Pollsters from YouGov reckon about 12% of the electorate are still undecided. They tracked down 641 of them, and discovered that, while they are evenly spread across age groups, they are much more likely to be female (67%), to have voted leave in the EU referendum (43%, against 30% for remain), and to have voted Conservative at the last general election (43% compared to 15% who voted Labour). When questioned (which can be hard as uncertain voters are less likely to respond to pollsters) some are more undecided than others. They found that 9% are likely to end up voting Conservative, 9% for Labour, 5% for the Lib Dems, 4% Green and 3% Reform. A quarter of the undecided voters are “unlikely to actually vote”. “This leaves 45% of the overall sample of people who are ‘truly undecided’, having told us they are at least 6/10 likely to vote at the election, but even with one week to go won’t commit to a party,” says YouGov’s director of political research, Adam McDonnell. “This group accounts for 6% of the entire public.” It’s a far larger group of people than at the 2019 election, and is unusually concentrated among one party. “For months and months we have noticed that people who voted Conservative in 2019 are more likely to be undecided,” says Surridge. “By this point in the campaign we would have expected the proportion of “don’t knows” to have come down below 10%.” In the months leading up to the 2017 election there was a large group of undecided voters (that time people who had voted Labour in the previous election). “But by this close to polling day they had mostly gone back to Labour,” she says. “This time round, everyone expected the previous Conservative voters to start drifting back to the Conservatives, but it hasn’t happened.” Surridge analysed data on previous Conservative voters between May 2023 and May 2024 and found that “they were breaking as much for Labour and Reform as the Conservatives. When making up their minds they weren’t going ‘home’ as much as expected.” Asked why this might be, Surridge says that the Tories unpopularity means that “don’t know” voters “are going where other voters have – away from the Conservatives”. She doesn’t expect the remaining don’t knows to swing back to the Tories in the last three days. “[The Conservatives] remain very unpopular and have done nothing to improve their popularity … maybe if there were some big campaign event …” How did so many people end up undecided? Surridge says voters fell out of love with the Conservatives in two waves. “The first wave were the people who voted Conservative for the first time in 2019. Then, as things have gone on, it has started to eat into more traditional Conservative voters.” Liz Truss’s “mini budget” and Sunak leaving the D-day commemorations early “seemed designed to push segments of their core vote away”, she says. “The polling figures suggest that some people who have voted Conservative their whole lives are undecided if they’ll vote for them this time.” The undecided might change the age demographics of voters As most of the undecided voters are previous Conservative supporters, they skew the “don’t know” group older than at previous elections. “If we see Tories stay at home, it might rebalance the turnout in terms of age,” Surridge says. “At the same time, you have a group of people under 30 who support Labour but have never been able to vote for the winning party, so they might be more motivated to go out and vote.” In Luton, a town with one of the youngest populations outside areas dominated by a university, there is evidence of both anger at the Tories and a lack of enthusiasm for Labour. Patryk Kuna recently turned 18 and is undecided on who his vote will go to. “Labour has been making some pretty funny TikToks, so I might vote for Labour, maybe,” he told the Observer. “I just don’t like the guy [Rishi Sunak] in general. No one picked him for office, so why is he there?” |