Tactical voting set to thwart Farage’s election hopes, poll shows

Just a couple of weeks after voters united in Caerphilly to deny Reform a by-election win, it looks like this could end up being a blueprint for seats across the UK come the general election.

A new poll from YouGov, carried out for the Times, has found that Liberal Democrat and Green voters would be willing to vote for Labour in seats where this would block a Reform win.

The analysis found that supporters of all parties were prepared to switch their vote to influence the overall result.

READ NEXT: Zack Polanski: ‘Keir Starmer won’t be Prime Minister at the next election’

More than half (57%) of Lib Dem voters and 46% of Green voters said they would vote tactically for Labour if they were in a seat where Reform looked likely to win.

Most surprisingly, a significant proportion of voters from Labour, the Lib Dems and Greens said they would be prepared to vote Tory if it could block a Reform seat victory.

Just over a third (34%) of Labour voters said they would vote for the Conservatives to stop Reform, along with 39% of Lib Dem voters and 19% of Green supporters.

Whilst Reform continue to lead by some margin in the polls ahead of Labour, the gap is much tighter on a local level in seats where the two parties are battling for first place. In these constituencies, the YouGov polling found there is only a two-point between Labour and Reform when tactical voting is taken into consideration.

The tactical voting could work both ways though. Whilst it is less of a factor in seats set to be fought between Labour and the Tories, Reform voters said they would be willing to vote Conservative to thwart a Labour win.

With Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters all willing to hold their noses and vote for another party simply to stop Farage becoming prime minister, this proves exactly what we said in the wake of the Caerphilly by-election: Reform's problem isn’t popularity, it’s isolation.