Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has been riding high in the polls for the best part of a year now.
Indeed, by the time the dust settles on the local elections in England on 7 May – when Welsh and Scottish voters will also be choosing new devolved governments – it will be a year since Reform held a record 10-point lead over Labour in The i Paper’s monthly polling, leading the pack on 32 points.
But although Reform is still ahead, it’s numbers have since fallen. So the question widely posed in Westminster is has Reform peaked – or hit a natural ceiling of support?
Reform’s polling has gradually declined since the end of 2025. Last autumn, Reform was averaging about 31 per cent, according to Politico’s “poll of polls”. Today, it is averaging 24 per cent – the party’s lowest since the start of April 2025.
Farage’s connection to Trump has ‘become more and more toxic’
Louis O’Geran, a senior associate at the pollster More in Common, says of Reform’s current polling performance: “At the very least, we’d call it a plateau.”
A poll by More in Common last week put Reform on 25 per cent – the pollster’s lowest figure for a year (although it had recovered to 27 per cent in its most recent poll on Wednesday).
The trend is mirrored by what has happened to Farage’s popularity, with YouGov this week giving the Reform leader a net score of -38 – roughly his lowest score in a year (he remains well above Keir Starmer, on -45 per cent).
There are likely to be several factors behind Reform’s slide. O’Geran thinks that Farage is partly suffering from his connection with Donald Trump. While Farage’s friendship with the US President is not new and has always been looked on dimly by voters, O’Geran thinks it has become more corrosive to Reform because of the fresh cost of living squeeze unleashed by Trump’s attack on Iran.
“The top reason people give for not voting for Reform is Nigel Farage’s connection to Trump,” he says. “It’s just become more and more toxic.”
Chris Hopkins, political research director at the pollster Savanta, thinks that it is “to be expected” that Reform’s polling topped out at about 31 per cent. “It was hard to see where they could go from there,” he says. “I believe that the Tory party have a floor, the Labour Party have a floor.
“If you’ve squeezed the life out of the Tories and Labour to the point that you basically only have the die hards left, you’re then only really fishing in Lib Dem and Green pools. And how much better can it get for you?”
Zack Polanski also responsible
The Green Party of England and Wales may itself be partly responsible for Reform’s downturn. Zack Polanski’s party has risen inversely to Reform’s decline. In August 2025 – at Reform’s peak – the Greens were polling 9 per cent. Today they are on 16 per cent and contending with the Tories and Labour for second place.
At first glance, it might seem surprising that the Greens could eat into Reform’s vote. But that overlooks two things – firstly, that voters are often relatively non-ideological, and secondly, that there are similarities between the appeal of the two parties.
Hopkins says: “Both parties represent an ‘anti-Establishment, none of the above’ vote, right? They are two sides of the ‘not the Labour and the Tories’ coin. Neither Zack Polanski nor Nigel Farage would probably agree with this, but they represent the same thing on a really macro level, which is ‘the current system isn’t working – we have the alternative’.
“So at that point for a voter, it’s just like, what flavour do you want your alternative to be? Voters are not as left or right driven as we think they are.”
O’Geran says that Gorton and Denton – the first time the Greens had won a by-election, pipping Reform to the post, was “pivotal”.
“It’s the first time I heard several people in a focus group, saying ‘I’m torn. I can’t decide whether to vote Green or Reform’,” he says. “That group is actually relatively small… but in a tight race, they do make a big difference.”
That by-election also highlights another problem Reform will face when it comes to a general election – the potential willingness of those opposed to unite around a single candidate.
As well as falling short in Gorton and Denton, Reform got a taste of this in the Senedd by-election in Caerphilly, where progressive voters swung in numbers behind Plaid Cymru, giving the nationalist party a comfortable victory.
‘It’s never a straight line – we’ve led for over 260 polls’
It is possible that Farage’s vote may also be being nibbled at from his right. YouGov have begun including Restore Britain – a hard-right party launched by the former Reform MP, Rupert Lowe – in its polling. This week it put Restore Britain on 3 per cent, compared to Reform on 27 per cent.
However, so far other pollsters have not joined YouGov by including Restore Britain in their polling. O’Geran says “it’s hard to see” support for the party coming through at the moment – although he does not rule out Restore Britain becoming a threat to Farage’s core vote later down the line.
As for the Conservatives, while there has been talk of Kemi Badenoch enjoying a bounce following improved performances against Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions, it is yet to show up in the polls (the Tories’ polling average, at about 17 per cent, is roughly where it was at the start of the year).
While support for Reform may have peaked, the more pertinent question is if that matters.
Reform sources remain bullish about the party’s prospects and airily dismiss talk about hitting a ceiling.
A senior party source said: “I think it’s just noise. It’s never a straight vertical line. We’ve led for over 260 opinion polls now, well over a year.
“People kept saying our ceiling was 15 per cent, then it’s 25 per cent, now it’s 30.”
The source had a blunt challenge to those questioning whether Reform’s support is crumpling: “Ask me again on 8 May [when the results of the 7 May elections will be clear]”.
Reform expected to clean up in the local elections
It is certainly true that Reform – and most pollsters – are expecting a bumper set of results for the party in the elections next month.
“Ultimately, their net seat gain is going to be huge, because they’re starting from such a low base,” says Hopkins.
Along with gains in councils across England, Reform is contending with Plaid Cymru to be the biggest party in the Welsh Senedd and is widely expected to come second in the Scottish Parliament, behind the SNP.
“It will be very difficult, no matter what, to construct a narrative that they’re struggling,” Hopkins adds. “The plus column is going to be astronomical, the minus column for Labour is going to be astronomical.”
O’Geran agrees: “The Conservatives and particularly Labour are going to see huge losses, with most going to Reform. So it’s going to be a very good night for them and for the Greens.”
Given that Reform’s polling surged in the aftermath of last May’s local elections, O’Geran thinks Farage’s party may enjoy a similar boost this time around. “It will be interesting to see if they see the same effect afterward,” he says.
Reform insiders claim that this set of elections could be the tipping point in which the party definitively eclipses the Tories as the main party of the right. A second senior Reform source said: “The Tory party is a phenomenon in Westminster but it will not be a phenomenon as a national political party beyond May.
“They’re going to basically be eviscerated in Wales and Scotland and most of the North of England. There will be a few pockets of pensioners in the South East, that will be it.”
Eclipsing the Tories will allow Reform to further cannabilise their vote, the source said. “There are people in the Tory party who do not like Starmer quite a lot, and they really don’t like the Greens, and they will vote for the party of the right that will stop Starmer,” they said.
“We are the protest vote on the right… after May it will become clear that the only people that can stop them – if you lean right – is Reform.”
Five-party politics leaves No 10 door ajar for Farage
Even if Reform does not drift back up to the 30s in polling and remains roughly where it is in the mid to high 20s, it could still be enough to put Farage in No 10 at the next general election.
O’Geran says: “If they have peaked here, it’s not a bad peak. When the electorate is this fragmented, you can do a lot with high 20s.”
Hopkins agrees: “Maybe the political hive mind still thinks that parties need to be on 38-39 per cent of the vote at an election [to win].”
“In five-party politics, plus the SNP and Plaid Cymru, they don’t.”
According to Hopkins, in some MRPs – multilevel regression and post-stratification “mega-polls” which predict seat numbers – 32 per cent would give Reform “an absolutely stonking majority”. A recent MRP by More in Common which had Reform on a vote share of 28 per cent put it one seat short of an overall majority and comfortably the largest party.
The consolation for the other parties is that Reform has not decisively broken away – the Tories, Labour and the Greens are seven or eight points behind.
“[Reform] are kind of at the point now where actually a few points dip in their vote share is enough to really shift what the election looks like,” says O’Geran. “It is still to play for.”
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