Farage’s party could win 42% of Commons seats with only 26% of the vote. That’s not the way civilised countries do democracy
Look at the coverage of any general election opinion polling recently and what you are likely to see is a map of Britain divided into its constituencies and covered in Reform’s light blue. They are utterly dominant when it comes to the projected seats. Take the latest YouGov MRP poll, published with great fanfare this week. MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) is a particularly detailed kind of poll that creates projections for each constituency – and this one predicted that Nigel Farage’s party would win a whopping 42% of the seats inside the House of Commons if a general election were held now. Even this was fairly low compared with some other recent data that actually projected a majority of 30 seats.
But while Farage and some parts of the media really want you to focus on the number of seats Reform might win, what you should be looking at is what the data is actually telling us. Stay with me on this. Because, while the latest YouGov poll may show Reform achieving 42% of UK seats, the proportion of people in the UK who actually support them, according to that same poll, is only 26%. What we really should be taking from the latest data is the headline “three-quarters of UK voters don’t want Nigel Farage and Reform”. Only one in four people want them in government.
Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
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