Poll Watch: YouGov, 13th May
Pollster: YouGov
Sample size: 2,310
Fieldwork dates: 11th-12th May 2025
Source
Key points
Reform would be a minority government - but this might not be the worst thing for them.
The SNP have surged back to historic highs, and their support is highest amongst the youth.
The Greens are polling very high in the North, as well as amongst under 25s.
This is a big bounce compared to Techne’s previous poll on 24th April; the fieldwork took place nearly a week after the local elections, by which time it would normally be expected for a bounce to start deflating.
But it looks like Reform is not slowing down, and the gap between Reform and the other parties has only widened. Whereas before they were neck-and-neck, now the gap has widened in both directions, with both “heritage” parties slipping in the polls while Reform rises.
What would this parliament look like?
Electoral Calculus’s prediction here is particularly brutal: the Conservatives would have three seats fewer than the SNP, an absolutely historic butchering, and Reform break through to just below the level Theresa May’s 2017-2019 government had.
Does this mean Reform might seek a confidence-and-supply arrangement, as May did? Such an arrangement in the Commons is fragile and unreliable, and if this really is Reform’s first government, that would probably be too much of a gamble. Instead, Reform could reasonably rely on a fractured opposition, with the SNP emboldened to demand another independence referendum in return for sitting with Labour, and the smaller parties, now including the Conservatives, would be reduced to parochial interests.
Obviously this is conjecture, and “the only poll that matters is the final one”, but it’s still worth thinking about. The polls are consistently putting Reform in first place, and even if they can’t form a majority, the question to ask is, do they really need to?
The Reform breakthrough in the Midlands seems practically complete; the long-ignored awkward middle child of the North-South divide, it’s often the Midlands where the most important changes take place. Birmingham (mostly) voted to Leave in 2016, and the heartlands of the Tories that stretch from Staffordshire to Lincolnshire turned to Reform in the recent locals.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are really rising to challenge the Conservatives in the South and the North. The fact that they are only 2% behind the Conservatives in (the admittedly too-broad category of) the North is worth paying attention to, as is the remarkably high polling of the Greens in the North too.
Seeing Reform poll highest amongst the unionist parties in Wales and Scotland is interesting, however. I did pose the possibility in July 2024 that Reform may be seen as the more “unionist” option compared to the “England-centric” traditional parties, but whether this bears out will be interesting to see.
What jumps out to me amongst this dataset though is the generation gap in the Conservatives’ support. If the only age group polling above 15% is the over-65s (a real watershed moment), the Tories have a challenge to face: do they lean into this historic base, or do they hunker down, bear out the storm, and try to win over younger voters?
Given that Reform are polling higher than the Tories in both categories, the moment may actually have passed, with the youth splitting (very unevenly) between other parties. Even the fact that the SNP’s support is highest amongst under 25s means the radicalisation of young British voters might be the ticking time bomb for the Tories.
The breakdown of the sexes is always important, especially because consistently Reform lead amongst women. The reasons for this are complex, but there is one factor that the political class seems to be ignoring, but the public are increasingly asking questions about: the relationship between immigration and sex-based violence.
There is a movement that has grown rapidly in the last month called the Women’s Safety Initiative, which aims to highlight what it considers to be an obvious correlation between mass immigration and the sexual assault of women and girls. The reality is this policy position attracts a lot of support for right-wing populists, and was a key motivator in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. If Reform cement this message, they could be the party that benefits from activating the usually-low female vote.
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