Blog/Polling

The headlines

• Labour’s lead over the Conservatives has climbed to 22 points in our tracking poll, the largest of the campaign so far and up four points on last week's lead.
• Rishi Sunak’s party has seen a drop of 3 points since last week, falling to just 21% nationally.
• Reform UK continues to climb and now sits at 16%, up one on last week.

Points of interest

• The share of Conservative 2019 voters switching to Reform has climbed four points to 27% this week. Rishi Sunak's party is now retaining fewer than half of their voters from the last election.
• Rishi Sunak's net approval rating has reached a new low of -37, down 11 points on the start of the campaign, while Keir Starmer (+1) continues to hover around the breakeven mark.
• Keir Starmer’s lead over Rishi Sunak on the best PM question is now 20 points (53–33%), up six since last week.
• Immigration ranks a distant third in our top issues question (with 42% selecting it as a top issue), well behind the economy / cost of living (72%) and the NHS / health (70%). The figure is unchanged on two weeks ago, suggesting that it's more than just immigration behind Reform's steady rise in the polls. Crime and housing (both 31%) round out the top five issues.
• With Euro 2024 starting, England manager Gareth Southgate is effectively tied with Rishi Sunak 34–33% in a question of who would make the best Prime Minister, but loses 29–38% against Keir Starmer.

Methodological note

Poll was conducted 14–17 June 2024, with a sample size of 2,604 respondents. Responses were weighted by age, gender, region, education and ethnicity. A ‘squeeze’ question was asked to respondents who initially said they did not know who they would vote for. Squeeze respondents who said they would not vote were then removed from the sample, with others allocated to their chosen party.

Turnout was predicted using a turnout model, which uses British Election Study data to estimate a respondent’s likelihood of voting based on their demographics and how they responded to questions on attitudes towards voting. A manual override was also applied, with those who say they are 0/10 likely to vote automatically assigned a 0% likelihood of voting.

While we finalise research pertaining to false recall of 2019 general election vote, we have chosen not to currently weight by recalled past vote. Given how many voters have switched party since 2019, we expect there to be a higher likelihood of false recall, which could skew our results. Furthermore, given the age divides in each party’s electorate, there is a significant disparity in expected mortality levels for 2019 voters of the two major parties. Weighting recalled vote based on the exact vote share of the last general election would not account for this fact. Any future past vote weight for this tracker will attempt to account for false recall and the number of 2019 voters of each party still in the electorate.

Data tables

Data tables are available here.

Image of Rishi Sunak