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The period between 2024 and 2026 has been transformational in British politics. The British Conservatives, for the first time since their foundation, face an unprecedently viable challenger on the right in Reform UK. While it is true that the Conservatives have faced a challenge on their right flank for decades, led by Nigel Farage in the form of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and then the Brexit Party, these threats have, until 2025 and 2026, been momentary or confined to second-order elections (local and European Parliament elections). However, two critical factors now threaten the Conservatives’ position as the main political party on the right of British politics: the first, their loss of support in government, between 2019 and 2024; the second, their continued loss of support in opposition, after 2024.  

This reflects a broader and a deeper electoral story. The Conservative vote is increasingly concentrated among older and less-educated voters, following the ‘sorting’ of electoral choice into two party blocs – a right-conservative bloc containing the Conservatives and Reform UK (and now Restore), and a left-liberal bloc containing Labour, the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru (Griffiths et al. 2025). By 2019, the Conservatives’ vote was so strongly structured by support on the ‘Leave’ side of the Brexit referendum and with that, a demographic of older voters with lower levels of education, that their vote would more naturally split within the right bloc than across it (Fieldhouse et al. forthcoming). This became possible because of Conservative failures in government between 2019 and 2024, first on the Covid pandemic and the associated ‘partygate scandal’ with Boris Johnson, and then by the cost-of-living crisis and the Liz Truss ‘mini-budget’, causing many of their voters from 2019 to reject the Conservatives. However, the Conservatives continued to lose support in opposition, after 2024, at the same time as the Labour party also lost a substantial portion of their 2024 support in the polls (Nuffield Politics Research Centre, 2025). By 2025, Reform UK took a lead in opinion polls, over Labour and the Conservatives. They won large margins of support in the 2025 and 2026 local elections and, in England and Wales, have been the main opposition party in parliamentary by-elections since the 2024 general election.  

One potential implication of this transformation – as yet unstudied – is its impact on economic voting, or the way in which economic performance influences vote choice. Do British voters still consider the Conservatives to be Britain’s ‘official’ party of opposition, or is Reform now the natural beneficiary of support among voters who think the economy is going badly? The answer to this question tells us whether the transformation of British politics is moving beyond headline changes in the polls to deeper shifts in the way that voter assessments of the economy structure their vote choice – a process that is often decisive in British elections (e.g. Sanders 1999; Fieldhouse et al. 2020). It also tells us whether, in turn, the Conservatives can wait for the Labour government to experience further economic gloom to revive their own fortunes, or whether Reform may now be the electoral beneficiaries of continued economic difficulties. With little sign of economic progress domestically and increasingly dire forecasts for the global economy, this issue is firmly in the foreground.  

The question of how economic performance translates into electoral performance has long been of interest to political scientists. Reward-punishment models of economic voting argue that incumbent governments are ‘rewarded’ at the ballot box when the economy is going well, and conversely ‘punished’ when the economy is underperforming (Lewis-Beck & Stegmaier 2000). In a two-party system, the translation of this incumbent punishment into opposition support is simple – the opposition gains when the incumbent loses. However, in a multi-party system, a more complex set of considerations determine which opposition party (or parties) benefit (Anderson 2000; Duch & Stevenson 2008). The continued fragmentation of British politics might thus have consequences for economic voting, especially on the right.  

In this short article, we examine the dynamics of economic voting between 2019 and 2024 and since the 2024 general election, with a focus on the Conservatives and Reform UK.  

Using British Election Study internet panel data, we first show that, whilst voters have strongly punished the Labour government for economic underperformance since 2024, the Conservatives have not been the beneficiary.Instead, the beneficiary has switched to being Reform UK. This does not mean that voters are switching from Labour to Reform on the economy: 2024 Labour voters who think the economy is going badly have abandoned the party in droves, primarily to other parties within the left bloc; and Reform are gaining votes among people (primarily within the right bloc) who also think the economy is going badly. Second, we show that this dynamic is unique in recent electoral history, by comparing the post-2024 period with the dynamics of economic voting observed after the 1997 and 2010 elections. In 1997, the Conservatives were rejected from office by the electoratefollowing an economic crisis over which the Conservative government had presided (the Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis). In the 2010 general election, Labour were replaced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition after presiding over the Global Financial Crisis. Both elections, in different ways, represented an increasingly fragmented landscape (though to a lesser extent than in 2024), but in each, the primary parties being punished or rewarded by the economic vote were still the large two parties: Labour or the Conservatives. By 2026, the right party beneficiary in opposition is now, as things stand, Reform UK.   

The battle for the right: the changing political context 

Labour’s success in the 2024 election, riding a wave of anti-Conservative sentiment and disciplined left-bloc tactical voting (Miori and Green 2024), was short-lived. As shown in Figure 1, which plots vote intention proportions from opinion polls in Great Britain between January 2020 and September 2026, Labour’s popularity declined rapidly after they assumed office in July 2024. Consistent with the idea that electoral choice has become largely structured by party blocs (Griffiths et al. 2025), many of these losses were to parties on the left. Data from the British Election Study reveals that, in May 2026, 39% of 2024 Labour voters reported the intention to vote for another party, and 67% of this group now preferred an alternative party within the left bloc (the Greens, Lib Dems, SNP or Plaid Cymru).1  

Figure 1: Poll-of-polls, Great Britain 2020-2026 

Note: Each point is the vote share for the corresponding party from an individual opinion poll fielded between 10th January 2020 and 11th of September 2026. Polling data taken from Wikipedia, limited to polls in Great Britain (i.e. no UK-wide polls). The 2019 and 2024 general elections are indicated by the grey vertical lines, and the GB-specific vote shares for each party at those elections are plotted. The trend line is derived from a LOESS regression with a span (or smoothing parameter) of 0.2. 

On the other side, in the right-bloc, the Conservatives continued losing votes to the right. According to British Election Study, only 47% of the Conservative’s 2019 voters decided to vote for them again in 2024, and, among those who voted for other parties (excluding non-voters), 56% went to Nigel Farage’s party in the 2024 election. Reform’s poll leads in 2025 and 2026 were buoyed by further Conservative losses after 2024. Data from the British Election Study in May 2026 reveals that only 52% of 2024 Conservative voters continued to support the party. Among those 2024 Conservatives who defected to other parties, 78% now support Reform UK, illustrating the challenge that Reform pose to the Conservatives on the right. Since this BES data was collected in May 2026, Reform’s support in opinion polls has dwindled (as shown in Figure 1), leaving both right parties competing to be the dominant right party in British politics.  

The continuation of vote losses for a main party in opposition – and still Britain’s ‘official opposition’ in the UK Parliament (winning 121 seats in 2024 to Reform UK’s 5) – is very unusual, begging the question of why the Conservatives failed to be a beneficiary of the vote losses of the Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Comparing 2026 data to the period after the 1997 election – the last time a Conservative government was replaced by Labour – illustrates this. Data from the British Election Study 1997-2001 panel reveals that in 1999, two years after the election, 16% of Labour’s 1997 voters had defected to other parties, and 37% of these defectors now supported the Conservatives. In contrast, two years on from the 2024 election, only 10% of Labour defectors supported the Conservatives. In short, fewer of today’s voters are crossing the floor from Labour to the Conservatives than they were 30 years ago, despite Labour facing considerable vote losses since 2024, and the Conservatives, while perhaps expecting to be the natural beneficiaries of Labour’s problems in office, so far appear unable to pick up those losses. Instead, Britain’s bloc politics means that the Conservatives continue to lose support on the right, and this right party, Reform UK, is now competing to be the largest party of opposition.  

The economic context and the economic vote  

The failure of the Conservatives to pick up votes from Labour becomes even more surprising when we consider the weak performance of the British economy since Labour assumed power. Economic growth has been sluggish, with real GDP growth averaging 0.31% per quarter since Q3 2024, when Labour assumed office (ONS 2026a); inflation has risen, from 2.2% in July 2024 to 3.1% in August 2026 (ONS 2026b); and this objective negativity has been mirrored in subjective perceptions of the economy.  

In Figure 2, we use data from BES Internet Panel waves 1-31 (2014 to 2026) to plot the share of respondents at each wave who think the economy has got worse or better over the twelve months before they were surveyed. General elections are indicated by the grey dashed lines. From July 2024 to May 2026, the share of voters who thought the economy declined over the prior 12 months rose from 61% to 81%, whilst the share who thought the economy improved dropped from 19% to 6% over the same period.   

Figure 2: Percentage who think the economy has got better or worse over the past 12 months, 2014-2026 

Note: the y-axis plots the weighted percentage of voters who think the economy has got better over the past 12 months (either ‘Got a lot better’ or ‘Got a little better’) and who think the economy has got worse (either ‘Got a lot worse’ or ‘Got a little worse’) at British Election Study waves 1 (2014) to 31 (2026). General elections during this period are indicated by the grey dashed vertical lines. N = 691,664.  

Traditional models of economic voting predict that under negative or worsening economic conditions – measured either by objective performance indicators or subjective perceptions among voters – the incumbent government loses votes, and opposition parties gain votes. Given the performance of the economy since 2024, we would expect the Conservatives to be gaining votes, but this has not been the case.  

To demonstrate this, we examine the relationship between subjective evaluations of the British economy and vote intention for Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK using BES Internet Panel data from December 2021 (wave 22) to May 2026 (wave 31).2 These subjective evaluations are measured with a question which asks “How do you think the general economic situation in this country has changed over the last 12 months?”, with responses measured on a 5-point scale from ‘Very well’ to ‘Very badly’. We regress vote intention on the interaction of economic evaluations and survey wave indicators (plus controls), allowing us to model overtime changes in economic voting. We include controls for age, gender, education, household income, immigration attitudes and, crucially, party attachment (which we lag by a single wave, using its measurement in the wave before).  

In Figure 3, we plot average marginal effects (AMEs) for this interaction, which represent the change in the predicted probability of supporting either Labour, the Conservatives or Reform that is associated with a one-unit increase in negativity about economic performance at each survey wave (along with 95% confidence intervals). The 2024 general election – the point where the Labour assumed government and the Conservatives moved to the opposition benches – is indicated by the grey dashed line. After Labour assumed office (i.e. in May 2025 and May 2026), voters who thought the economy was getting worse were less likely to support Labour than other parties, consistent with the idea that incumbent governments are punished for economic underperformance (perceived or actual). Specifically, a one-unit increase in economic negativity was associated with an 8-percentage pointdecrease in the probability of voting for Labour at each wave.  

Whilst Labour are being punished, the Conservatives are not being rewarded. In May 2025, one year after leaving office, voters who thought the economy was getting worse were 2-percentage points less likely to support the Conservatives than other parties; and in May 2026, these economic evaluations were unrelated to Conservative support. Instead, it is Reform UK who appear to be benefitting from the economic vote. Up until the 2024 election, the association between economic evaluations and Reform UK support was near-zero – but in May 2025 and May 2026, a one-unit increase in economic negativity was associated with a 6-pp increase in the probability of supporting Reform over other parties.  

Figure 3: Economic evaluations and Conservative, Labour and Reform UK support, 2021-2026 

Note: Model N = 92,000. The figure plots average marginal effects of sociotropic economic evaluations at each survey wave (with 95% confidence intervals) derived from an mlogit model for vote intention. SEs are clustered by individual and survey weights are applied. Model includes controls for age, gender, education, household income, immigration attitudes and lagged strength of party identity.  

Comparing the Economic Vote: 1997 and 2010 

One potential explanation for the Conservatives’ failure to benefit from the economic vote is that, via a series of ‘competence shocks’ when governing from 2019-2024, the Conservatives lost their reputation for effective handling of the economy – and of government in general. The most potent of these shocks were the Conservative’s handling of the pandemic and the subsequent ‘Partygate’ scandal (Green et al. 2025; Larner et al. 2025); and the brief premiership of Liz Truss, whose mini-budget and subsequent bond market revolt shattered the Conservative’s reputation for economic competence (Curtice 2023). Whilst these shocks occurred between two and four years before the 2024 election, reputations for (in)competence are slow to recover after negative shocks (Green & Jennings 2017). The Conservative failure to benefit from the economic vote might therefore be driven by the long-lasting consequences of competence shocks during their previous time in office.  

We can test this explanation by comparing the current post-2024 context with the periods following the 1997 and 2010 elections – the two previous occasions in which a new party assumed office. Both of these historic elections followed highly salient economic competency shocks for the departing incumbent: in 1997, the Conservatives continued to feel the electoral consequences of Britain’s exit from the ERM during Black Wednesday in September 1992 (Sanders 1999); and in 2010, Labour had lost its reputation for economic competence following the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession which followed (Fieldhouse et al. 2020). We would expect to see similar trends post-1997 for the Conservatives and post-2010 for Labour, when these parties exited government in the wake of competency shocks.   

We begin by examining the post-1997 period. Using 6 waves of data from the BES 1997-2001 panel, we examine the relationship between subjective evaluations of the British economy and vote intention for Labour, the Conservatives and other parties (a composite category including the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Greens and other parties) from May 1997 to May 2001. The wording and measurement of the economic evaluation question is identical to that included in the current BES Internet Panel, allowing for direct comparability over time. Using a multinomial logit model, we regress vote intention on the interaction of economic evaluations and indicators for survey waves, along with several control variables (age, gender, education, household income and immigration attitudes), allowing us to test the changing dynamics of this relationship over time.  

In Figure 4, we plot average marginal effects of economic evaluations from this interaction, which describe the change in the predicted probability of supporting either Labour, the Conservatives or other parties associated with a one-unit increase in negativity about economic performance at each wave (along with 95% confidence intervals). The 1997 and 2001 elections are indicated by the grey dashed line.  

The figure shows that, after leaving office, the Conservative economic vote recovered quickly. Only 4-6 months after the election, a one-unit increase in negativity about economic performance under New Labour was associated with a 5pp increase in the probability of supporting the Conservatives over other parties. 1 year on from the election, the magnitude of this association was over twice as large, at 12pp.  

Figure 4: Economic evaluations and vote intention: BES Panel 1997-2001 

Note: Model N = 12,172. The figure plots average marginal effects of sociotropic economic evaluations at each survey wave (with 95% confidence intervals) derived from an mlogit model for vote intention. SEs are clustered by individual and survey weights are applied. Model includes controls for age, gender, education, household income and immigration attitudes.  

These results show that, despite suffering a competency shock in government which limited their success in the 1997 election (Sanders 1999), and facing a much more popular Labour government at the time under Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Conservatives became the beneficiaries of the economic vote soon after leaving office. The period since the 2024 election thus appears to be quite different. To further illustrate this, we examine the trend in economic voting after the 2010 election. In 2010, Labour left office having governed during the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. Whilst responsibility for the crisis was diffuse and transnational, many voters blamed Labour for the economic malaise that followed, driven partly by accusations of mismanagement levelled on them by the Conservatives (Fieldhouse et al. 2020). Examining the trend of economic voting after 2010 thus provides another opportunity to understand the possible long-term consequences of competence shocks for economic voting.  

To do so, we make use of BES Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS) data from 2009 to 2013. Rather than a panel dataset containing repeated observations of the same individuals, the CMS employed a rolling cross-section design which surveyed new respondents every month from May 2009 to April 2013. The CMS again contains the same subjective measure of economic evaluations, asked repeatedly over time, allowing us to model the changing dynamics of the economic vote across this period (and compare to the dynamics observed post-2024). Specifically, we regress vote intention on the interaction of economic evaluations and dummy indicators for survey months, plus controls (age, gender, education, household income and attitudes to the EU).  

In Figure 5 below, we plot average marginal effects of national retrospective economic evaluations on support for Labour and support for other non-governing parties at each month, along with 95% confidence intervals. These points again describe the change in the predicted probability of supporting either Labour or other non-governing parties associated with a one-unit increase in negativity about economic performance at each month. We overlay these points with a smoothed trend line which illustrates the underlying trend in the relationship between economic evaluations and party support, independent of month-to-month sampling variation. The May 2010 general election is indicated by the grey dashed vertical line.  

The figure shows that, within 3 months of the election, voters who thought the economy was getting worse under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government were more likely to support Labour than other parties, and the magnitude of this association quickly exceeded that for voting for other parties (from November 2010 onwards, a one-unit increase in negativity about the economy was associated with a 15-20pp increase in the probability of supporting Labour). As with 1997, the main party in opposition (this time Labour) began to benefit from the ‘economic vote’ almost immediately after losing power, despite suffering a severe shock to their reputation for economic competence when last in government.  

Figure 5: Economic evaluations and vote intention: BES Continuous Monitoring Survey 2009-2013.  

Note: Model N = 25,724. The figure plots average marginal effects of sociotropic economic evaluations at each survey month (with 95% confidence intervals), derived from linear probability models for Labour voting and challenger voting. Trend line is derived from a LOESS regression (using a smoothing parameter of 0.3). Survey weights are applied. April 2013 is excluded from the plot due to low N (only 64 observations). Model includes controls for age, gender, education, household income and attitudes to the EU. 

One possibility we cannot rule out is whether the economic performance of the Conservatives between 2019 and 2024 (and in particular, between 2022 and 2024) was so bad that it has somehow broken the economic ‘reward’ the Conservatives may be expected to enjoy following the 2024 election in a way that was not true in 1997 or 2010. The 1997 general election was five years after the ERM crisis, while in 2010 the blame and handling of the global financial crisis may not have been as targeted on Labour as much as it was towards the Conservatives under Liz Truss. These are possibilities, but the distinctive finding in Figure 3 is not just the absence of the economic vote for the Conservatives by 2026, but the strong presence of the economic vote associated with support for Reform UK. This transmission has not occurred before; in all other cases the benefit to other parties has been much smaller in magnitude than to the official opposition (the Conservatives post-1997 and Labour post-2010). There is, then, strong evidence that the economic vote has begun to benefit a different party on the right in British politics, in the absence of a benefit to the Conservatives. 

Conclusions  

The transformation of British electoral politics continues apace. One apparent consequence of this transformation is the failure of the Conservatives – at time of writing – to benefit from the economic vote, with Reform UK instead benefitting from the perceived underperformance of the economy under the Labour government. This trend – which contrasts with the patterns observed after the 1997 and 2010 general elections – highlights that the political shifts witnessed since 2024 go beyond headline changes in the polls. Instead, the electoral consequences of economic evaluations – which for many years have meant reward for the official opposition when voters feel negative about the economy – now appear to be benefitting Reform UK.  

This brings us to consider why we are witnessing a new party on the right as the beneficiary of the economic vote, post 2024. Is it simply that, within the right bloc, Reform UK are now more trusted on the economy? Descriptive evidence suggests that this is unlikely to be the key factor. BES data from May 2026 shows that among right bloc voters (those who voted for either the Conservatives or Reform in the 2024 general election), 50% think that the Conservatives would handle the economy well if in government, whereas only 40% think that Reform would handle the economy well. Another possibility is that Reform UK, by virtue of their national opinion polling, profile, and success in consecutive local elections, have replaced the Conservatives among many voters as their local and national viable opposition party on the right. Duch & Stevenson (2008) argue that, in a multiparty system, parties deemed more viable by voters will benefit more from the economic vote. Finally, we note some potential path dependency in the implications of these findings for British politics. If, under these patterns, the economy continues to suffer a negative economic outlook, or fails to improve significantly (both of which look very likely to be true), it may be harder for the Conservative party to mount a recovery, and easier for Reform UK to do so, making this ‘viability battle’ even harder for the Conservatives. Even if the economic vote becomes somewhat more important for the Conservatives over time, perhaps as voters again consider the Conservatives as a stronger performer in opposition, it appears likely that any benefit will be, at the very least, shared with Reform UK. 

Finally, it is notable that the economic vote has been a major problem for the Labour government and, while we write this in a period when the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is enjoying a small boost of support in the polls, the headwinds he faces are significant. As the economic outlook continues to be challenging, those headwinds do not just concern policy-manoeuvrability and the ability to achieve ‘growth in every postcode’, but reflect the very real possibility that Labour will suffer an electoral penalty for continued economic problems from which Reform UK look set to benefit.