Chris Hopkins is the Political Research Director at Savanta.
Reform UK remains something of an enigma to pollsters. On the one hand, they look and feel like a proper political party that poses a serious threat to UK elections. They have a pseudo-history of doing so. As the Brexit Party, they came first in the UK’s final set of European Parliamentary elections in 2019. Many of their prominent figures – including Catherine Blaiklock and Nigel Farage, their founders – played a part in UKIP’s sensational rise to electoral significance in 2015.
But on the other hand, Reform lack any actual evidence of electoral success, quite unlike UKIP. Their opinion polling, hovering around the 12 per cent of the national vote share average, may well roughly mirror that which UKIP achieved at the 2015 General Election.
Before that election UKIP had recorded seven 2nd place finishes in UK by-elections, two by-election wins (albeit via defections from the Conservatives), had taken control of a local authority, and had hundreds of councillors up and down the country. Reform UK, by contrast, have performed poorly in the by-elections they’ve contested, with their best result being 3rd in Wellingborough earlier this year, withjust 13 per cent of the vote.
They’ve kept their deposit in only five of 19 by-elections contested. They have had disappointing performances in local elections too, with the 2023 local elections yielding just six seats and an average vote share of just 6 per cent in wards where they stood.
Some proper evidence of Reform winning real votes is required before we anoint them a bigger threat to the Conservatives than the actual opposition. They will have such opportunities soon, since the 2024 Local and Metro Mayoral elections are on the horizon. The Blackpool South by-election – a seat that Reform should perform well in – will be held on the same day, so the performance of Reform will be one of the most significant stories to emerge from the final major electoral yardstick that we’ll have to measure party performance before a general election.
But regardless of the lack of real electoral evidence around them, Reform should only be ignored at the Government’s peril. They might not win any elections, but they can certainly help the Conservatives lose them.
Recent polling by Savanta found that 86 per cent of Conservative to Reform switchers said that their vote was ‘for Reform’ rather than ‘against the Conservatives’, implying at the very least that Reform voters are forging their own unique brand. But to what extent Reform are a late-term protest or likely to steal actual voters come an election remains the million-dollar question.
Pollsters have been trying to dig into these voters to learn more about them. The results are fairly telling. Starting with the more obvious conclusions, they’re right-leaning, older voters who tend to live outside of London, with strong views on immigration, but also on the impacts of globalisation, big business and climate change. But dig a little deeper and you see they’re not just ‘Tories in disguise’, playing footsie with another party.
While Reform UK voters’ second choice is significantly more likely to be the Conservatives than Labour or another established party, many more say that they wouldn’t vote at all or don’t know what they’d do if Reform were not standing a candidate in their constituency. Further, a majority of Reform UK voters feel unfavourably towards the current iteration of the Conservatives and, ergo, Rishi Sunak. The idea that the Conservatives can just rely on these voters to ‘come home’ when an election is held contradicts the data.
Some polling has tried to determine what the Conservatives must do to win these voters back. ‘Being tougher’ on immigration is an obvious conclusion that this research comes to, but there are some significant flaws to this argument.
Yes, immigration is highly important to Reform’s voters – as it is highly important to Conservative voters – but many of the questions supposedly proving immigration’s electoral impact rely on the flawed “if the Conservatives get their act together on immigration, then how will you vote” format. This question type, irrespective of its methodological defects, fails to appreciate that the Conservatives are in this dreadful electoral position not because of a failure to talk tough on immigration, but because of a failure to deliver on their words.
It also neglects the real challenge Rishi Sunak faces; that the Conservatives are losing votes to the right in Reform UK *and* the left in Labour, and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all policy to stem the bleeding anymore. Once upon a time, there might have been; in the Liz Truss era, Conservative 2019 defectors tended to split between Labour and undecided, which ultimately is part of the reason why Labour’s vote share touched the 50 per cent mark and their leads were in the 30s.
But in Savanta’s recent polling for The Sun, we found a marginally higher proportion of Conservative defectors are going to Reform rather than Labour – and this is why, despite the Conservative vote share in many polls being as low as the Liz Truss era, the Labour lead isn’t matching October 2022 levels.
Where previously defectors had ditched the Conservatives for economic, competence, and moral reasons after Partygate and Trussonomics, they’re now ditching the party over a lack of action on immigration, the Rwanda plan, and the perception that Sunak isn’t the person to deliver a truly Conservative agenda. In other words, by making the post-Truss era about delivery on immigration, among other things, the Prime Minister has made a rod for his own back.
Savanta’s research tells us that eight in ten (82 per cent) voters are unlikely to change their mind on their voting intention before the next election, suggesting there are increasingly small pools of wavering voters for the Conservatives to win back. Switchers do not appear any less likely to change their mind than Conservative loyalists, and among those that have already switched away from the Tories, only a very small proportion (8 per cent) say that they can still see themselves voting Conservative at the next election.
A large chunk (47 per cent) say they might come back eventually, but not before the next election. There a myriad reasons why they’re staying away now.
“I have voted Conservative all my adult life, but the present government appear to have ‘forgotten’ true conservative values”, a Reform voter told me recently. Many Conservative-to-Reform switchers share their views, but the Conservative-to-Labour switchers tell a different story. “I’ve never earned so much but been so poor,” said one, while another said that “unfortunately our current government hasn’t proved competent.”
Where once it may have been easier to win over one group of defectors, Sunak must try, in increasingly limited time, to win over two very disparate sets of voters with very different priorities. A strategy that might appeal to one, may alienate the other, and winning back the entirety of one set might not even be enough to deprive Labour of a majority at the next election. And why would any would-be Conservative voter believe that, after a year and a half of not delivering, Sunak will start to deliver on his promises now?
Unless the Prime Minister can prove to voters he’s not just talk, it’s no wonder that voters are ditching the Conservative Party from both sides.
The post Chris Hopkins: Johnson and Truss lost Conservative voters to Labour. But it’s Sunak that has lost them to Reform. appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Chris Hopkins
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