Christabel Cooper
@christabelcoops
Director of Research at ThinkLabour. Interested in politics and data. Interested in how people think about politics and data.
The advantage of being interim Interim CEO of ThinkLabour (for two weeks only!) is that I have made the executive order to bring my lovely greyhound into the office ♥️🐕
Instead, Reform's decline is driven partly by a modest Conservative recovery. The chart below shows where the 2024 Conservative vote has gone - they are losing slightly fewer voters to Reform than a year ago. I also suspect fewer 2024 non-voters now intend to vote Reform.
By contrast the percentage of Labour 2024 voters intending to switch to Reform has not altered significantly for over a year.
This chart shows the destination of Labour's 2024 vote. The red line is the percentage that would still vote Labour. You can see that this starts trending upwards around the time that the percentage of former Labour voters intending to vote Green starts falling.
Labour's headline voting intention is recovering. This pre-dates Burnham becoming PM, but as his victory became inevitable we've seen polls putting Labour within touching distance of Reform. Crucially, this appears to be a consolidation of the progressive vote, rather than gains from Reform.
It also trackers pollsters house effects - a matter of controversy in some quarters...
My favourite section (which I've never seen anywhere) is the chart of where the GE2024 vote for each party has gone. This is Labour - you can really see the rise in Labour to Green switchers after Polanski becomes leader and how it is starting to fall back (and how significant those switchers are).
For anyone with even a passing interest in polling, this is a fantastic resource, created by @cwp-weir.bsky.social, Research Manager at @thinklabour.bsky.social, which collates all the latest public headline polling, but also pulls out demographic detail from the tables. www.pollingpolis.co.uk
This is a word cloud on Rishi from before the 2024 GE (Conservative to Labour switchers). Probably answers the question for Sunak!
Instead, Labour should appeal to those voters whose values align with the party, by making clear it is an economically left-leaning and moderately socially liberal party, and governing well (which necessitates difficult and unpopular decisions) to win those it has lost to the right.
Me for @labourlist.bsky.social today on Labour's electoral coalition in which I argue that the government's current attempts to hold together a broad group of voters is not succeeding. labourlist.org/2026/05/who-...
This is the data from the underlying tables. Economy is listed as a separate option, and *always* comes beneath cost of living if both are included on a poll. Why the Times thinks its a good idea to try to stoke divisions in this way, at this particular moment, is beyond me.
We know that council taxpayers wildly underestimate how much of their money goes on social care. One of the reasons council tax is perceived as so unfair is that people don't understand where their money is going, as our polling found. And so the system limps on, even as it stops making sense. 2/
It's worth remembering that Trump is not omnipotent. He is not a Roman Emperor who can execute people who disagree with him and push on regardless. The saner Republicans do have the power to curb his worst excesses - and I'd have thought with polls like this, they now have an incentive to do so.
The idea that apocalyptic levels of demographic change are destroying Britain are always undermined by proponents citing stats on ethnicity from London. When London is the richest region in the country and is broadly at ease - even celebratory - of its diversity. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06...
If this is the analysis from Conservatives (from BBC) they are in even more trouble than I imagined - this is basic innumeracy! Even if you start from the (incorrect) assumption that most Ref voters are ex-Labour, then Labour doing better just brings them back to Lab, it has no impact on Con vote.
This is all feeling very Liz Truss. With the difference that the UK's political systems were robust enough to basically projectile vomit her out of the body politic, whereas America's institutions aren't able to do the same.
If you claim to be worried about migrants failing to integrate into British society, it's totally counter-productive to make it harder for people to make a full commitment to their new home. Our full report is here: www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...
What's being missed in the "Reform is really bad for Labour" narrative, is that Reform is *really, really* bad for the Conservatives. The new FocalData MRP has Lab scraping a minority government, but the Cons on significantly fewer seats than Corbyn won in 2019. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
As we’re all doing Brexit today, here’s my big take: Sovereignty was always more important to Leavers than immigration and that’s even more true now than it was in 2016. Advocates of a closer relationship with the EU need to bear that in mind. Here’s graphs from a @yougov.co.uk survey in Nov.
By themselves, young men are too small a part of the electorate to completely change Reform's fortunes, but we know that voting behaviour as a young adult tends to shape voting behaviour later on. And the 18-24 age group was the only one with significant differences by gender in GE2024 vote.
Difficult to express how glad I am, that Robert Jenrick is not the leader of one of our major parties. To cast blame on all migrants for the actions of one person is pretty much undiluted racism. White people are - correctly - not collectively blamed for the crimes of individual white people.
Reform voters aren't *that* left wing. They are more economically left wing than Con voters (presumably because they are, on average, a bit poorer) but not nearly as economically left wing as Labour voters or indeed the average voter.
(Chart from Labour Together's election report). Meanwhile, Compass poses the question below - they're correct there is more overlap between Labour and the LDs/Greens than between Labour and Con/Reform voters. But the number of Con plus Reform voters is twice the number of LD plus Green voters.
You can make a principled case for PR, but don't pretend it will lead to endless progressive government (see the current politics of Europe for details). Worth remembering Lib Dem voters are socially liberal, but on economics are to the right of core Labour voters and close to Con to Lab switchers.
This chart, from the latest Compass report, purports to show that there is an almost neverending progressive majority in the UK... by treating the Lib Dems as progressives during the time when they were part of a coalition with the Conservatives which implemented austerity.
This link between depression and voting Reform can be seen just by looking at rates of depression (source HoC Library) versus Reform vote share in England in GE2024. Reform voters are attitudinally similar to Con voters, but tend to live in more deprived areas and be less satisfied with their lives.
In terms of their attitudes, individual Reform voters are actually closest to the Conservatives (the chart below is from Labour Together's General Election review). But they live in places that look very different from those affluent Conservative-held seats...
I did a comparison of the demographics Red Wall seats (using James Kanagasooriam's list), seats with high Reform share, and all Con and Lab held seats. There's a fair few characteristics shared by RW and Reform-heavy seats (note - over half of RW seats are also Reform heavy).