Gorton and Denton by-election: what do opinion polls say about the parties?

Where do the parties stand? There are at least as many answers to that question as there are political parties, but much of the recent opinion polling suggest Reform UK’s remarkable surge in support may be subsiding, while the Greens, and to a lesser extent the Conservatives, are gaining ground.

Labour may be bottoming out at an extremely poor 15 per cent. But on 26 February we will have an actual by-election, which may or may not tell us more…

Reform UK, still. Nigel Farage’s party has been consistently ahead in the polls for about 10 months, although some more recent polls put them at 25 per cent, below their October peak of 30 per cent. On the other hand, the more ambitious sociologically-based “mega polls’ suggest a higher level of support and, more importantly, concentrated in areas where they have the best chances of winning Commons seats.

These MRP polls (multi-level regression and post-stratification) target predictions on the social and electoral characteristics of individual seats, and have a good record in prediction. The most recent two of these, both published this month, show Farage’s party winning a Commons majority. The Electoral Calculus one (fieldwork 1 to 8 December) gave Reform a parliamentary majority of 20; but one conducted by More in Common, with the fieldwork a few weeks earlier, predicted a thumping majority of 112 over all the other parties.

Even small changes in support and different assumptions about how the support will be spread and how much will be “tactical” voting can make a big difference in outcomes.

In summary: Reform still ahead, and far from collapsing but may well have seen some softening. Whether the run of Tory defections make a difference isn’t yet clear.

In terms of previous allegiance, it’s mostly from the Conservatives but there’s also evidence that some voters who abstained at the July 2024 election have been won over by Farage, albeit they too would also have been Tory voters in normal times.

Liberal Democrats. In the past, the combination of the two main parties being simultaneously unpopular always led to a surge in centrist support: the 1974 elections, for most of the 1980s and again in the run up to the 2010 hung parliament during “Cleggmania”. But now there are more plentiful choices for disillusioned voters: Reform, but also the Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, pro-Palestine independents and Your Party on the Left.

So their support is actually lower than at the last general election but sufficiently efficiently distributed in marginal seats to protect their parliamentary strength. By contrast, MRP studies estimate Greens would achieve anything from 9 to 52 seats – illustrating how difficult it is to make projections in a multi-party world.

Anything. Nothing counts as a safe Labour seat at the moment, and much will depend on which of the half dozen candidates emerge as the main contenders. It might well turn into a Greens v Reform contest, especially since George Galloway has said he won’t run (Shahbaz Sarwar, a councillor, will be the Workers’ Party candidate instead).

But it is not certain Andy Burnham would have won the seat even if he had become Labour’s candidate. More to the point a weaker Labour candidate could, perversely, help unify and strengthen the anti-Reform vote and deny Farage another by-election win; he only gained Runcorn in May 2025 by six votes.

Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, won’t be standing, which feels a shame given his strong campaigning skills; a local councillor, Hannah Spencer, seems the likely standard bearer.

Reform has chosen GB News presenter and former politics professor Matt Goodwin, who says the contest is “a referendum on Keir Starmer”.

The Conservatives will lose their deposit, as they only won 7.9 per cent at the general election and might even sink below the Lib Dems (3.8 per cent at the last general election).

Given that the next general election might not be until the summer of 2029, neither the by-election nor current opinion polls will tell us anything about who’ll form the next government.