The standout feature from Reform’s performance in the polls is not how many votes they are winning from the Conservatives and Labour, but how many they are gaining from non-voters. Whether or not these voters actually turn out will shape the next election – a ?
2024 nonvoters are having a big impact on voting intention polls at the moment – if we remove all of them from our headline voting intention, Reform's vote share falls from 31% to 26%, significantly shrinking their lead over Labour
It's reasonable to doubt whether those who didn’t vote in 2024 will turn out in 2029 – In our polling we ask everyone to rate their likelihood of voting out of ten, and include people if they set their likelihood at 8+, but increase this threshold to 9+ for 2024 nonvoters.
Therefore, it’s important to remember that when we talk about “Did not vote to Reform switchers” we are only talking about those who say they are *very* likely to vote (9/10 or 10/10. And it is this group that Reform has been able to capitalise on so effectively.
Still, you can't necessarily take people’s word for it when they say they are likely to vote. But Reform's local election performance is best explained by habitual nonvoters turning out in large numbers – suggesting that these high likelihood to vote scores might be real.
Similarly, recent performance of populist-right parties have been driven by attracting non habitual voters – see e.g. the AfD in Germany who won 2 million votes from nonvoters this year, or Trump who did particularly well with bringing non-voters to the ballot box.
The other factor that makes us more confident that these likely Reform voters would turn out in an election is that many of them have done so before – in 2019 37% of Reform's 2024 nonvoters also did not vote, but 45% of them say they voted for Boris Johnson's Conservatives.
So this group are definitely habitual voters rather than reliable voters (for example 47% of them say they tend not to vote in Local Elections, compared to just 7% of all other Reform voters), but that doesn't mean they never vote…
and all evidence points to the fact that, were an election held today at least, these non-voter to Reform switchers are real group, are likely to vote, and ought to be taken seriously
There are two consistent themes to the polls for as long as I have been following them is that the polls overestimate how many people will actually vote in UK general election and that non-voters do not turn out to vote in the levels they say they will. The only two times in UK elections when that has hasn’t been the case has been the Scottish independence referendum and the Brexit referendum.
So my initial thought was to think Reform’s current lead is 2% over Labour rather than the 9% lead in the headline voting intention however Ed Hodgson has provided compelling reasons why this time these non-voters will actually turn out in 2029 but if I had to bet on it, if there were an election tomorrow Reform’s lead would be closer to 2% than the 9%.