BBCUse our interactive poll tracker to check the latest trends by measuring how people say they intend to vote.
What do the latest polls tell us?
Rishi Sunak has kicked off the general election – it will take place on July 4, writes Peter Barnes, senior political analyst at the BBC.
Opinion polls suggest his Conservative Party is starting the campaign well behind its main rival, the Labor Party.
In fact, that’s pretty much what’s happened over the past 12 months, with Labor polling consistently above 40%.
Of course, opinion polls can be wrong, and Mr Sunak hopes that improving economic news and a focus on party policy platforms will help the Conservatives turn things around as the campaign progresses.
As things stand, however, Labor starts the campaign with a commanding lead in the polls.
Britain’s Reformers are in third place, but with their support spread evenly across the country, it could be difficult to turn that support into seats in Parliament.
The Liberal Democrats have been fairly consistently around 10% on average, but they hope that by focusing on their target seats they can make gains at the election.
The Greens have seen their poll numbers rise in recent weeks and they will also focus their efforts where they think they can win.
For the SNP and Plaid Cymru, Britain-wide polls are not a good way to gauge their support levels in Scotland and Wales respectively.
Now that campaigning has started, there are likely to be many more polls than usual, including in every country in the UK.
How big are the gaps between the parties?
All polls are based on a sample of respondents, usually more than 1,000, which is then weighted to be representative of the country.
There is always a margin of error, meaning the actual percentage may be higher or lower than a survey suggests.
We estimate that true support for each party falls within the ranges shown here.
Data from individual surveys are published online by the different companies.
When a party received less than 0.5%, it is shown in the table below as 0 due to rounding of figures.
What is a survey tracker?
Each point on the graph shows a poll result for a party.
We summarize all this information with an average line which makes the trend easier to understand.
What surveys do we use?
To obtain a range of surveys appropriate to our averages, we use those conducted by members of the British Polling Council.
Its members agree to the same rules on transparency, but the council said membership should not be seen as a guarantee of quality.
The surveys we include are from BMG, Deltapoll, Find Out Now, focaldata, Ipsos, JL Partners, More in Common, Opinium, Panelbase, People Polling, Redfield and Wilton Strategies, Survation, Techne, Verian (formerly Kantar Public), WeThink . (formerly Omnisis), Whitestone Insight and YouGov.
We only include voting intention percentages, which pollsters calculate by excluding people who answered “don’t know” or “won’t vote.”
Most of the polls included cover Britain, although some poll the whole of the UK. Respondents are not given the option to choose parties that run only in Northern Ireland.
We include data that is in the public domain. Some polling companies will not release all data from all parties at once.
Who pays for the surveys?
Where survey companies have indicated in their data tables who their client is, we have included them in our table. It is common for polling companies to carry out their work for news outlets, television programs and campaign groups.
What is the margin of error?
The true position of the Conservatives and Labor could be five percentage points away from our average.
Nine out of ten polls just before Election Day were within this range of eventual national vote shares in general elections from 2010 to 2019.
The gap is smaller for other parties campaigning across Britain and even smaller for the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
How do we average surveys?
Our estimate of party support is a moving average of polls.
A party’s share for a given day is the average of its results from polls carried out over the previous fortnight. We only consider each company’s most recent survey for that day’s averages.
Why do survey companies get different results?
All opinion polls differ a little because they ask different people. There are also other things that can cause differences between survey companies. For example:
- Different companies find the people who participate in their surveys in different ways
- The precise wording of the question varies among pollsters, and some pollsters ask more than one question to reach their voting intentions.
- Pollsters apply “weights” to their data to try to make their results reflect the makeup of the voting population. So, if a particular survey has a lower proportion of female respondents than in the overall population, their responses will carry additional weight in the final results. But different companies consider different factors
- Companies have different ways of dealing with people who initially say they are unsure how they will vote or who are unsure about voting.
What are the pollsters asking?
Regarding voting intention, polling companies typically ask respondents a question such as: “If a general election were held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?”
Some polling companies did not give their respondents the choice of certain parties, including them in the “other” category.
For example, Reform UK, formerly the Brexit party until 2021, is only included as an option in all polls featured in our tracker since autumn 2022, while support for Plaid Cymru is included among the “others » parties in the polls published by Techne.
Produced by Grace Richardson, Scott Jarvis, Becky Rush, Allison Shultes, Libby Rogers, Daniel Wainwright, Aidan McNamee, Jana Tauschinski, Debie Loizou, Preeti Vaghela, Robert Cuffe, John Walton.
