UKIP from 2014 to 2017, and each of their other best prospects for winning parliamentary representation were all also won by the Conservatives in 2019: Ashfield, Boston and Skegness, Great Yarmouth, to name but a few.
And even where the party is not looking set to seriously challenge to win the seat, we can see from MRP seat-level data that the Conservative vote share drops most where Reform UK is doing better.
But just who are the voters now backing Reform UK? What do they look like, and how did they vote in previous nationwide contests? And can this explain why it is uniquely the Conservatives who are suffering from Reform’s success?
According to the most recent YouGov polls over the last two weeks, around 14 per cent of those asked for their vote intention reported that they would back Reform UK on July 4th. Most pressingly, that figure includes no less than a quarter of those who voted for the Conservatives in 2019.
One-in-four voters switching away to a rival is nothing short of a disastrous figure for Sunak and his party to contend with, representing a serious and significant fragmentation of its voter base.
That one-in-four figure is, interestingly, more than double the number of Conservative 2019 voters who are intending to vote Labour (around 12 per cent).
And, currently, only around a third of those who voted for Boris Johnson’s party at the last election intend to vote for Sunak’s iteration this time around.
Conversely, Farage’s outfit are only taking only around 1 per cent of Labour’s 2019 vote and around 2 per cent of those who voted for the Liberal Democrats last time out.
This explains why the recent Reform UK surge, and indeed their pre-Farage support levels of around 10-12 per cent of vote intention, are quite such a thorn in the side for Sunak and the Conservatives – it is almost exclusively previous Tory voters who Reform UK are getting support from.
Crucially, this was not the case for UKIP under Farage in the 2015 general election, with their support coming from the 2010 Conservatives over Labour voters by a ratio of around 2:1, rather than the current 25:1.
As well as drawing heavily from the Conservatives, Reform UK unsurprisingly attracts support from far more 2016 Leave voters than Remainers. Of all Leave voters, over a quarter of them currently intend to vote for Farage’s party, versus just 2 per cent of those who voted Remain.
The expected patterns continue when we look at age: while just around 5 per cent of adults aged 18-24 intend to vote for Reform UK, that figure for those aged 65 and over is around one in five. There is an interesting gender split to Reform UK support too, with around twice as many men among their current voter coalition than women.
A higher proportion of English voters intend to vote for Reform UK than Welsh or Scottish voters, and around 5 per cent more voters in the C2DE social class groups intend to vote for the party than do ABC1s.
In many ways, the YouGov data presents a classic image of the voters who flocked to UKIP under Farage in 2015 – older, more working class, more male, and staunch supporters of Brexit. Reform UK is reuniting a coalition that in its first phase hurt Labour at least to some significant degree, but who swung behind the Conservatives in 2019 and is deserting them now.
This, in its essence, is why Farage and Reform UK are such a problem uniquely for the Sunak and Conservatives.
The post Patrick English: Just who is voting for Reform UK, and why do they only hurt the Conservatives? appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Dr Patrick English
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