How will Britons vote in the next election?

COUNTRIES THAT are home to more than 4bn people will hold elections in 2024. Britain is almost certain to be among them; its general election must be called no later than December 17th (which would mean the actual vote happens in January 2025). As exercises in mass democracy go, Britain’s 47m eligible voters pale in comparison with the enormous electorates in America (160m eligible voters) and India (950m). But its outcome looks likely to be consequential. The electoral pendulum swings slowly in Britain: the Conservatives have been in office for 13 consecutive years, and Labour had been in government for the same amount of time before them. The next election looks likely to result in another transfer of power.

That, at least, is what Britons tell pollsters. In an effort to get under the hood of voting behaviour, The Economist has created its own poll tracker of voting intentions. Polling firms regularly ask representative samples of Britons how they would vote if a general election were held “tomorrow”. We use statistical methods to adjust for differences between the firms’ sampling methods, to produce a single composite average that will be updated weekly until polling day. Our tracker also breaks voters down several demographic variables, including their age, region and choice on Brexit.

The tracker shows that the Labour Party has a poll lead over the Tories of around 20 percentage points (see chart 1). That is the largest gap one year before an election since Labour’s landslide victory under Sir Tony Blair in 1997. Converting national polls to seats in Parliament is not straightforward in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. But using uniform national swing—which assumes that changes in vote share are constant across constituencies and has historically been a reasonable approximation of the final result—suggests that the Conservatives could lose nearly three-quarters of their seats at the next election. Can the polls be trusted?

Pollsters have come under a lot of scrutiny in recent years. In the 2015 election they understated support for the Tories under David Cameron; in 2017 they underestimated support for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Samples can be biased by the fact that people who respond to surveys tend to be unusually interested in politics. People who say they will vote don’t always do so on the day. Tactical voting behaviour tends not to become clearer until the campaign is under way. Complicating matters further, the next election will be fought on new boundaries, redrawn for the first time since 2010.

Rather than looking at small fluctuations in the polls, Jane Green, a professor of politics at the University of Oxford, thinks it makes more sense to focus on the “direction of travel and the trend”. Looked at in this way, the polls do not look at all good for the Conservatives. Just two-thirds of Tory voters at the 2019 election say they would vote for the party again. Back then the question of Brexit energised Britons to the benefit of the Conservatives: the Tories captured four-fifths of Leave voters. The polls suggest that under half of those voters would vote for them now (see chart 2). The travails of the Scottish National Party, which currently trails Labour north of the border, also make it easier for Sir Keir Starmer to chart a path to Downing Street.

Age is Britain’s biggest electoral divide. Fully 55% of voters aged between 18 and 34 say they will vote Labour; just 17% say they will vote Conservative. At the other end of the age spectrum 29% of people aged 65 and over say they will vote Labour; 40% say they will vote Tory (see chart 3).

Other parties besides Labour are circling the Tory vote. Support for Reform UK (a right-wing outfit that was previously called the Brexit Party) has risen over the past three months from 7% to 10%. The Liberal Democrats, who were nearly wiped out at the 2015 election, are polling at 11% nationally and at 14% in London and south of England.

The Conservatives should not be written off. There is still plenty of time for Sir Keir and Labour to screw up. Professor Green thinks that polls will tighten once the campaign is under way, not least because some Tory voters from 2019 who currently say they are undecided are likely to return to the party fold. Inflation is now well past its peak (though it is not clear that people will feel a lot better off in 2024). But the Tories have an enormous mountain to climb.

Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, does have the advantage of being able to call the election before the required date if he wishes. Sir John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, thinks that just one thing will determine when the vote is held: whether Mr Sunak, who took the job in October 2022, wants to be prime minister for 18 months or two years. “Unless the job has become completely awful, he will want to remain for the longer period.”■