This is why Reform is on the cusp of victory

New polling by Ipsos-Mori has Reform on 34 points, currently heading for a working majority in Parliament at the next election. If this came to pass, it would mark the most extraordinary result in British politics in at least a century. Can we really trust polls like these?
Let us consider reasons to be sceptical. The first is that all polls like this – standard, nationally representative surveys of a few thousand voters – only capture national vote share. They do not project the corresponding outcome of seats.
While we can make rudimentary assumptions of a party's likely representation in Parliament, they are still assumptions. A 34 per cent vote share would return a huge number of seats, but we cannot know whether the spread of votes would be broad enough to secure the number of seats implied by this poll.
A party might receive 34 per cent of the vote share, but their support might be concentrated in small geographical areas. In such circumstances, Britain's 'first-past-the-post' electoral system would limit them to a small number of seats. We know Reform will get little support in the big cities; this will artificially inflate Labour's seats next time and limit Reform's.
The second reason to be sceptical of these polls is that, this far out from an election, they cannot be treated seriously as predictions. Polls are merely snapshots of public opinion at an exact moment in time. Things were different three months ago; they will be different in three months from now.
Sometimes, with polls like this, there is a third reason to be sceptical: you get 'rogue' polls which put one party in an unusually high or low position. Sometimes polls randomly tap into a sample which is out-of-line with public opinion for some reason. This is why you must consider the average of all polls of a given period, and also consider whether polls reflect trends.
In considering this specific point, let us now flip the analysis back over. Let us consider why this poll should be taken seriously: there are several reasons to do so.
You cannot credibly write this poll off as 'rogue'. This result of 34 per cent broadly reflects other polls coming out at the moment. While it is a little higher, it is not much higher, and it confirms a clear trend that Reform is on the march.
It obviously also reflects recent election results. At the mix of national and local elections in May, Reform secured a new MP, a new Mayor and a raft of new councillors across the country. They received 31 per cent of the vote share in the local elections. Ipsos-Mori's poll merely puts Reform on a slightly higher vote share than they secured several weeks ago in real elections.
You must always take polls seriously if they reflect what is coming out in focus groups at the same time. Ed Shackle, Public First's head of qualitative research, confirms this to be the case. All the current momentum is with Reform. He notes that, while you used to get some hesitation from voters about admitting they were considering a Reform vote, this is gone now. People increasingly sense that Reform is surging, and it is exciting to get on the bandwagon.
While Reform is surging in less-affluent areas on the coast and in towns and small cities across provincial England, their support is up across the board in the focus groups. They are currently hoovering-up most of the votes of disaffected people across the country.
This recent polling result has also come after a wave of stories on issues where Reform is strong: immigration and crime, most notably. For the last few weeks, the media has been awash with stories of grooming gangs, serious crimes alleged to have been committed by asylum-seekers, the continued arrival of small boats, and all the rest. This cannot but help Reform's standing in the polls.
While I am personally sceptical of anyone's ability to make a judgement on the national mood based on their own personal, random conversations, when these conversations are entirely in line with the polls, you have to wonder. And the conversations I have with ordinary people in my own personal life confirms that huge numbers of people are seriously thinking about voting for Reform.
Overall, then, we should take this poll seriously; Reform is very obviously the most popular party in the country at this moment. But we still have four more years before the next election and an awful lot will change. Above all, given their recent record, it is reasonable to assume Reform will blow themselves up with internal rows and blatant incompetence.
If they can make it through to the end of this year in a similar polling position but without a terrible internal trauma, it will be worth taking them very seriously.

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