Reform Slumps to Third in First Seat Projection for a Year
YouGov’s first multilevel regression projection since last September puts Labour on 241 seats, the Conservatives on 130 and Reform UK on 123 — a hung parliament, and a collapse from the 311 seats Reform was projected to win a year ago. Labour was on 144 then. Vote shares have converged to within a few points: Reform down five to 22%, the Conservatives up to 21%, Labour up three to 24%. Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman are both projected to lose their seats.
Two forces show up in the model. A Prime Minister who occupies the plain-spoken northern ground Nigel Farage had made his own, and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, which the projection shows taking three points or more off Reform in the marginals that decide everything. The result is a right split three ways while the left has options: as YouGov’s Patrick English put it, Labour are “only a fraction ahead” on vote share but there are “a wide range of possible ‘coalition of the left’ options open to them… in a way where there just simply isn’t for Reform and the Conservatives on the right”. The sample was 14,000, with fieldwork spanning late August to 18 September; YouGov’s final 2024 projection called 92% of seats correctly. Watch whether Reform’s slide continues once the donations investigation develops.