It’s all starting to feel a bit 2019 again…
For a brief period in 2019, it did seem as though the establishment parties under May and Corbyn would be swept away by Farage. The EU elections of that year, in which the Conservatives were pushed to fifth place and Labour into third, seemed to cement this wisdom. Of course, this did not actually happen – if a week is a long time in politics, seven months is an epoch.
Nevertheless, Farage is having a third go at painting the map teal. Undoubtedly, the political climate is more suited to a Reform success than it has been in the past. Reform UK won five seats in the 2024 election, four more than UKIP managed in 2015. Any insurgent party relies on public attention, and the sheer volume of coverage both on social media and traditional print is only good for Reform’s electoral prospects. However, Reform UK still has an uphill battle. To act as though the current opinion poll lead will last will spell disappointment for the party.
When looking at opinion polling, it is important to be mindful that most voters make decisions at elections based on far more than how they answer polling questions. Whereas an election is a chance to weigh up a government’s record in office, polling decisions are more prone to deviations based on the news cycle. Recent coverage has increased the salience of issues Reform can stake a claim on. If it focused on healthcare or defence policy rather than immigration, perhaps we would see a Labour or Conservative lead instead. UKIP always performed better at European elections than at any other level of government for similar reasons. These elections gave more importance to European issues, something UKIP could capitalise on in a way they couldn’t in Parliament or local elections. This isn’t to say that if an election were to be held today Reform wouldn’t improve, merely that opinion polling figures must be caveated.
The second challenge facing Reform is to actually gain seats. An opinion poll can be thought of as an election for a single, UK-wide constituency. A general election, though, is six hundred and fifty individual elections. For Reform to improve their seat total, they must win a plurality in more than five of these individual contests.
The seats that Reform placed second in are concentrated in northern England – areas like Tyne and Wear and Merseyside. However, it would be a mistake to think Reform could feasibly win most of these. Take Newcastle-upon-Tyne East and Wallsend. Reform UK placed second, but this hides the sheer disparity in vote share–a full thirty percentage points separates Labour from Reform.
The explanation for Reform in second place in areas like these is cultural. The urban areas of northern England are not necessarily more left-leaning than other cities – rather, the history of the area has left a cultural bar to voting Conservative even when the voter agrees with the party. Thus, a second right-wing party can easily claim second place from the Conservatives, while still remaining far below Labour.
The result is a map that looks ripe for opportunity for Reform but disguises the true potential. The margin between Reform and Labour was less than five thousand votes in just twenty constituencies. To take Conservative-held seats is, on the face of it, even harder. The 23.7% vote share for the party in 2024 is the worst in its history–it consists almost entirely of voters who would not countenance supporting any other party. Any seat with enough Conservative voters to sustain it through that result will be tough to bring into Reform’s control.
The most viable path to more seats, therefore, is to leapfrog straight from third (or lower) to first place by appealing to a mixture of voters. This is how Reform won the five seats they did in 2024 (including taking Boston and Skegness, the second-safest Conservative seat). Hence, this is not an impossible task. A separate, distinct pattern in the 2024 election, though, was the willingness of voters to vote tactically, and their ability to do it well. The undeniable feeling of most of the electorate heading into 2024 was a simple mantra of “get the Tories out.” Labour, Liberal Democrats, Green: voters were willing to support all of these parties in incumbent Conservative seats to change who represented them. By and large, voters could identify which party had the best chance of winning. In Waveney Valley, whose predecessors were represented by Conservatives, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats lost votes, whereas the Greens soared to first place with a 32% vote share increase. The same can be seen across most other Conservative seats; voters were good at spotting who to vote for to get the Tories out.
Nigel Farage, while not in power, is most definitely a Marmite figure. During the Brexit campaign, support for leave tended to fall when UKIP’s polling numbers rose. It is not entirely impossible that, much in the same way voters held their noses to dislodge Conservative incumbents, voters in Reform-target seats decide to back the party most likely to beat Reform – potentially even by voting Conservative. That is, however, if Kemi Badenoch does enough to distance the party from the 2019-24 government.
The two challenges outlined face every party that starts from behind when trying to take power. However, Reform must also contend with an endogenous issue of its own: the leader. Any political party that wants to improve its electoral outcomes needs a leader capable of unifying a party across all its factions. Farage has been unwilling to share the limelight throughout his career and has acted ruthlessly against those questioning his decisions. Does anyone remember that it wasn’t actually Farage who founded the Brexit Party, but a woman named Catherine Blaiklock? After standing down in favour of Farage, she was iced out of the party and quickly blacklisted before the 2019 election. The same occurred to Ben Habib. He too was replaced by a Farage loyalist following the 2024 election and has since left the party. For a party to win over different groups of voters, it has to be more than a single figure. If Farage is unwilling to do this, his supporters will constitute the vast majority of Reform voters, with others unlikely to support the party.
There is a universe where Reform could overtake either of the two main parties in 2029. Missteps by established parties do happen, and voter opinion can change a lot in a single parliament. Lloyd George did not expect the Labour Party to overtake the Liberals in 1922. Yet, the challenges that face Reform are numerous, and to divine the 2029 result from opinion polls this year is a mistake. Although Reform do have some reasons to be cheerful, cheer does not change the cold, hard facts. The corpses of two insurgent populist parties who once led in opinion polls loom large.