YouGov surveyed 706 Labour members about Starmer’s performance as PM and his potential challengers. Wes Streeting in a speech today to the House of Commons on his resignation talked about his "rebellious hope". On the basis of the survey he has no hope. * Most Labour members think
Britain’s unwritten constitution assumes the incumbent Prime Minister gets the first chance to form a government. But what happens if that Prime Minister has been personally ejected by voters in their constituency?
According to a survey of 4,560 children aged 13 - 16, across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland conducted by Survation for the BBC, teenagers think 'to feel good about what you do' was the most important thing about any future job. 'happiness' was second,
Our latest default model projection based on current national polling shows that if a general election was held today, Reform would be the biggest party on 226 seats, 100 seats short of a majority. To put Nigel Farage in Downing Street they would require a coalition with the Conservatives -
Writing in the New Statesman Ben Walker speculates that Labour could lose nearly 2,000 seats out of some 2,500 they are defending. This seems catastrophic for Labour and would see the Greens gain almost a 1,000 councillors with Reform expected to take another 1,000 from Labour
Karl Turner, the long-serving Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull East (first elected in 2010 and a local born-and-bred Hull man), is already in open conflict with the Labour leadership. As of today (31 March 2026), he has had the Labour whip suspended after repeated public criticism of Starmer’s
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," argued Benjamin Franklin, despite his wise advice time after time surveys show that on civil liberties questions the general public prefer security over liberty. The Survation Policy Intelligence Unit (SPIU)
The British public's optimism on the economy has reached a level lower than was seen after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. According to the Ipsos Economic Optimism Index, in March 2026, the net economic optimism index stood at -66. This figure is even less optimistic than the -64
Since the first strikes were launched by the US and Israel on Iran, public scepticism and reluctance towards the UK’s involvement in the war has grown steadily. In recent polling by Survation, nearly half of respondents (49%) want to remain neutral with a focus on protecting British interests. A
The University of Liverpool's Dr David Jeffrey thinks "this is because Kemi's boost in net favourability is not down to people liking her more, but rather fewer people disliking her - and you don't win over voters in opposition by indifference." Dr
Keir Starmer’s approval ratings keep getting worse. In a recent poll by YouGov, 73% of respondents said he was performing “Badly” in office. Meanwhile, Opinium reported that Starmer's net approval rates have dropped to a record low of -49 %, lower than the record low rankings of Boris
The latest Opinium poll is the first poll in 3 weeks to show Reform back at or above 30%. Most recent polls show that voter intentions in favour of Reform peaked in November and have been in a slow decline since the beginning of the year, currently translating on our
By-Election
The eve-of-poll Opinium constituency poll makes it a three way race with the Greens winning within the margin of error. Which means no-one really knows until the votes are counted. This analysis last night from the Mail on Sunday's Dan Hodges covers all bases: We will know soon
By-Election
Full Fact reported last week that "an advert shared by the Labour Party features energy secretary Ed Miliband claiming that the “real polling” shows that the upcoming by-election in Gorton and Denton is a “fight between Labour and Reform”. It also includes a bar chart, which shows Reform UK
projections
As we work on updating the database, dealing with edge cases and debugging the algorithm's outputs we're are now confident that our two basic models are working as expected. At this stage of the election cycle we are running two models - a conventional uniform national
We have had a long hiatus since the last general election, basically taking 2025 off. We're coming back for a new electoral cycle anticipating a more complex psephological landscape. Currently we're doing a lot of technical work, data hygiene, candidate uploading and bug fixing. So some
WeThink
Yesterday we looked at how well, or rather how badly, we did with the difficult to predict "wildcard" seat micro-forecasts we made for the general election last month. Today we will look at how all the pollsters did in comparison with their macro-forecasts. It is fair to say
projections
It is now a month after the election and after a break from the frenzy that was, it seems like a good time to reflect on how we did and what we learnt. This is the first of two posts and we are going to get the bad news out
We have overlaid on the standard uniform national swing model a tactical voting adjustment. In seats where the Tories are projected to win this gives a 3 point boost at the expense of the third placed party to the second placed party. The 3 point boost is our guestimate of
Algorithm
A month ago we identified five wildcard candidates - Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Faiza Shaheen, Lee Anderson and George Galloway - where applying the uniform national swing didn't make sense because of the particular local circumstances. The model generated obviously nonsensical results for these candidates in their constituencies
Conservative Party
It will probably be worth all the polling companies who conduct MRP (all listed helpfully here by Peter Ingelsby) coming together to do a post mortem after the event to diagnose the cause of the large spread / range of forecasts. This is separate, but related to the range of vote
Survation
Following the release of constituency polling carried out by Survation we have incorporated the findings into our database and created exceptions for Clacton and Islington North that the algorithm will use as a new baseline. Effectively we are now applying changes to the national polling rolling average to the results
The Multilevel Regression with Post-stratification (MRP) model is nowadays seen as the gold standard method in modern political forecasting. It typically uses large national samples, analysing data on a constituency-by-constituency basis, the MRP poll predicts specific electoral seat outcomes, indicating which candidates are likely to win or lose. It can
Expert Panel
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