Yougov Poll Shows Collapse In Tory Support - Voting Intention: Con 21%, Lab 54% (28-29 Sep 2022)

30th September 2022

Labour open up 33-point vote intention lead in wake of mini-Budget chaos.

The latest YouGov/Times vote intention poll shows the Labour party on 54% of the vote, up nine points on their previous record high with YouGov on Monday. The Conservatives meanwhile have dropped to 21% of current vote intention, down seven points.

As well as being their record highest share ever in a YouGov poll, Labour's 33-point lead is the highest figure the party has ever recorded in any published poll since the late 1990s.

Elsewhere, the Liberal Democrats have dropped down to 7% (-2) of vote intention, the Greens are on 6% (-1), and Reform UK are on 4% (+1).

There are three key factors in Labour's lead. First, the proportion of 2019 Conservative voters who now say they will vote Labour has risen to a sizeable 17%, doubling from 8% in our poll published on Monday. Only 37% of those who backed the Conservatives in the previous election currently intend to stick with the party.

Fewer than two in five 2019 Conservative voters still intend to vote for the party. One in six plan to switch directly to Labour.

n historical perspective, this 17% ‘Con to Lab' switching figure far eclipses the 5% rate of switching we saw when, under Ed Miliband, Labour were consistently the Tories by more than 10 points in 2012. The current situation is more comparable to the around 16% of 1992 Conservative voters who switched to Labour in 1997 under Tony Blair, according to the British Election Study.

The second important factor in Labour's lead is that a further 26% of 2019 Conservative voters say they do not know how they would vote if an election were held tomorrow, and 9% say they would not vote at all. These figures have not changed significantly since Monday, but are higher than in the spring when the recorded ‘Con to don't know' figure was between 15-20% and Labour's lead was between zero and five points.

The third important story in the growing Labour lead is the squeeze on support for the Liberal Democrats. While in July YouGov polling had Ed Davey’s party at 15% of vote intention, they have now slipped to just 7% in our latest poll. Fully half (50%) of 2019 Liberal Democrat voters now tell us they intend to vote Labour.

Read the full report HERE