Reform UK Surge Turned a Labour Election Win Into a Tory Wipeout

July 5, 2024

Those searching for the moment Labour’s election landslide was confirmed should look no further than 3:15 a.m. on Friday. That was when the seat of West Bromwich flipped from Conservative to Labour with a majority of nearly 10,000 — despite Keir Starmer’s party only growing its vote share by four points.

Most of the 27-point drop in Conservative support in the West Midlands seat was likely driven by Reform UK, the insurgent right-wing party led by Nigel Farage, which won 20% of the vote.

It’s a phenomenon repeated across the UK. Reform saw the greatest gains in 80% of the more than 250 seats ceded by the Tories under Rishi Sunak, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of constituency-level results.

Source: Bloomberg News analysis of data from the Press Association and the House of Commons Library

Note: Based on 2024 results for 99.7% of constituencies declared. For each seat, only parties with increased vote share are shown. The vast majority of Parliamentary constituencies changed boundaries between the 2019 and 2024 elections. For those, references to 2019 results are notional based on estimates from Colin Rallings, Michael Thrasher, Professor David Denver (Scotland) and Nicholas Whyte (Northern Ireland) for Sky News, PA, BBC News and ITV News. Reform’s 2024 performance is compared against the 2019 performance of the Brexit Party, its predecessor. In seats where the Brexit Party didn’t stand candidates in 2019 — about half of all races — instead of calculating a vote-share difference, the vote share achieved is used as is. Seats in Northern Ireland and the Speaker’s seat aren’t included in the analysis because not all major parties contest them.

Despite its impressive showing, Reform ultimately garnered only a handful of seats, including a win for the party’s leader, Farage, the principal architect of Brexit and now a leading voice calling for tighter curbs on immigration.

Reform had an outsized impact on the race because it fielded candidates in roughly twice the number of seats as its predecessor, the Brexit Party, in 2019. Back then, Farage wanted to avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote. This time, the party contested more than 600 out of the 650 total seats — and dramatically hurt the Conservatives: half of their losses were in seats Reform was running in for the first time.

Due to the informal pact Farage struck with then-Conservative leader Boris Johnson in 2019 many Brexit Party supporters were not counted in that election. So the reported surge for Reform likely overstates how much their support actually increased nationwide.

The Green party also sat out many races in 2019 as part of an alliance with the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru in Wales, but it competed nearly everywhere in Thursday’s election. This year saw about 4,400 candidates overall, a record number and nearly 1,000 more than five years ago.

The Scottish National Party had one of its worst election results in more than a decade, helping fuel Labour’s nationwide triumph. Turnout of 60% dropped to the lowest in decades, a reflection of voter discontent.

View the full UK live election results

The more fractured electoral landscape mattered more in some places than others. In a majority of seats that the Conservatives failed to hold, the third-place party — nearly always Reform — won a larger vote share than the margin by which the Tories lost on Thursday.

Among the closest races were Cambridgeshire North West and Peterborough in the East of England, where the Conservatives lost by less than half a point while Reform had 13% or more of the vote.

Source: Bloomberg News analysis of data from the Press Association

Note: Based on 2024 results for 99.7% of constituencies declared. How close Tories came to holding onto a seat was calculated as the ratio of the third party’s vote share to the Tory’s losing margin. A higher ratio means a higher chance of holding onto a seat, because Conservatives would have needed to win a smaller share of the third party’s voters than somewhere with a lower ratio.

While Reform’s rise arguably cost the Tories their majority, it also relegated them to third place or lower in more than 200 seats, or about one-third of constituencies. That’s the worst showing since the 1950s.

The Tories ultimately underperformed Reform in one in five declared seats that both parties contested and trailed the Liberal Democrats in nearly 100 races, up from about 20 in 2019.

Reform’s success in attracting large numbers of 2019 Conservative voters effectively supercharged Labour’s win. That was a huge shift from just five years ago — and ensures those who voted Reform this time will become a key force in the next general election.

The story was updated at 1:15 p.m. UK time to include data for more constituencies that declared final results

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