Reform UK’s targets

Seeing Conservatives urging Elon Musk not to donate to Reform is them desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel and I have come across plenty of talk about them doing a “Canada 1993” but with the British FPTP voting system what are their actual prospects? The constituency level dataset for the 2024 General Election is available from the House of Commons Library and number crunching it gives interesting reading. See Table of Reform UK’s second places at the end for the numbers but immediately apparent are three observations:

1. They are mostly held by Labour
2. They are almost entirely “poor” second places
3. They just scraped many second places

Six of the top-ten are Conservative-held but beyond this Labour is undeniably the target since they hold 89 of the 98 seats. Reform will need Conservative voters but any real targeting of Conservative seats is practically a distraction and ultimately it is in their interest to at least keep the door open to a Reform-Conservative coalition. The name of the game would be to attack what presumably would be a deeply unpopular Labour government.

The average majority over Reform is 23% and even the first quartile is 16% so almost all of Reform’s second-places are far from being marginal. Many of these seats are ones that previously were rock-solid and are the sort that would only be lost in a complete landslide. This requires a level of targeting more akin to by-elections and underlines that they will need to pick their fights carefully. Reform have already made it clear they intend to follow the LibDem playbook with the hope of doing up north what the LibDems did in the south: Rack up votes where it matters.

A lot of the second-places that Reform got they only just scraped. Number two target of Hornchurch & Upminister is a true three-way marginal with the Conservatives having a majority of 4.1% but Reform only a wafer-thin 0.81% ahead of Labour. In total 37 of Reform’s second-places have them under 3.5% ahead of third-place and the median is 5.87% whereas ideally a second-place party wants third-place to be a long way behind so the “two horse race” argument can be deployed. This is not the case in the few Conservative-held seats that have Reform in second-place and in these places claims about splitting the anti-Labour vote will be deployed against Reform.

With these in mind if I had to pick 25 target seats for Reform they would be:

• Llanelli
• Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes
• Kingston upon Hull East
• Bradford South
• Makerfield
• Barnsley South
• North Durham
• Rotherham
• Sunderland Central
• Derby South
• Heywood and Middleton North
• Neath and Swansea East
• Houghton and Sunderland Sout
• South Shields
• Stoke-on-Trent Central
• Bolton South and Walkden
• Normanton and Hemsworth
• Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley
• Dagenham and Rainham
• Washington and Gateshead Sout
• Easington
• Ashton-under-Lyne
• Blackpool South
• Rawmarsh and Conisbroug
• Birmingham Erdington

Labour held seats with a majority under 21% as above this threshold the majority more often than not is double Reform’s vote share, and third place is more than 6% further behind so they are straight-up Labour-Reform contests. A direct ten-percent swing is no walk in the park but these are the ones I would be watching closely.

Table of Reform UK’s second places

Majority is difference between the winner and Reform UK whereas margin is difference between Reform UK and 3rd place.