Patrick English

Thank you for the share, Laura! And for doing all the excellent research that I got to lean on!

Thank you so much for the share and the kind words, Tim! 🙏

Reform and young people in the context of votes at 16 Anecdotes may claim rising support for the right among the British youth, but is that so?

🚨🔔 NEW, from me!

I’ve taken some time to review the evidence and try to give answers on…

🤔 Are Reform popular with young voters?
🌹 How much ground have Labour with the British youth?
⬇️ Who will benefit most from ‘Votes at 16’, Starmer or Farage?

patrickenglish.substack.com/p/reform-and...

This article is very strong on the potential polling and electoral consequences of lowering the voting age to 16.

Parties of the left are absolutely dominant among young voters. Labour are most popular. We hear a lot about “young people and Reform” but it’s only a really small minority, in reality.

Hi Mark sorry for taking ages to get around to this.

Yes, the Scottish sample would have been about six times what we get in a normal GB poll.

We have actually combined the England and Wales and Scotland model back into one (for now), given we can harmonise census data, now

First @yougov.co.uk‬ MRP since 2024 election shows a hung parliament with Reform UK as largest party.
(‪@patrick-pme.bsky.social‬)
More, via Opinion Today:
opiniontoday.substack.com/p/250626

🚨NEW 🚨 @YouGov have released our first MRP since #GE2024

If an election were being held right now...

➡️ Reform would be the largest party in a hung parliament
🌹Labour would be reduced to 176 seats
🌳Tories would become 4th party
⏫ Gains for Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid, and Greens

Political volatility has been taking us by surprise for a while now. Here’s little exercise to illustrate. Rewind two years and take a look at where the polls were, what people expected, and what they failed to anticipate. You have to go back a while before politics is predictable even 2 yrs out 1/

Winter fuel payments are set to be restored to all pensioners with an income of £35,000 or less

Our poll found a plurality of Britons wanted to see more pensioners be eligible for WFPs (44%) rather than a return to all pensioners getting it (33%)

yougov.co.uk/topics/polit...

What is happening between Musk and Trump is of course dominating the headlines.

But the ongoing struggles that Reform are having keeping their own band together is worth tracking.

Reform Chair Zia Yusuf quit today in the third acrimonious party ‘falling out’ in 8 months.

Yes: Reform are leading the polls

Yes: Farage is popular among many voters

Yes: Reform did very well in the local elections

Also yes: Farage is a hugely divisive figure, and will unite voter coalitions *against* him, as well as for

He does not win a single @yougov.co.uk Best PM matchup 👇

Getting to know 'Reform curious Labour voters' exploring the attitudes, demography and values of Reform curious Labour voters and the coalitional dilemmas they lose

NEW: Who are the voters Labour risks losing to Reform?

How might Lab unite them with the rest of its election winning coalition? How might Reform win them over?

Some big new research out today with @persuasionuk.bsky.social as featured by @greenmirandahere.bsky.social in today's FT 🧵👇

Hard to express just how close the Liberals came to winning a majority.

This *one vote win* on the recount flips another seat into their column.

Liberals now *two seats* short of a majority.

They could get as close as *one seat* if the recount in Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore turns it their way.

This chart is from @britishelectionstudy.com @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social, me and Ed Fieldhouse. You can see that 2024 Reform voters mainly came from the Conservatives or UKIP in 2015.

This has been a story on the right for *ten years* now, unless something very different happened last week.

Thank you, Mark!

Ha ha! Thank you, Andy!

Thank you, Carlos!

A reminder of the final @yougov.co.uk MRP projection of the Australian federal election.

We expected an increased Labor majority, while other models pointed to a hung parliament.

But Labor are outperforming even our expectations at the minute.

Here's another.

This graph shows the relationship between estimated 2016 Leave share and party performance from 2021-25.

There's no real relationship for any party *apart* from Reform UK, where we see a pretty clear uptick in Reform share increase as estimated Leave goes up.

An illustration of how FPP goes from sandbag to springboard - Reform votes and seats in different councils:

Oxfordshire: 18% vote, 2% seats
Cambridgeshire: 23% vote, 16% seats
Devon: 27% vote, 30% seats
Leicestershire: 33% vote, 46% seats
Derbyshire: 37% vote, 66% seats

As you have just heard from Laura on the BBC elections coverage, we are now proejcting that the Conservatives will win the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority mayoral position, taking it from Labour.

We await the final numbers from Cambridge to confirm.

This is what we mean when we say it’s actually difficult for Labour to have a ‘really bad night’ tonight, by usual standards.

They’re defending about 1/3 of the seats that the Conservatives are.

Mayoral contests (esp. WoE and Cambs) offer more obvious areas of political pain for the government.

Another solid performance for the YouGov MRP in Canada. The central estimates were a little high for the Liberals and a little low for the Conservatives - but the result was within the distribution of modelled outcomes.

Interestingly, the vote share of both parties was slightly under-estimated.

What *is* more impactful are systematic and inaccurate self-reported turnout propensity gaps across current vote intention groups. Which sort of speaks to your Reform-Lib Dem question there. But it’s very hard to identify those pre-hoc (pretty easy post-hoc, though).

We treat everything as linear in turnout models for these sorts of elections, simply because they are so difficult to produce turnout models for! The difference between being even an 8, 9, or 10 on the self reported scale (and how you model them) and the aggregate outcome is very minimal.

😅😅 in classic timing I went and got my hair cut about a week after this was taken

We at @yougov.co.uk have released our projection of the 2025 Canadian election. 🇨🇦🍁🗳️

Our central expectation is that the Liberals win a majority.

Overall vote share looks close: our median projection is 42% for the Liberals, 39% for the Conservatives.

The NDP look set for their worst ever result.

Canada’s 2025 federal election could be one of the first in a new era of global instability and uncertainty where it *pays* to be the incumbent, after a 2024 which saw incumbents get *trashed* in elections worldwide.

But: many of the economic problems which led to those 2024 routs remain.

Excellent stuff as ever, David and co!

The Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre want this election to be about domestic issues, such as housing and inflation.

But it just isn't. It's about foreign affairs and security. It's about Canada itself.

That creates an advantage for the incumbents; for Carney and the Liberals.