Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called the next UK general election for July 4, 2024.
After 14 years of Conservative government, Keir Starmer’s Labor Party has been consistently ahead in the polls since the start of 2022.
The Guardian is monitoring the latest polling averages, coming from all the major British polling companies, leading up to election day.
Current voting intention
Average searches over a 10-day rolling period, showing GB voting intent
Voting intention over time
Latest average of all polls over a 10-day rolling period, showing Britain’s voting intention
The Scottish National Party (SNP) is not included in the data the Guardian uses in the chart above. In polls across Britain, the SNP vote sits at between 2% and 4% of the national vote share. But its geographic concentration in Scotland means it will win many more seats than other small parties with a similar national vote share, such as the Greens. Polls targeting Scotland alone give a much better indication of how well the country will do in the upcoming election than the national polls above.
Polls only go so far in predicting who will win in the UK electoral system. What matters is the number of seats each party wins in parliament, which is decided by individual elections in 650 constituencies.
What the latest polls could mean for parliament
Election calculation seat projections
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Seat predictions differ, but the one shown above is from pollster Electoral Calculus. It carries out its own surveys, in which it also collects demographic data from the people it interviews.
This data is fed into a mathematical model, called a multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) model, with the aim of estimating the link between characteristics such as age, gender and the area where a person lives and which party they will vote for.
Combining this with data about what types of people live in different UK constituencies, Electoral Calculation predicts which party will come first in each constituency.
How accurate are the seat projections?
In the British “first-past-the-post” system, poll numbers do not clearly correlate with seats because this depends on the location of votes. Describing general poll seat projections as a “loose standard”, Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said: “Labour could get a 15-point lead and not have a majority, a 10-point lead and have a majority. It depends on where those votes are.”
If the election is close, polls become less predictive of the outcome. Other limitations of projecting seat counts from national polls include the fact that the Lib Dem’s seat count is difficult to infer from national polls because, although their national support is much lower than that of the two main parties, in certain constituencies they have a significant presence. National polls are also not very informative about what will happen in Scotland, and polls there are less frequent.
Notes on the data
The chart shows a 10-day moving average for each party’s support based on polls conducted across Britain. This excludes Northern Ireland, which has different political parties. On a given day, the Guardian calculates each party’s average support in any poll published in the previous 10 days. Only polling companies that are members of the British Polling Council are included.
Seat projections are obtained monthly from Electoral Calculation, which applies a model to polling and demographic data to estimate the number of seats each party could win. They update this projection monthly.
Illustrations by Sam Kerr. Additional research by Gabriel Smith, Emma Russell and Lily Smith.
