‘Labour should worry more about polls narrowing than polls being wrong’

In January of this year, Labour’s average lead over the Conservatives stood at 22 points, the highest level since the end of the Truss debacle. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looked out of his depth and out of control. But following the successful negotiation of the Windsor framework, Sunak’s premiership stabilised and Labour’s lead began to fall. Feverish speculation that the result of the next general election might not be a forgone conclusion started to take hold among the right-wing commentariat. 

Labour’s lead has now settled at a healthy 15 or 16 points for the past month and a half. This did not stop May’s local election results being interpreted by some as worrying for Labour. The projected national share calculated by the BBC after the locals showed Labour with a 9-point lead over the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats gaining 20% of the vote (double the share given by pollsters). The prospect of a general election in which the progressive vote was split between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, with Labour being forced into a post-election “coalition of chaos”, led to unintentionally hilarious headlines claiming that Rishi Sunak was the “unexpected winner from last week’s elections”.

But projected national share is widely misunderstood. It is an estimate of what the vote shares would be for each party if local elections were held across the whole country, not a projection of what the result of a general election would look like. And we know from past results that people are more inclined to vote for smaller parties and independents in local elections, even when local and general elections are held on the same day.

No obvious reason to think Labour doesn’t have a substantial lead

At Labour Together, we carried out polling following the local elections and found that nearly a quarter of those who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the local elections intended to vote for Labour in a general election. The local election results themselves provided concrete evidence of anti-Tory tactical voting. In councils contested between the Conservatives and Labour, Labour did much better than the Lib Dems. In councils contested between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, the Lib Dems did much better than Labour. Alongside a series of by-elections in which tactical voting has been even more evident, the willingness of many voters to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the Conservatives should be deeply troubling for Tory strategists.

But what if the polls are completely wrong? 2015 was the last election in which pollsters dramatically overestimated Labour’s vote share. It is worth noting that in the local elections leading up the general election defeat, Labour had only managed a 4% lead over the Tories in projected national share in 2013 and a 2% lead in 2014. Other measures also should have indicated that the headline polling was misleading. Labour was behind the Tories on which party would best handle the economy and Ed Miliband’s approval ratings were an average of 18 points behind David Cameron’s between 2010 and 2015.

By comparison, today, the polls show Labour with a consistent lead on the economy and Starmer with a consistent lead over Sunak on who would make the best Prime Minister. It is true that the Prime Minister is more popular than his party. Unfortunately (for Sunak), this relative popularity is mainly found among Remainers, who are generally so averse to voting Tory that a favourable opinion of Sunak makes little difference to their voting behaviour. Looking at all the available evidence, there is no obvious reason to think that Labour does not have a substantial lead over the Conservatives.

There is some debate over how its lead may translate into seats

Where there is some debate is over how this lead would translate into House of Commons seats, especially given the upcoming boundary changes, which are likely to have a negative impact on Labour. A statistical technique called multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) can estimate constituency-level results. This has proved good at predictions close to elections, but at mid-term appears to give suspiciously good results for Labour.

For example, this week, a Focaldata MRP predicted that Labour would gain a 140+ majority on new boundaries. In Scotland, it is not yet clear how far the SNP’s recent problems have hurt them electorally. A recent YouGov MRP estimated that Labour could gain around 23 seats based on current polling, but the likely Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election will give the first indication in an actual election of the scale of the damage. 

Labour must be prepared for a potential Tory revival

Despite these unknowns and complexities, if Labour were 15 points ahead in a general election, then Sunak would be needing to order a removal van to Downing Street. Prime Minister Starmer would be moving in, most likely with a moderately sized majority.

But of course polls – even when they are a completely accurate reflection of current public opinion – cannot predict the future. The government will be hoping that, by the time of the next election, there will be a reduction in the numbers of small boats crossing the Channel that they can claim credit for and that the economic situation will look less apocalyptic.

Bringing asylum numbers down should help shore up the Conservatives’ base and perhaps win back some of the left-on-economy, right-on-culture voters who have mostly now returned to Labour. An economic recovery would be even more impactful. Voters who have switched from the Tories to Labour since 2019 are disproportionately likely to be economically insecure and therefore at the sharp end of the cost-of-living crisis. A substantial percentage of 2019 Tory voters are telling pollsters that they don’t know who they would vote for, which depresses the Conservative number. If the economy improved then these ‘Don’t Knows’ would likely revert back to the Tories. 

Labour probably doesn’t need to worry that the polls are wrong right now. But Labour does need to be prepared for a scenario in which circumstances become more favourable for the government – and be able to offer a compelling alternative.