Posted by 
Nigel Farage’s entry into the U.K. election race seems to have finally put his Reform party on the map.
Pollster YouGov released its latest in-depth seat projections Wednesday as the July 4 vote looms. It’s the company’s first MRP model projection since Farage, now at the helm of Reform UK, announced he would be running in the election after all in early June.
Things have gone from bad to worse for the Conservatives, with the model projecting the party’s lowest seat total in its history. Coming in at just 108 of the total 650 up for grabs, the party is 257 seats down on its triumph under Boris Johnson in 2019.
Meanwhile, Reform U.K. makes its first appearance on the electoral map, projected to take five seats from the Conservatives, including the seaside town of Clacton where Farage is running.
On the upper end of the model’s confidence intervals, his party could even stand to win 17 seats. That’s quite the jump given the party’s precursor, the Brexit Party, won no seats in 2019 and Reform wasn’t projected to win any in YouGov’s last model — which used data from before Farage announced.
The MRP model estimates the relationship between voters’ characteristics and their vote intention. It then uses constituency-level data to project seat outcomes, if the general election was held now, based on the types of voters who live there. This latest MRP is additionally special as the names of actual candidates in each constituency were included in the survey question, which was not possible in previous iterations.
The projected change in the electoral map is stark, with a sea of red replacing many of the 365 seats the Conservatives won in 2019. The latest MRP also shows a few specks of bright minty blue in the form of Reform U.K. seats.
In addition to Reform U.K., the projections show the Lib Dems as big winners, increasing their seat number by a factor of 6 when compared to the 2019 general election results.
Reform U.K.’s implied national vote share based on the model is 15 percent, making it the third most popular party. However, in the U.K.’s first-past-the-post system this does not translate to winning a third of the seats up for grabs. In fact, of the five seats the party is projected to win, only Farage’s is safe.
Although Reform is far from winning in most seats, its vote share can play a role in dictating which party does. The Conservatives were projected to win the following seats in YouGov’s MRP model just two weeks ago, but they are now projected to lose them. As the dot plot indicates, during this period Reform U.K.’s vote share has increased in most of these constituencies.
While it is not accurate to assume that all Reform U.K. voters would have otherwise voted Conservative — in fact research suggests that only one in three would vote for the Conservatives if Reform were not part of the race in their constituency — there is an increase in Reform vote share in these seats while Conservative vote share has decreased.
The stark change in Reform’s fortunes over just a couple of weeks suggests that the Farage effect is real and a true thorn in the Tories’ side.
