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The Guardian
Tuesday briefing: How undecided voters could shape the UK general election
By Rupert Neate,
5 hours ago
‘Dont-know’ voters … a far larger group of people are undecided about how to vote compared with people during the 2019 general election. Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian
Good morning. The UK general election is on Thursday, yet about one in eight people have still not decided who they are going to vote for. The polls heavily suggest Labour are on course for a historic victory, but the scale of the Conservatives’ defeat – from heavy to catastrophic – may be decided by the large group of as-yet undecided voters.
Labour are projected to win 428 seats, giving the party a stonking majority of 102. The Tories are expected to fall to just 127 seats, and some polls question whether they will even reach three figures . The Liberal Democrats could climb from 11 at the 2019 election to 50. Reform UK, while projected to win as much as a 16% share of the vote, are unlikely to win more than two seats, but will cost Conservatives seats (to Labour and other parties) across the country.
Many voters tell pollsters they are undecided or may yet change their minds before polling day – as is clear from the Guardian’s own panel of floating voters – and many of them are expected to be wavering right up until they’re in the polling booth, pencil in hand.
For today’s newsletter, Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, will help us try to find out who the undecided are, why they are still so unsure, and whether they’ll turn up at the polls at all. That’s after the headlines.
Five big stories
General election 2024 | Recriminations have begun to fly around the Conservatives as a senior figure called the last few weeks the “worst campaign in my lifetime” and criticised the party for failing to tackle the threat from Reform.
France | French left and centrist parties are scrambling to cobble together a united front after Marine Le Pen’s resounding victory in the first round of snap parliamentary elections on Sunday brought her far-right, anti-immigration party a step closer to power.
Science | A brain-controlled bionic leg has allowed people with amputations to walk more quickly and navigate stairs and obstacles more easily in a groundbreaking trial .
Theatre | Sir Ian McKellen is withdrawing from the national tour of Player Kings after he fell off a West End stage last month. The veteran actor said he was taking medical advice with “the greatest reluctance” to “protect my full recovery”.
In depth: ‘This election is the most predictable in recent memory, but also the most unpredictable’
Pollsters from YouGov reckon about 12% of the electorate are still undecided. They tracked down 641 of them , and discovered that, while they are evenly spread across age groups, they are much more likely to be female (67%), to have voted leave in the EU referendum (43%, against 30% for remain), and to have voted Conservative at the last general election (43% compared to 15% who voted Labour).
When questioned (which can be hard as uncertain voters are less likely to respond to pollsters) some are more undecided than others. They found that 9% are likely to end up voting Conservative, 9% for Labour, 5% for the Lib Dems, 4% Green and 3% Reform. A quarter of the undecided voters are “unlikely to actually vote”.
“This leaves 45% of the overall sample of people who are ‘truly undecided’, having told us they are at least 6/10 likely to vote at the election, but even with one week to go won’t commit to a party,” says YouGov’s director of political research, Adam McDonnell. “This group accounts for 6% of the entire public.”
It’s a far larger group of people than at the 2019 election, and is unusually concentrated among one party. “For months and months we have noticed that people who voted Conservative in 2019 are more likely to be undecided,” says Surridge. “By this point in the campaign we would have expected the proportion of “don’t knows” to have come down below 10%.”
In the months leading up to the 2017 election there was a large group of undecided voters (that time people who had voted Labour in the previous election). “But by this close to polling day they had mostly gone back to Labour,” she says. “This time round, everyone expected the previous Conservative voters to start drifting back to the Conservatives, but it hasn’t happened.”
Surridge analysed data on previous Conservative voters between May 2023 and May 2024 and found that “they were breaking as much for Labour and Reform as the Conservatives. When making up their minds they weren’t going ‘home’ as much as expected.”
Asked why this might be, Surridge says that the Tories unpopularity means that “don’t know” voters “are going where other voters have – away from the Conservatives”.
She doesn’t expect the remaining don’t knows to swing back to the Tories in the last three days. “[The Conservatives] remain very unpopular and have done nothing to improve their popularity … maybe if there were some big campaign event …”
How did so many people end up undecided?
Surridge says voters fell out of love with the Conservatives in two waves. “The first wave were the people who voted Conservative for the first time in 2019. Then, as things have gone on, it has started to eat into more traditional Conservative voters.”
Liz Truss’s “mini budget” and Sunak leaving the D-day commemorations early “seemed designed to push segments of their core vote away”, she says. “The polling figures suggest that some people who have voted Conservative their whole lives are undecided if they’ll vote for them this time.”
The undecided might change the age demographics of voters
As most of the undecided voters are previous Conservative supporters, they skew the “don’t know” group older than at previous elections. “If we see Tories stay at home, it might rebalance the turnout in terms of age,” Surridge says. “At the same time, you have a group of people under 30 who support Labour but have never been able to vote for the winning party, so they might be more motivated to go out and vote.”
In Luton, a town with one of the youngest populations outside areas dominated by a university, there is evidence of both anger at the Tories and a lack of enthusiasm for Labour. Patryk Kuna recently turned 18 and is undecided on who his vote will go to. “Labour has been making some pretty funny TikToks, so I might vote for Labour, maybe,” he told the Observer . “I just don’t like the guy [Rishi Sunak] in general. No one picked him for office, so why is he there?”
What happens if the undecided decide on Reform?
Many previous Conservative voters are now planning to vote for Reform, and Surridge reckons a lot of people who are undecided will follow them. “The more high profile Reform has become, the more people have switched to them,” she says. “There are people who voted leave in the EU referendum and didn’t have an obvious choice other than the Conservatives – now Reform gives them that option.
“But if Reform do a little bit better than polling suggests, that could cause a really big swing in the number of seats the Conservatives could retain,” Surridge says. “It could range from 155 to just 70 seats.
“This election is the most predictable in recent memory, but at the same time also the most unpredictable,” she says. “Everyone knows who will be in government, but no one knows what the opposition is going to look like.”
Could the polls be wrong?
We wouldn’t recommend betting on the election , but the bookies are offering 1/25 on a Labour majority government compared to 125-1 for a Conservative one. Could the bookies and the pollsters be wrong?
“If they are, the whole polling industry would have to close down as no one would ever believe anything they say ever again,” Surridge says. “They wouldn’t just be wrong, they would be wrong by a bigger magnitude than ever before – just to get to a hung parliament not a Conservative victory.
“There is scope for a Conservative disaster, for less than 100 seats,” she says. “At this point, 150 seats might seem like a quite good result for the Conservatives. There is even the possibility that the Lib Dems could be the official opposition .”
What else we’ve been reading
As a Labour government appears increasingly likely, it is perhaps time to get to know the potential next cabinet a little better. Who knew that Rachel Reeves , who would be the UK’s first female chancellor, was posted to Washington by the Bank of England when she was just 23. Find out all about Reeves in this profile by Heather Stewart and Larry Elliott . Rupert
“Every teenage girl has their unexplainable emotional attachment to it”: Alaina Demopoulos has a wonderful piece about why gen Z has fallen for Billy Joel’s Vienna (above). Hannah
Having recently bought a rather expensive crochet cardigan, it is pleasing to learn that it was an ahead-of-fashion purchase. According to this story by Chloe Mac Donnell , crochet clothing is a popular “way of tapping into a sexier style of dressing without flashing too much”. Rupert
Sasha Mistlin has written about the worrying uptick in support for Nigel Farage among young people, and why the Reform leader has more in common with Andrew Tate than you might think. Hannah
Two of Team GB’s skateboarders celebrate birthdays just before competing at Place de la Concorde, Sky Brown, who won bronze at the Tokyo Games, will be 16. Her teammate Andy Macdonald will be 51. “Age is literally just a number. It doesn’t matter. Andy’s proven that. I am only young so I do want to still enjoy being a teenager, but I’m good at balancing things and this is way more important than anything else,” Brown tells Ben Bloom . Rupert
Sport
Euro 2024 | Portugal coach Roberto Martinez praised Cristiano Ronaldo after a rollercoaster night against Slovenia in which the captain missed a penalty in extra time and then scored in a 3-0 shootout win to help take them into the quarter-finals; An 85th-minute deflected shot by Randal Kolo Muani, listed as a Jan Vertonghen own goal, gave France a nervy 1-0 win over a disappointing Belgium on Monday and sent them into the quarter-finals too.
Euro 2024 | Jude Bellingham faces a Uefa investigation for the lewd gesture he made after scoring his dramatic equaliser against Slovakia on Sunday, although it is considered unlikely that England’s hero of the hour will be banned.
The front pages
On the Guardian’s front page it’s “Labour would take global lead on climate – Miliband” as the paper covers the pre-election promise. Many of the other papers have election headlines with the Times saying “Starmer: a big majority will be best for Britain”. The Telegraph has “Royal Mail blamed for postal vote chaos” as it reports on postal ballot delays. The i makes a French connection with “Labour faces up to prospect of far-right neighbour in France with early talks” as it covers Starmer’s approach to the possibility of the National Rally coming to power. The Mirror has “Give our children hope” as it says former PM Gordon Brown is urging voters to back Labour. The Express headlines comments by conservative Kemi Badenoch with “Voting Reform ‘risks losing hundreds of Tory MPs for a generation’”
In the Mail it’s “Britain’s forces not ready for ‘conflict of any scale’” as the paper says a senior official is warning about Britain’s military capability ahead of the election. And in the Financial Times , “Supreme Court hands Trump broad immunity over actions as president,” in the wake of the consequential ruling there.
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
A groundbreaking trial has seen people with amputations walk more quickly and navigate obstacles with greater ease, with the help of a brain-controlled bionic leg. “No one has been able to show this level of brain control that produces a natural gait, where the human’s nervous system is controlling the movement, not a robotic control algorithm,” said Prof Hugh Herr. Prof Herr – a co-director of the K Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the senior author of the study – said that the technology would lead “to a step-change in clinical care for so many patients around the world … we’re very passionate about getting this technology out to the patients who need it.” It may also have benefits for Herr, too; a double amputee, he says he is thinking of having revision surgery to get his own bionic legs “in the coming years”.
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