Latest YouGov Westminster voting intention figures
The latest YouGov voting intention poll for The Times and Sky News shows a largely unchanged picture from last week. Reform UK are on 27% of the vote, within the margin of error of their 26% figure last week, with this an eight point lead over any other party.
Labour are unchanged on 19% of the vote, while the Conservatives record a vote share of 18% this week, compared to 19% in our previous poll. The Greens’ latest figure of 15% is also within the margin of error of last week’s (16%), while the Liberal Democrats remain on 14%.
Will YouGov include Your Party in voting intention figures going forwards?
An important decision when asking about voting intention is which parties to include in the main prompt. A large number of small parties typically run at elections, and prompting for them would be impractical and risk overinflating support for smaller parties.
Typically, therefore, polling companies will initially prompt for the main five parties, and for the SNP and Plaid in Scotland and Wales, and then give the option of “another party”. For people who say "other", a follow up question can ask which other party.
Above a certain level of support, however, putting a party behind the “other” option would risk understating their support. Exactly where this crossover might be and at what point a party should be promoted to the main prompt is a matter of judgement. In the past YouGov has normally addressed this issue by doing test polls with no prompt at all, to get an idea of what support would be without any prompting at all (we have written about this at more length here). In the case of the Brexit Party and Greens, this resulted in us moving them to the main prompt at a support level of around 8%-10%.
Over the last few months, we have been testing how best to incorporate Your Party into polling once they had confirmed their name. This included running an unprompted open-end question last week, to which less than 1% of respondents said they intended to vote for Your Party, a near-identical level of support to when including them as part of the “other party” route.
With such a low level of support, we believe the most appropriate way going forward is to continue to include them in the follow up question asked to those who say “other”, and will not be reporting them separately in headline figures.
We will continue to monitor this and, as ever, will review and revisit this should their level of support significantly rise.
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