By Stephen Fisher, 1st May 2024.
Changes in vote intention opinion polls typically provide an indication of headline net seat changes at local elections. Most of the seats up this year were last fought in 2021. The following table shows how party support in the opinion polls has changed since then.
Table 1. Opinion poll changes from 2021 locals to 2024 locals
% | 2021 polls | 2024 polls | Change |
Con | 41 | 23 | -18 |
Lab | 36 | 44 | +8 |
LD | 7 | 9 | +2 |
Reform | 3 | 12 | +9 |
Green | 5 | 6 | +1 |
Those changes imply a 13-point swing from Conservative to Labour. The graphs below show broadly how that might translate into seat gains for Labour and losses for the Conservatives as percentages of the 2650+ seats up this year. The 13 point swing should put this week’s local election results on par with those for 1995, 1996 and 2013.
Liberal Democrat local seat tallies at the national level have historically been linked primarily on the swing between them and the Conservatives. That swing is 10-points to the Liberal Democrats this time.
Table 2 below shows predictions from the regression models. The figure for Others is just an accounting balance. The Conservative and Labour models are based on Con-Lab swing and the Lib Dem model is based on Con-LD swing. The three are estimated separately. They do not take direct account of the rise in the Reform party share, nor perhaps more importantly given their success last year, the big rise in the number of Green party candidates relative to the number of seats up for election.
Table 2. Model based forecasts for English local election net seat gains/losses for 2024
Forecast | |
Con | -390 |
Lab | +320 |
LD | +100 |
Others | -30 |
Based on last year’s experience, I would expect the Conservatives to do worse than the model suggests, and the Liberal Democrats and Others (mainly Greens) to do better.
Continue reading Local election seat projections for 2024