Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced that the next UK general election will be held on 4 July 2024.
After 14 years of Conservative government, Keir Starmer’s Labour party has consistently led in the opinion polls since the start of 2022.
The Guardian is tracking the latest polling averages from all the major UK pollsters in the run up to election day.
Current voting intentions
Average of polls over a 10-day rolling period, showing UK voting intentions
Changes in voting intentions
Latest average of all polls over 10 days, showing UK voting intentions
The Scottish National Party (SNP) is not included in the data used by The Guardian for the graph above. UK-wide polls place the SNP’s vote share at between 2% and 4% of the national vote share. However, their geographic concentration in Scotland means they will win more seats than other smaller parties with a similar national vote share, such as the Green Party. Scottish-only polls give a much more accurate picture of how the SNP will perform in the next election than the national polls above.
In Britain’s single-member constituency system, opinion polls are limited in their ability to predict who will win: what matters is how many seats each party gets in Parliament, which is decided by individual elections in 650 constituencies.
What the latest polls mean for Congress
Seat predictions based on election calculations
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Seat projections vary, but the one shown above is from Electoral Calculus, a polling company that conducts its own polls and also collects demographic data from those surveyed.
This data is then fed into a mathematical model known as a multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) model, with the aim of estimating the association between characteristics such as age, gender and region of residence and which party people vote for.
By comparing this with data about who lives in different constituencies in the UK, Electoral Calculus can predict which party will come out on top in each constituency.
How accurate are the seating predictions?
In Britain’s single-seat constituency system, poll numbers don’t always match the number of seats because they depend on where the votes are concentrated. Rob Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, described seat predictions from public polls as a “rough rule of thumb,” saying, “Labour might have a 15-point lead and not get a majority, or a 10-point lead and get a majority. It depends on where the votes are concentrated.”
When elections are close, polls become less predictive of the outcome. Other limitations of predicting seat numbers from national polls include the fact that it is difficult to infer how many seats the Liberal Democrats will have from national polls; while their national support is much lower than the two major parties, they have a large presence in certain constituencies. Also, national polls are less useful for what will happen in Scotland, and polls there are more rare.
Notes on data
This chart shows the 10-day average trend of support for each party based on polls across the UK, but not Northern Ireland, where the parties are separate. On any given day, the Guardian calculates the average support for each party from all polls published in the past 10 days. Only pollsters that are members of the British Public Opinion Council are included.
Seat projections are obtained monthly from Electoral Calculus, which applies models to polling and demographic data to predict how many seats each party is likely to win. The projections are updated monthly.
Illustrations by Sam Carr. Additional research by Gabrielle Smith, Emma Russell and Lily Smith.
