Conservatives shed 32% of voters since January, FT polls finds

The Conservatives have lost up to a third of voters who planned to back the party just four months ago, according to an Ipsos poll for the Financial Times that points to high levels of volatility ahead of the UK election on July 4.

The survey, conducted on the same cohort of almost 16,000 voters at the end of January and at the start of June, found that 32 per cent of people who initially said they would vote Conservative had since changed their minds.

Rightwing party Reform UK attracted 8 per cent of the Tory voters polled, 6 per cent switched to Labour, 7 per cent said they were now undecided and 9 per cent said they were less likely to vote at all.

Despite the high rate of switching, the poll showed little change in the overall support for each of the main political parties, with the Tories’ share of those polled falling from 14 to 13 per cent and Labour increasing its share over the period from 26 to 27 per cent.

While the Conservatives lost voters to Labour and Reform, they also gained backers among those who had previously said they were undecided. This group has commonly turned out for the Conservatives in recent elections.

Labour — which opinion polls suggest is likely to sweep to power on July 4 — also experienced high levels of turnover, losing a quarter of people who previously said they were planning to vote for the party, of which 3 per cent said they were now undecided and 9 per cent less likely to vote.

The party lost 4 per cent of its voters to the Lib Dems, some of which are likely to be tactical switchers trying to oust Tory candidates, but Labour gained 16 per cent of those who had previously been planning to vote Lib Dem.

Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester university, said the Ipsos findings demonstrated that “surface stability has a lot of churn underneath it”.

“We’re likely to see a lot more churn than in previous elections because partisanship is lower than we’ve seen in the past and fragmentation between different parties is higher,” Ford said.

The proportion of British voters who switch their preferred party between general elections has shifted from about 13 per cent in 1960 to closer to 60 per cent today, according to research from Oxford and Manchester universities.

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Nearly half of those who switched from Labour to the Lib Dems said they were switching to try to keep another party out. There are many seats — particularly in the south and south-west of England — that have never returned a Labour MP and where the battle is viewed as a two-horse race between the Tories and Lib Dems.

Reform was the only party to significantly increase its total vote share in the longitudinal survey, from 3 to 7 per cent. Reform founder Nigel Farage seized the party leadership on June 3, near the end of the second data-collection period of May 29 to June 5, meaning that the data will not fully reflect the impact of his move.

Of those voters who switched from the Conservatives to Reform, 80 per cent said they were unhappy with Rishi Sunak’s performance as prime minister, while about three-quarters said they were influenced by policy towards asylum seekers.

“The data helps us understand the importance to Conservative-to-Reform switchers of dissatisfaction with the government and prime minister,” said Gideon Skinner, head of politics at Ipsos.