Reform UK are on Track to Win Over 100 Seats

As Reform UK passes the 100 seat mark in POLARIS’ projections this report takes a deep dive look at the constituencies projected to be won by the party in a General Election. Using surveys, interviews and state-of-the-art modelling this report presents a fresh view on the changing shape of British Politics and those behind the tectonic shifts.

Report by Callum Hunter, Senior Data Scientist and Julian Gallie, Senior Research Associate

9th February 2025

OVERVIEW

The latest POLARIS model suggests that Reform are breaking the 100 seat mark as their predicted seat total continues to rise, with the party now projected to win 102 seats across England and Wales. Major Labour party figures are also set to lose their seats to Reform UK candidates including Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, and Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and one of the architects of Labour election victory. Nigel Farage’s party is set to take seats from both Labour and the Conservatives as POLARIS can now reveal what makes those Reform constituencies stand out.

At the previous election there was a consensus that the Conservatives could not win a majority with Reform polling in the mid-teens and now low twenties. In the 2024 election, Labour won seats across the country due to Reform’s high vote share taking votes away from the Conservatives. However, POLARIS now shows that Reform’s inroads into Labour’s heartlands mean that in the current position, the popularity of the turquoise party is the biggest barrier to either one of the two main parties winning a majority. Reform’s rise is now no longer a gift to Labour, instead it has become another hurdle on their path to a majority, or even forming a coalition, at the next election.  

What makes these potential Reform constituencies stand out is the political issues they care about. Those living in Reform constituencies prioritise cost of living support and stopping illegal migration as their top issues deciding how they will vote; this is key to Reform’s ambition of winning the Red Wall. These seats that voted for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019 and returned to Labour at the last election were won by an offer of social conservatism and fiscal liberalism, a mixture or social and economic populism. Although Starmer won those seats back in 2024, a new threat looms with a striking resemblance to the 2019 Conservatives the Red Wall may fall again.

As Reform aim to learn from Boris’ successful election win in 2019 and compete in both the red and blue wall, the next step in their path will be combining their offer to win in seats across the Conservative heartlands as well in the North of England. This means they need to expand their offer and win over those in Labour and Conservative seats who are concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. For Labour and the Conservatives, the challenge will be to combat the dual threat of the other major party as well as Farage and the new kids on the block.

Introduction

The latest poll from JL Partners shows that the UK is currently moving towards a three-party system where no single party can form a government. Reform’s rise is now blocking the route to a majority for both major parties. With Labour on 26%, the Conservatives on 25% and Reform UK on 22%, the first past the post system is being stretched to breaking point. Reform UK, the insurgent party responsible for much of this fracturing, has soared in popularity since the 2024 General Election. The latest estimates from POLARIS show that if a general election were held today we would expect Labour to win just 200 seats, whilst the Conservatives and Reform UK are projected to win 190 and 102 respectively. The plot below shows how far this takes each of the main parties from the 326 seats needed to form a majority government in the House of Commons. This latest POLARIS estimate suggests a situation in which no combination of parties would be able to form a government, potentially leading to constitutional paralysis.

From a historical perspective, the electorate is more fragmented now than any point in the past century. The below plot displays the two-party index — an index that quantifies how close the UK is to a two-party state dominated by Labour and the Conservatives. The closer the index is to 1, the closer the country is to a two-party state; at 0 the Conservatives and Labour win just 50% of the vote combined and at -1 those two parties win 0% of the vote share. Throughout much of the twentieth century, from 1924 to around 1979, the UK essentially functioned a two-party state with the index never falling below 0.9. However, since then the index has been falling consistently, with a 2017 intermission, until it reached 0.4 in the 2024 election. This is the lowest the index has ever been — if we adjust it to represent the two major parties rather than the Conservatives and Labour — and all polling indicates that the country is moving further towards a fractured electoral system. Our latest polling has shifted this two-party index to just 0.04 — effectively signalling the breakdown of the two-party assumption. 

Understanding this fracture is a tall order. In this report, we focus in on a single part of that picture, notably the difference between Reform UK projected constituencies and other parties’ projected constituencies. By looking at demographics, changes in issue salience and interviews from voters themselves we have been able to understand why some parts of the country may go turquoise rather than red or blue at the next election. This report details findings from a wide variety of sources and represents one of the most detailed studies of Reform UK voters to date.

mETHODOLOGY

This report uses a wider variety of qualitative and quantitative data to uncover the driving force behind the tectonic shifts in British politics. 

POLARIS’ methodology is detailed here. New council by-election data now means the model incorporates 306,817 actual votes across the UK. There has been one small methodological change to POLARIS concerning the estimation of Scottish constituencies. As part of POLARIS we apply a UNS shift to the national projected vote share estimates so the model vote shares align with our latest polling. This adjustment works well for England and Wales but misses the impact of the Scottish National Party (SNP) North of the Border. Hence, the new method applies a second, Scotland-only adjustment using polling data from public polls. This adjustment is the main reason behind the significantly improved SNP position in this latest POLARIS update. 

We have also included a Local Indicator Spatial Analysis map for Reform UK’s modelled vote share at the 10% confidence interval. This technique uses spatial correlations of Reform UK’s vote share to highlight regions where they will systematically over perform compared to their national vote share of 22%. These areas are concentrated around South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, the Thames Estuary and parts of Lancashire.

In order to find the demographics of each party’s hypothetical average constituency we take the projected seat outcomes from POLARIS and use the number of votes cast in the 2024 general election to calculate the weighted average of various demographic indicators such as age, qualification level and tenure. This data is taken from the 2021 England and Wales census and the 2022 Scotland Census.

Changes in issue salience are calculated in a similar way as the constituency demographics. The underlying data comes from JL Partners’ public data in the run-up to the general election in June 2024 as well as other public surveys conducted in December 2024 and January 2025. These results are then poststratified using our SRP technique to indicate which issues are the most salient for each party’s average constituency before the general election and now.

Finally, in January 2024 JL Partners conducted a nationally representative survey of 2000 voters which asked them to tell us who they would vote for and why they had either changed their voting intention since the general election or why it had remained the same. The vote intention from this survey is used to align POLARIS’ national vote share projections with our latest survey data — we apply a uniform shift to make sure POLARIS’ national projections are the same as polling data.

The quotations throughout this piece are lifted directly from the survey and give a sense of why real people are voting the way they are and why Labour and the Conservatives are losing votes to the insurgency of Reform UK. These were responses to the question, “In a sentence can you say why you are planning to vote your chosen way and whether your mind has changed since the election and why?”.

rESULTS

The 102 seats the Reform UK are projected to win by POLARIS are the starting point in trying to understand what this new group of voters looks like. Using data from the census, as well as modelled issue salience and interviews, the picture painted by these voters is bleak for the Conservatives and Labour. What is apparent throughout the interviews is a general lack of enthusiasm for either party and the desire to try something different. Whilst on issue salience there are clear differences between projected Reform UK constituencies and the other party’s constituencies. From stopping illegal migration to the cost of living these constituencies are markedly different to their counterparts. Demographic differences begin to highlight why this might be the case — in particular the gap in education and commuter distance hint at deep underlying differences between these voters and the rest. Pulling all of these data sources together paints a picture of distrust and lack of faith in politics amongst those constituencies most likely to pass over to Reform UK. 

One of the biggest demographic differences between projected Reform UK seats and other party’s seats is the education gap. Nationally, around 31% of the population has no formal qualifications, according to the 2021/2022 census, however in projected Reform UK seats this is seven points higher with nearly 4 in 10 people in these areas having no formal qualifications. At the other end of the spectrum, degree level education and above, the opposite is true. Around 28% of the population has a degree whilst in Reform constituencies the average is just 20%, a full eight points lower than the average. This gap in education has been a feature across the Western World, with education levels becoming one of the strongest predictors of vote intention. Interestingly, for qualification levels between these two extremes projected Reform voting constituencies typically follow the national distribution. It is not a smooth gradient of education that differentiates Reform constituencies from the rest but rather a harsh binary of degree level qualifications versus no formal qualifications at all. 

This attainment gap then feeds into the sorts of jobs these voters tend to do and hence the distances they must travel to get to work. In the aftermath of the pandemic, professional and service workers were able to work from home giving rise to around 31% of all workers now working from home. In projected Reform constituencies this number is nine points lower with just 22% of people in those constituencies working from home. These constituencies have higher levels of those that work locally with 41% travelling less than 10km to work in these Reform constituencies, this compares to the national figure of 35%. Clearly Reform voting constituencies have a higher proportion of workers whose working patterns were not adjusted by the pandemic suggesting they have higher concentrations of workers who are not in professional or service based industries. 

Whilst the tenure distribution of these projected Reform constituencies is quite similar to the national distribution they do differ from the Labour Conservative distributions. This fact is significant when one bears in the mind that most these projected constituencies are currently held by Labour and so understanding the differential distributions could highlight some important differences. For example, in Reform UK projected constituencies, the average home ownership rate is 63% whereas in Labour projected constituencies it is 56% — this compares to the current 59% for Labour, 65% for Reform UK and national average of 63%. Since most Reform gains are projected to come at the cost of Labour this pattern suggests that Labour to Reform UK constituencies will be characterised by higher than average homeownership. Hence these constituencies are the current Labour constituencies with higher levels of homeownership — this fact would exacerbate the ownership/rental gap that has started to characterise UK politics, with right-wing parties being the home of owners and left-wing parties being the home of renters. This aligns with the differential age distributions which show that Labour constituencies are projected to be slightly younger than their Reform UK counterparts giving rise to a further party-comparative split.

Clearly the demographics of these constituencies show something clear — Reform UK projected wins currently look like Labour constituencies with lower levels of education and lower levels of professional workers (who work mainly from home). They are likely to be constituencies that have higher than current Labour average rates of home ownership and are typically slightly older Labour constituencies.

Whilst demographic modelling is instructive in profiling these key constituencies, and their voters, issue politics is one of the main drivers of people to the polls. Using modelled data, we can show how the issue salience for each party’s average constituency has changed since the general election. Whilst there are nationwide trends, it is the comparative differences between the average constituencies that highlight why the electorate is beginning to split. 

Across all parties, the salience of Cost of Living support has drastically increased since the election in July, with 43% of the population saying this was a top three issue for them — this is up 31% in June. However, this increase differs across each party’s average constituency. Whilst the average for our projected Conservative constituencies has increased by nine points to 38%, for Labour voting constituencies the average has increased by 12 points to 44% and for projected Reform constituencies it also increased by 12 points to 45%. These numbers corroborate some of the conclusions made from the demographic differences between Reform UK constituencies and the rest of the country. Demographics suggested these constituencies had lower levels of education and professional workers — the very people who have been hit hardest by high levels of inflation — and issue salience shows that cost of living support is now their highest priority. A clear picture of these voters and where they live is beginning to form. 

The main issue that divides these projected Reform constituencies from the rest of the country is “Stopping Illegal Migration” — on average 32% of people in these constituencies placed this issue in their top three representing an increase of four points. This compares with projected Labour constituencies (27%) and Conservatives constituencies (29%). Illegal migration and small boats was an issue raised repeatedly in the interviews of voters who are switching from Labour to Reform UK with one interviewee saying “…they are the only party to stop all the immigration that is crippling this country.” With this issue gaining evermore prominence, and previous Labour voters suggesting only Reform can tackle it, there is a growing groups of constituencies that are fast becoming natural Reform targets — something made clear in the LISA map at the start of this report. 

Most of these shifts have been at the expense of “Improving the NHS” as a priority, which has slipped from a top three issue for 53% of the population to now 41% — meaning Cost of Living support is currently the top issue for the majority of people. 

Issue salience highlights two key facts about projected Reform UK constituencies. Firstly, nearly half of these voters are concerned about the cost of living which is still affecting many of the demographics that compose Reform UK’s base — a clear correlation between demographic factors and macroeconomic pressures. Secondly, illegal immigration is a major issue for these constituencies and is quickly becoming the cleavage issue that divides these constituencies from the rest. As issue salience changes, and issue ownership perceptions shift, Reform can leverage this uncertainty to dominate on issues that move from low to high salience, something they have done with immigration. 

cONCLUSIONS

With Reform UK projected to win over 100 seats, and the two-party index heading for an historical low, the electorate is now more fractured than ever before. This fracturing has occurred mainly due to the surge in Reform UK in the wake of the 2024 general election. Hence understanding how and where Reform UK may make gains is paramount for political parties and the country. This report has revealed the main demographic difference between these areas and the rest of the country. With lower levels of education, and workers based at home, these a constituencies that have not felt the benefit of the liberalisation project of the past 30 years. These areas look a lot like current Labour constituencies, but appear to be older and have higher levels of home ownership. These voters are also more concerned about the cost of living and illegal migration than other parties suggesting that the demographic conclusions are corroborated by the salience of issues in these areas. Interviews with these voters make clear they feel that traditional politics has failed them, especially the Labour party that promised them change they feel has not been delivered. These have all led to a potential seismic change in British Politics.