News

Jane Green and Marta Miori

Despite Nigel Farage’s claims, Reform UK are unlikely to pose a significant electoral threat to Labour’s 2024 voters. Using new British Election Study data and analysis of Labour’s vote across constituency type and across time, we show that the vast majority of 2024 Labour voters and those lost since the election to other parties and ‘undecided’ are not predisposed to vote for Reform – and that this is true even among those voters in stronger ‘Leave’ voting areas of the country, as well as most non-voters in 2024.

Two explanations are key to understanding these patterns. First, Labour’s vote base has changed over a prolonged period, country-wide, and especially during the ‘Brexit realignment’ that followed the 2016 EU referendum. Even in pro-Leave Labour heartlands, today’s Labour voters are as likely to be ‘Remainers’ as their counterparts in Remain-leaning constituencies. Until Reform successfully appeals to these voters, they are unlikely to swing directly from Labour. Second, even indirectly, few Reform supporters have voted for Labour at any point in the 21^st century. This is true if we look at where Farage’s parties drew votes between 2015 and 2025, and across twenty years of voting history. Instead, Reform’s gains have long originated from the Conservative split on the right, and are continuing to do so today.

Focusing on Labour voters misses the much bigger threats to Labour from Reform, which is Reform overtaking the party in Labour councils and constituencies by continuing to capture Conservative voters and 2024 non-voters – the latter small in proportion, but currently larger in size than for other parties. This is made likelier if Labour’s vote continues to splinter broadly, to ‘undecided’ and to the left, and is a threat to the party in the many seats they won on lower vote shares in 2024 due to fragmentation on the right. 

Labour is losing some voters to Reform, but these are small in proportion

Despite the media and political focus on Reform, Labour’s current vote losses to Reform are small in proportion to those they are losing elsewhere. According to British Election Study data, which tracks the same voters from 2024 and how they intended to vote (in a hypothetical general election) just after May’s 2025 local elections, 18.9% of 2024 Labour voters said they were undecided, 9.4% would vote Liberal Democrat, 8.3% would vote Green, and just 7.9% said they would vote for Reform UK. These figures are broadly replicated in opinion poll after opinion poll, though they will look inflated for Reform if the proportions saying ‘don’t know’ or ‘will not vote’ are excluded from the total.

Labour’s vote losses are large in overall size for a government in office for less than a year (by May 2025), because only around half their 2024 voters intend to vote for them again, but these large losses are very broad in destination. Labour’s vote is splintering across the ideological spectrum, with around one half remaining loyal, one fifth of its 2024 vote moving to the left, a fifth to undecided, and just one-tenth to the right.

The potential for Reform to further erode Labour’s 2024 support is likely extremely limited. The British Election Study asks a question named ‘Propensity to Vote, or PTV’, worded ‘How likely is it that you would ever vote for [Party]?’ where a respondent can give a score between 0 = Very unlikely, and 10 = Very likely. Among those 2024 voters who still intend to vote Labour, or who split in different directions from Labour by 2025, each group reports a very low probability of switching to Reform.

The highest proportion scoring Reform equal to or higher than the mid-point is among Labour to Conservative switchers, but these only account for 2% of 2024 Labour voters. Among the larger group, Labour switchers to ‘undecided’, only 16% report a propensity to vote for Reform at or above the mid-way point; a full 84% of Labour’s switchers to ‘undecided’, arguably Labour’s primary electoral target between now and the next election, report a very low likelihood of ever voting for Reform UK.

Labour’s broad vote losses are replicated across ‘Brexit-y areas’

Crucially, we can show how these losses are replicated across different parts of the country, defined as whether the constituency in which someone lives voted more strongly for ‘Leave’ in the 2016 EU referendum, or more strongly for ‘Remain’ – to capture Labour losses in their more Remain-voting areas, and losses in their more Leave-voting traditional heartlands. The latter are areas where the Conservatives made inroads in 2019, but which Labour took back given the Conservative collapse in 2024.

The British Election Study data has very large samples of respondents, around 30,000 per online survey, which can be broken down into ‘Brexit area quintiles’, which we do here. This shows, in turquoise, the proportions of Labour’s 2024 voters who have switched to Reform across Leave share in the constituency, and – in red – the proportion who have stayed with Labour, grey to undecided and ‘will not vote’, and black to ‘others’. It shows that the type of splintering is very similar across types of area, with only slightly greater switching to Reform (11.9%) among 2024 Labour voters in the most Leave-leaning constituencies, compared to 7.7% and 8% in the third and fourth quintiles.

Because Labour’s vote declined in its heartlands over a long time period, and increased in more metropolitan areas, the proportions of its 2024 vote were broadly similar across these different areas of the country: while 26% of Labour’s 2024 vote was in the 1^st quintile, 16.5% was in the second, 17.3% in the third, 19.5% in the fourth, and 20.7% was in the fifth, making the above pattern of splintering remarkably similar across the country.

Labour’s vote transformed over the long-term, and did so everywhere 

To understand how Labour’s recent vote can’t split significantly further to the right, and how that pattern is similar across the country, we note how much the Labour electorate has changed in the last ten years. The graph below shows the percentage of Labour voters in each UK general election since 2015 who voted to Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum (light-blue bars), as well as the percentage of voters who still supported Leave in the election in question (dark-blue bars).

The downward trend in the light-blue bars, visible everywhere but especially in Leave constituencies, shows Labour Leave voters switching away from the party during the ‘Brexit realignment’ (2017-19). Many of these voters are Labour’s traditional ‘heartland’ voters, that the party has already lost. The fact that these voters switched away over eight years ago, and that this change was ideological in nature, makes it harder for Labour to gain these voters back compared to their odds of reconnecting with voters from 2024, or 2019.

To add to this, there has been an ideological realignment towards the liberal left among the voters who stayed with Labour: the percentage of Labour voters who still supports leave in 2019 and 2024 (dark-blue bars) is considerably lower than the percentage of these same voters who had voted to Leave in 2016, and this decline in current Leave support is consistent across constituency types. As a result, even in the country’s most pro-Leave areas, on average, fewer than 20% of Labour voters now support Leaving the EU. If supporting Leave is an indicator of the potential for Reform UK, given, for example, its strong relationship to other attitudes such as lower support for immigration, and the potential for a vote against the status quo, Labour’s voters, across the country, now exhibit less potential.

Nigel Farage has been drawing most of his support from voters on the right, and currently from more non-voters than other parties

Even the voters that Labour has already lost, however, are unlikely to be voters they need to ‘gain back’ from Reform. The following graph breaks down 2025 Reform supporters (measured by their May 2025 vote intention) by the last time they voted for Labour in a UK general election, for those respondents for whom we have voting history over multiple elections in British Election Study panel data between 2005 and 2025. A significant majority – 70% – of Reform supporters in 2025 have not voted for Labour in the last twenty years, or ever.

This is consistent with the fact that Nigel Farage has been drawing most of his support from voters on the right. The graph below follows the electoral history of BES respondents who currently intend to vote for Reform, in more detail. We can see, in the changes between 2017 and 2019, that a small proportion of May 2025’s Reform supporters (when this data was collected) were some of the voters that Labour lost to the Conservatives during the ‘Brexit realignment’. A more significant proportion has also ebbed in and out of the ‘non-voter’ category across the past general elections. However, by far, the voting record of current Reform supporters is one of support for other parties on the right – especially of support for UKIP in 2015, and the Conservatives in 2017-19.

For each 2025 Reform supporter who has come from Labour, two are 2024 non-voters. This partly reflects the fact that non-voters are a larger group in today’s electorate given the low turnout in the last general election. If we zoom-in on this group, we can see that all parties have similar potential to attract these non-voters: self-reported probabilities of voting for each party among 2024 non-voters are fairly consistent across the different parties, as shown by the graph below – where each party has around one third of non-voters reporting a propensity to vote for them above the mid-way point.

So far, however, Reform have been significantly more successful in gaining the voting intention of these non-voters. The furthest bars on the right of the graph below, marked ‘VI’, show the percentage of 2024 non-voters who have switched to each party by May 2025. A year after the election, 17.5% of BESIP respondents who had declared to not have voted in 2024 now support Reform, which is ten points higher than any other party.

While Reform are currently mobilising recent non-voters, the potential for other parties to do so remains untapped, at least as of 2025. That could change in a future general election where the electoral stakes are seen as very high.

The continued Conservative split on the right poses a significant threat to Labour in many of their ‘Labour lawns’.

Focusing on Labour voters misses how much the rise in popularity of Reform, even though mostly originating from Conservative voters, can threaten a Labour majority that benefitted from fragmentation on the right in the last general election.

Based on vote shares from 2024, Reform are in contention (i.e. either second, or fewer than 10 percentage points behind the 2^nd party) in half of Labour’s seats. These 207 constituencies are shown in the graph below, where the total height of each bar represents Labour’s lead over Reform in 2024. Some of these distances are substantial, but two factors may make them difficult for Labour to defend.

The first are the high vote shares for the Conservatives in many of these seats, which if squeezed by Reform can lead to Reform overtaking Labour without needing to attract any of their voters. This is shown by the dark-blue bars in the graph, which represent the share of the distance between Reform and Labour that Reform can overcome by taking Conservative voters in the seat. The bars that are entirely dark blue – one third of all Labour seats where Reform are in contention – are seats where the combined vote share for the Conservatives and Reform is greater than Labour’s share of the vote. These are right-wing constituencies that Labour would not have won in 2024 without fragmentation on the right, lowering the share of the vote needed for them to win and explaining, for instance, how they gained seats in the country’s most pro-Leave areas on a smaller share of mostly Remain supporters. As Reform continues to gain large swings of voters from the Conservatives, this leaves Labour vulnerable to losing these seats even if they successfully retain the same level of support they had in 2024. 

This brings us to our final point, which is that Labour’s broad splintering of voters towards the left and to ‘undecided’ will further lower the share needed for Reform to overtake them in seats where they are in contention. By definition, a consequence of the high levels of tactical voting between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in 2024 is that Liberal Democrat vote shares are very low in seats gained by Labour, and vice versa. This means, however, that Labour cannot always rely on gaining more voters from the left-bloc in many of the seats it has to defend against Reform – and that tactical unwinding, even if in the form of a broad splintering towards other parties on the left, can further lower the vote share needed for Reform to overtake Labour in these seats.

When Reform overturned a 34-point Labour majority in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election in May 2025, both factors seemed to have been present: aggregate vote shares in the seat were more spread out across the left-bloc than they had been in 2024, and the right vote had become more unified. But crucial to understanding this result – as well as any other seats changing hands – is turnout. Reform’s vote share increased by 20.5 points in 2025, but these were 4,983 voters in a context where the Conservatives lost 4,415, Labour 9,719 and turnout went down by 12.5 points. While we cannot say, at the constituency level, which parties benefit from changes in turnout, it is important to note that a drop in participation amongst 2024 Labour voters – or, additionally, a more effective mobilisation of non-voters by Reform – can further inflate Reform’s vote share in seats where not long ago, Labour’s lead over the party would have been considered too large to be overcome over the course of a single electoral cycle; especially without a substantial, direct transfer of votes from Labour to Reform.

“Parking Reform’s tanks on Labour’s lawns”

It was easy to see, in 2024, that Reform benefited from Conservative failures in office. It follows that Reform’s next target would be voters disillusioned with Labour’s upcoming failures in government. Farage has repeatedly said that Reform is now ‘parking their tanks on Labour’s lawns’. This is a phrase that can be misleading. Reform are starting to make substantial in-roads in Labour areas, as evidenced by May’s 2025 local council elections, but it is not true that they are doing so by making substantial in-roads among Labour’s recent voters.

You can see why Labour might be struggling to respond to this new challenge. But responding wrongly, based on a shorthand, has massive electoral risks, because you could be alienating the very people who have voted for you and who would have been much more likely to do so in another election, including in those very places. It is far harder for Reform to win Labour voters than it is for them to win more votes from the Conservatives, and this remains true regardless of the ‘Leave-y-ness’ of the part of the country. The continued split on the right – not the left - continues to give Reform UK the chance to say they are ‘parking their tanks on Labour’s lawns’. Labour needs to separate understanding these places from understanding their voters within them. If Labour goes after long-lost Labour voters, from many elections ago, their job will arguably be even harder.