PollCheck

Announcement: Today PollCheck is releasing our Locals 2026 Coverage We've published ward-level predictions for every English council voting on 7 May. 37 councils are projected to change control. Labour is projected to lose over 700 seats, while Reform gains roughly that many Counts will update with every new national poll Full interactive projector, council data packs, methodology: pollcheck.co.uk/locals-2026

Westminster Voting Intention: Reform UK: 25% (-1) Greens: 19% (-2) Conservative: 17% (=) Labour: 16% (+1) Liberal Democrats: 11% (=) Others: 7% (=) SNP: 3% (=) Plaid Cymru: 1% (=) Via: Find Out Now MOE: ±1.9% Field Work: 18 March changes w/ 11 March

This is the equivalent of starting a new job and not uploading a Slack / Teams picture for a week members.parliament.uk/member/5447/co…

Approval Ratings (NET) Kemi Badenoch: -8% (-2) Ed Davey: -10% (0) Zack Polanski: -13% (-1) Nigel Farage: -16% (-3) Keir Starmer: -45% (-4) Via: More in Common Field Work: 13–16 Mar changes w/ 6 - 9 March

Greens true to their name?

Locals 2026 Projection: Barnsley Reform: 30 (+30) Labour: 20 (-26) Lib Dems 11 (-1) Conservative: 0 (-1) Some thing to note here: Lib Dems are still likely to hold all 12 seats they have, their strong local presence in the 4 wards they control will be hard for Reform to overcome Importantly, Lib Dems got 49% in a December 2024 by-election in Dodworth Reform gain two seats in Worsbrough, but lose out in one to a well known Independent who got over 55% in 2023 The upper bound of Reform seats in this council is 35, the lower bound for Labour is 15 pollcheck.co.uk/locals-2026#/b…

Locals: Self declared candidates are starting to be added per ward

Perhaps the best news for the Greens will be that when asked about a General Election, the voting intention remained virtually identical This could show a genuine realignment rather than a protest vote

Greens also won the 18-34 vote by a huge margin among those who voted, While Reform won 55+

Gorton and Denton by-election 'exit poll' A deep dive on the poll conducted by @Survation for Datapraxis Labour won just one ward - Gorton and Abbey Hey All figures exclude Did Note Vote (31% of respondents) 🧵1/6

Westminster Voting Intention: Reform UK: 28% (-2) Conservative: 21% (+2) Labour: 20% (-2) Greens: 13% (+2) Liberal Democrats: 12% (-1) Others: 4% (+1) Plaid Cymru: 2% (+2) Via: More in Common MOE: ±2.0% Field Work: 13 - 16 March changes w/ 6 - 9 March

Made some improvements to this - places like Greenhill should look more realistic and less Green now. There was an issue with wards where there was previously a full slate vs 1 party candidate that had been fixed in the past but didn't apply correctly in some places Let me know if you spot anything else strange

@poll_checker Thank you!

Current Local Elections Projection: These numbers could change significantly after final candidate data in April For instance, Greens standing in every London seat is likely to shift their numbers, as will Reform standing country wide The model is constantly being improved with councillor and user feedback - if you're one of those, thank you! Working with local councillors and campaign managers has helped improve the data massively pollcheck.co.uk/locals-2026

@RhysBenjamin Yeah, it seems that in Harrow in particular the issue is in how the 2022 vote is being averaged in 3 seat wards where Greens had one candidate. This is likely affecting other outer boroughs too. I'll work on this today

@poll_checker There doesn’t appear to be too much difference between inner and outer London (eg Ref/Grn performance in Harrow seems overly optimistic for them)

NEW: A Gorton and Denton 'exit poll' shows that Andy Burnham would have won the by-election It also shows that only 36% of 2024 Labour voters voted Labour, and an equal amount voted Green Via @NewStatesman

@TobiasByfield Probably early April, since they're new authorities it'd be difficult to try without at least the candidate data

@poll_checker This does feel more realistic than the Bombe MRP doing the rounds, which suggests Labour will lose ~1,700 Councillors (which of course would be a devastating result). Any ETA on Surrey East + West modelling?

Thanks for flagging this, great point. The model uses recent by-election data but in this case there was a bug as values were entered incorrectly. This is fixed so the LD vote here looks much more realistic at 7%. Independents currently win with Greens second, but this will all depend on final candidate data

This model has the Lib Dems winning Plaistow South in Newham, a ward they came dead last in at a recent by-election with just 90 votes (4.4%). Other models have Greens winning significantly more seats in London in May.

@edhodgsoned This is genuinely great, nice idea

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