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More than half of people who voted Labour in July say they are considering switching to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens at the next general election, according to new research shared exclusively with PoliticsHome.
According to polling carried out this month by Thinks Insight & Strategy, 52 per cent of 2024 Labour voters said there is ‘some’, good’ or ‘very high’ chance that they would vote for one of these parties.
A significantly smaller portion of Labour’s 2024 vote — 25 per cent — said they were considering Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
A look beneath the headline numbers highlights the strategic questions facing Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Labour figures as they try to keep their voter coalition together.
While there are more 2024 Labour voters considering other perceived parties of the left, the smaller group leaning towards Reform will be harder to persuade to return to Labour, the polling suggests.
“These results illustrate the tightrope this Labour government are walking,” Ben Shimshon, Co-founder and CEO of Thinks Insight & Strategy, told PoliticsHome.
“The government has a big majority, but a shallow one, and the coalition that they assembled in 2024 looks very precarious, only 9 months later.”
He explained that while the 52 per cent of Labour 2024 voters who are now considering the Lib Dems or Greens is a much larger group in numerical terms, they seem “more open to switching back to Labour” than those considering Reform, albeit “perhaps holding their nose while they do so”.
Over half of this group (55 per cent) said there is a ‘very high’ or ‘good’ chance they’d vote Labour in an immediate general election, and only 15 per cent said there’s no chance at all.
On the other hand, “leaping Reform feels like a one-way street,” said Shimshon.
“Those who voted for Farage’s party in 2024 are very committed to doing so again in future, and among Labour 2024 voters who are now considering Reform, over a third (36 per cent) already say that there’s ‘no chance at all’ that they’d vote Labour again in an election tomorrow.”
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The findings come amid a growing debate within Labour about the political direction the government should pursue after a difficult first 9 months in power and bruising local and mayoral elections earlier this month.
Large parts of Labour are concerned that by trying to appeal to voters on the right, the government risks alienating those on the left who could ditch them for the Lib Dems and the Greens.
However, senior figures in government believe that they must be able to demonstrate progress on reducing immigration to stay in power at the next general election.
This tension was clear in the responses to the government’s Immigration White Paper earlier this week.
While a YouGov poll found public support for the Prime Minister’s decision to tighten immigration rules, as well as his “island of strangers” remarks, many Labour MPs were worried that the government was pandering to the right wing.
Describing this strategic headache, Shimshon said: “The challenge is the more Labour work to shore up the Reform-considering portion of their coalition, the more likely it is that their policies and pronouncements will serve to harden the concerns of those who are considering the Lib Dems and Greens.”
Thinks Insight & Strategy has been tracking the mood of the nation since 2019. This update presents findings from an online survey of 2081 UK adults conducted by Thinks Insight & Strategy between 5th and 8th May 2025. Data were weighted to be representative of the UK adult population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background and region, and to reflect the 2024 General Election result amongst those who claimed to have voted in that election.
