Post

🚨New Research 🚨 Ahead of the release of Wave 30 of the BES Internet Panel, the team has examined Labour's decline since the 2024 GE. Labour's support has splintered into mostly indecision or left-liberal parties, but they've also lost their few right-wing voters. 🧵⬇️ tinyurl.com/3m62exph

Labour's decline in support is remarkable. Support for Labour has fallen more sharply after this election than it has for any other winning party covered by the BESIP (though the timings between waves are not identical).

Labour's support has splintered. Over 1 in 5 of their 2024 voters are now undecided. Labour could win these back, but there is a risk. The Conservatives lost a similar amount to indecision after the last 3 elections, and they won most back in 2017 and 2019 (but not 2024).

Labour's next biggest losses are to left-liberal parties (Liberal Democrats and Greens). Reform's growth in support has mostly come from the Conservatives and non-voting (much less from Labour). These reflect patterns of party-bloc voting that we saw in the 2024 UK GE: tinyurl.com/y5pv7thw

Labour also faces more direct competition from left-liberal parties for the voters that they've lost to indecision. These Lab -> undecided voters like the Liberal Democrats, Greens, and Plaid Cymru a lot more than they like Reform UK and the Conservatives. So, these party blocs matter.

Labour's strategy since the election seems designed to appeal to right-conservative voters. This strategy hasn't worked on its own terms because they have lost the (very few) right-wing voters that they had, while also losing (much) larger numbers of left-wing voters.

Labour's slump is significant. Labour’s vote has splintered between indecision and other left-liberal parties, with its rightward shift yielding little gain. Labour's main competition for their 2024 voters are other left-liberal parties. They have time to win them back, but a tough path to do it

Labour's only gain from DK/NV is flimsy at best: unlikely this group will be inspired to vote for an incumbent party; those who plan to support Reform will be more motivated to actually vote.

Why do you conflate left and liberal? This isn't the USA. Liberal parties haven't won an election here for over a century.

We use those terms because voters think of parties like that! If we look at immigration as a proxy for liberal/authoritarian and redistribution as a proxy for left-right, then voters do split parties into a "left AND liberal" bloc and a "right AND conservative" bloc!

They don’t appear to actually want to *do the things* to win those voters back.

labourlist.org/2025/05/labo...