Why Labour needs to win voters from the right

Welcome to the Hold Sway blog. I’m going to use it to share some points of view on polling, politics and campaigns, hopefully giving interested readers an insight into what the polls are telling us about the world, why certain political developments are happening, and more broadly what it’s like to work in campaigns and politics. I’ve been working in private political polling for 12 years, in Britain and abroad, and have ended general election campaigns on both the winning (e.g. UK Labour 2024, Greek New Democracy 2023) and losing (e.g. UK Labour 2015) sides.

I want to start with a topic that has provoked a lot of centre-left political debate since Labour came to power in 2024: its target voters. This just means the group of people the party is trying to win over with its policies and messaging. It’s often suggested that a) Labour is seeking to appease Reform voters while ignoring its own base, and b) that it should instead try to unite a progressive bloc of voters currently split between itself, the Greens, Lib Dems and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. While I don’t think it’s strictly accurate that Labour’s main target is Reform voters, my main issue with this argument is that a progressive-voter strategy is set up to fail. This post aims to explain why.

Labour’s dilemma

As was widely reported in the lead-up to the 2024 general election, Labour had a strategy of targeting what were labelled “hero voters” – people who had voted Conservative in 2019 but could be persuaded to pick Labour in 2024.

At the election, Labour won 411 seats with 34% of the UK-wide vote. Winning so many seats on the lowest winning vote share in modern history is a curious triumph, borne both of good fortune (the rise of Reform UK splitting the right wing vote) and good targeting: hero voters are distributed very efficiently across seats.

Since the election, Labour’s share in the average poll of Great Britain has fallen to 18%, 11 behind Reform UK. Only about half the people who voted Labour in 2024 still say they would do so, and the big dilemma lies in where all those voters are going. According to the latest wave of the high-quality academic British Election Study, released over the summer, just over 10% of Labour 2024 voters would now vote Tory or Reform, just over 18% are with the Lib Dems, Greens or a nationalist party, a further 19% don’t know how they’d vote, and 2% would not vote.

This is a desperate level of fragmentation, but given that the largest grouping of ex-Labour voters is on the centre-left and left, perhaps a progressive alliance strategy makes sense. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll find that these progressive ex-Labour voters are more likely to consider coming back than voters lost to the right are. The progressive alliance strategy says: a larger group, more likely to switch – why would you not be targeting them?

It should go without saying that to win, Labour does need to win back big numbers of those voters who have gone to the Greens, Lib Dems, nationalist parties and indecision. But that can’t be the only thing they do: both our electoral geography and the current state of the polls would hobble that plan.

Losses count twice in head-to-head battles

In 219 of Labour’s 411 seats, the Tories came second, and in a further 89, Reform was second – meaning that in three quarters of its 2029 defences, Labour will be in a direct battle with the right. The mass vote switching from Conservative to Reform since the election won’t have altered that fact very much, just the balance between the two parties.

In First Past the Post, losing a voter to your direct rival for a seat hurts twice as much as losing them in any other direction, because the rival’s vote total goes up as yours goes down. This means that under current vote shares, Labour’s loss of 10% of its votes to the right will have more impact on the election than its loss of 18% to its left.

The size of the progressive bloc

At the 2024 election, 53% voted for Labour, the Lib Dems or the Greens.  On current averages, those parties’ combined vote share has fallen to 47%. Reform and the Tories together are now on 46%, up from 38% at the election. That’s a 7-point swing against the progressive bloc as a whole, and by itself raises a key objection to the progressive alliance strategy: is it viable to win as the leader of a bloc that has a bare plurality of the vote?

When you combine this shift in voting intention with our electoral geography, the problem becomes starker still. At the 2024 election, the combined progressive vote was larger than the combined right wing vote in 416 of the 575 constituencies in England and Wales (I’m excluding Scotland from this simple analysis because the independence question complicates the progressive/right wing divide much more than in Wales).

Applying a 7-point uniform swing from the progressive to the right-wing bloc shows that the right bloc is now bigger in 313 of them, with the progressive bloc falling to 262. That is to say, if voters in each bloc sort themselves perfectly to back the type of candidate they (theoretically) favour, the right is in touching distance of an overall majority in Parliament, regardless of what happens in Scotland.

Progressives won’t be more tactical than the right

Progressive alliance backers might argue that the right wing parties’ voters won’t be purely tactical in their decisions, and with a split right, Labour could win just by gathering up most of the progressive votes. I don’t think this would happen, for two reasons.

First, we should expect consolidation to take place on the right. Voters have moved fluidly between the Tories and parties to their right over the past 10 years, and still show a high propensity for such switching. Any of the following are more than plausible: right wing voters act tactically to get rid of a Labour government; the Tories collapse completely, leaving Reform to clean up; Reform collapses completely, to the Tories’ benefit; the right wing parties form a pact or alliance, as when the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories in many seats at the 2019 election.

Second, Labour pursuing a progressive alliance strategy would be a signal to right wing voters that it’s against them and their priorities, increasing the pressure for anti-government tactical voting.

Another way of putting all of this is: the progressive alliance strategy relies on Labour consolidating the left much more efficiently than Reform and/or the Tories can consolidate the right. While the numbers of voters in each bloc are almost identical and the left contains 5 major parties plus independents, that seems incredibly risky.

It’s got to be both/and

Again, this is not to say that Labour should not try to win votes back from the progressive parties before the next election. Any Labour win would almost certainly rely on a lot of the people who have moved away to the left coming back. But the path to winning has to include shifting the overall balance toward the progressive bloc as well as winning voters within it.