In about six weeks, the UK goes to the polls for the May council elections.
It'll be the first electoral feedback on Keir Starmer's Labour govt since they won power in the general election in July 2024. It's Kemi Badenoch's first test as the new leader of the Conservative Party. And it's a big moment for Nigel Farage's Reform party as they seek to make a breakthrough.
The opinion polls are all over the place with Labour, Reform and the Tories all taking the lead at some point in the last two months. The best the pollsters can say is that all three parties are neck and neck in the low twenties.
However there may be another way to try to predict how the council elections will go: looking at the council by-elections since the general election. Council by-elections happen for various reasons. Death or ill-health creates a vacancy, plus many sitting councillors were elected to Parliament last July, which meant they had to resign as a councillor, triggering a by-election.
Council wards have an electorate of about 5,000 voters, and turnout for by-elections is low. However because there have been over 200 council by-elections since the general election, we have a sample of several hundred thousand people from all over the country who have actually bothered to go out and cast a vote.
Here are the aggregate results:
Aggregate Result in seats of the 220 Council By-Elections (for 225 Seats) since the 2024 General Election:
LAB: 74 (-37)
CON: 60 (+24)
LDM: 43 (-1)
RFM: 12 (+12)
IND: 11 (=)
GRN: 10 (+2)
SNP: 10 (+2)
PLC: 3 (=)
LOC: 2 (-2)
Aggregate Vote Share:
LAB: 24.2% (-9.0)
CON: 23.3% (+0.1)
LDM: 18.3% (+2.9)
RFM: 9.6% (+9.2)
GRN: 9.2% (+0.1)
SNP: 7.4% (-2.2)
PLC: 0.7% (-0.0)
Oth: 7.4% (-1.0)
As you can see from the vote share, Labour and the Conservatives are indeed neck and neck in the low twenties, exactly as predicted by the polls. But the LibDems are doing much better than their poll numbers, and Reform are doing considerably worse.
There are several explanations for this. The LibDems are very experienced in local politics and getting their supporters to turn out. Because Reform is a newish party still grappling with it's organisation and setting up branches, it's inexperienced at local politics.
Also, Reform's supporters are "terminally online" people who inhabit social media. They may respond favourably to an online poll, but not make the effort to vote.
Based on this, barring upsets, Labour and Tories will get similar vote share, with Reform gaining seats but not doing as well as they hoped.