Reform Voters Will Be Hardest For The Tories To Win Back, New Poll Suggests
3 min read
Voters who ditched the Conservatives for Reform UK at the last election may be the most difficult for the Tories to win back, a new poll suggests.
A Savanta survey conducted in the run-up to Conservative party conference in Birmingham this weekend shows people who backed Nigel Farage's party on 4 July are significantly more likely to say people like them will be most difficult for the Conservatives to win back over.
Sixty two per cent of respondents who voted Reform at the General Election say Tory-to-Reform switchers will be the hardest for the Conservatives to persuade to return, according to polling shared exclusively with PoliticsHome.
While that statistic may seem unsurprising, the equivalent figures for people who voted Labour and Lib Dem on 4 July are much lower at 33 per cent and 29 per cent respectively.
Chris Hopkins, UK Political Research Director at Savanta, said the findings illustrate the "under-appreciated" stubbornness of Reform voters when it comes to the question of whether they can be convinced to return to the Conservatives.
“There is an assumption that Reform UK voters will be the easiest for a new Conservative leader to win back but, crucially, those very voters disagree.
"An under-appreciated trait of Reform UK voters seems to be how stubborn they tell us pollsters they are, and it'll take more than sounding tough on immigration to win them back.
"After all, it was failing to deliver on a hardline rhetoric that lost those voters in the first place," Hopkins told PoliticsHome.
The four candidates to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader — Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat — will go head-to-head in Birmingham before the party members choose the winner in early November.
How to win back voters who ditched the Conservatives for Farage's right-wing party is one of the major questions facing the quartet as they vye to become Leader of the Opposition.
While Reform won only five House of Commons seats on 4 July, the votes they took from the Tory party helped Keir Starmer's Labour win in swathes of seats nationwide.
Badenoch, a former secretary of state who is seen as on the right of the parliamentary Tory party, recently described people who backed on 4 July Reform as "our people".
The Savanta research, however, suggests a Tory strategy of focusing on those voters risks ignoring bigger sections of the population that voted for Labour and the Lib Dems.
A quarter of all respondents (24 per cent) told the pollster the Conservatives lost in July because they were not right wing enough. But a larger share (38 per cent) said the party was removed from office because it was not moderate enough.
“Savanta's research points to the issue facing the new Conservative leader: in July, the Conservatives lost voters in all directions for a myriad of reasons, and developing a unified strategy to win them back could prove to be impossible," Hopkins told PoliticsHome.
Fifty eight per cent of all respondents said they were not paying attention to the party's leadership contest, including 41 per cent of people who voted Tory on 4 July.
Savanta surveyed 2,050 people online between 20-22 September.
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