General Election poll tracker: Will Labour or the Conservatives win?
The live poll tracker from Sky News collates the results of opinion surveys carried out by all the main polling organisations – and allows you to see how the political parties are performing in the run-up to a general election.
If you can’t see the latest polls, tap here for the full version of this story
By charting changing voting intentions from January 2020 to now, the tracker allows you to monitor the evolving picture as we head towards the next general election.
Below you can learn more about the methodology, and how to read the data.
The tool you need as the election looms
Bookmark this page, remember this tool. Sky News has launched its own, authoritative version of one of the most important indicators available ahead of a general election next year.
Almost every day between now and the election, there will be new opinion polls by a clutch of different pollsters – each using different methodologies and all asking who voters will support on polling day.
Which pollster will be closest, which method is the right one, who should you look at? Those questions will always be unanswerable until the morning after election day, with the past only a broad guide to the future.
There is a tendency for political professionals to seize on every one of the polls, magnify every percentage point of movement, and draw dramatic headline conclusions. No doubt I will at times be guilty of this, but it will also put you at risk of over interpreting a single outlier poll.
Every poll has a margin of error of two or three percentage points either side. This isn’t just ignorable small print, it’s a big challenge for all of us – and a warning for all of us not to impatiently rewrite political narratives based on a single number change.
So the best way to use opinion polling reliably requires patience – and a lot more data. That is where this tool comes in.
How does one pollster, with its (usually) consistent methodology, move over weeks and months? Is there a discernible pattern from several different pollsters over a matter of days? Those of us with our noses pressed firmly up against the glass don’t want to wait for this.
This sort of analysis is only available through a “poll of polls”, which takes data from every single pollster that is asking voting intention questions and signed up to the industry standards body, the British Polling Council.
It is drawn up by Sky election analyst Will Jennings and Sky data and elections editor Isla Glaister – and supported by a team of Sky data scientists and designers. It’s an important piece of work for us, and a lot of thought has gone into it.
The poll of polls seeks to give an answer to the most important question of all – the direction of travel of public opinion over time. Are the closing months of this parliament, the declining state of the economy and the emergence of Labour’s policy platform making any difference? Keep coming back to this page.
There are limits. Crude attempts to turn the polling averages for the main parties into a number of seats for each party will always be just that: rough and ready and probably ultimately unhelpful (not that people will stop trying). This is a GB poll so the level of support for the SNP necessarily reflects how they fare comparatively across Great Britain, not just in Scotland.
Likewise, there is nothing here about Northern Ireland. Liberal Democrats might say they perform better in target seats where they focus resources, rather than nationally where they rely on air war alone.
Nevertheless, this is the page – and a tool – which will tell you the biggest picture story about the main parties and their comparative level of support as we hurl towards a general election where anything could happen. See you back here soon.
How does the tracker work?
The main line
The main line travelling from left to right shows the average support that each party was recording on a given date. The average is a simple mean of each of the most recent polls from all pollsters recognised by the British Polling Council.
Pollsters have slightly different methodologies in how they interpret raw results from the sample of people they ask. Our average uses a maximum of one poll per pollster, which means it is not skewed by pollsters who happen to publish surveys more regularly than others.
If the most recent poll by a given pollster was more than 28 days ago, we exclude it from the average.
The dots
The dots on the chart represent results from individual polls. If you click on a dot you can see the details of that particular poll for each party, including the name of the pollster who carried it out and the date they finished asking people.
Read more about the general election:
What happens now an election has been called?
Find your new constituency and how it’s changed
How boundary changes make Starmer’s job harder
The MPs who are standing down
The pollsters
The polls we include are all those by pollsters recognised by the British Polling Council (BPC).
The BPC is an association of polling organisations that publish polls, with a commitment to promoting transparency.
It is concerned only with polls and surveys that set out to measure the opinions of representative samples – such as the views of all adults, or all voters.
Membership is limited to organisations who can show to the satisfaction of the BPC that the sampling methods and weighting procedures used are designed to accurately represent the views of all people within designated target groups.
How are polls carried out?
Most polls these days are carried out online. Pollsters use a panel of people whom they know demographic information about – such as age, gender, education and where they live – so they can pick a sample that best represents the whole UK.
If polls are carried out over the phone, they will ask people this information at the time so that they can factor it into calculations.
Over the course of a few days, they ask these people their political preference and then take into account how many people of different demographics they’ve asked – and adjust the results according to what each pollster thinks is the best way to make the sample most representative of the country as a whole.
In general, pollsters should ask at least 1,000 people to get a reliable result. Statistical theory indicates that you are unlikely to get much more reliable results by asking any more than a couple of thousand people – even in a country of almost 70 million – but too many fewer than 1,000 could make the poll less likely to accurately reflect the views of the population.
Credits
Chart design and implementation:
Dr Will Jennings, Sky News election analyst
Daniel Dunford, senior data journalist
Yetunde Adeleye and Jenai Edwards, designers
Production:
Przemyslaw Pluta, lead data engineer
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
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The return on Donald Trump to the G7 was always going to be unpredictable. That it is happening against the backdrop of an escalating conflict in the Middle East makes it even more so.
Expectations had already been low, with the Canadian hosts cautioning against the normal joint communique at the end of the summit, mindful that this group of leaders would struggle to find consensus.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney carefully laid down an agenda that was uncontroversial in a bid to avoid any blow-ups between President Trump and allies, who of late have been divided like never before – be it over tariffs and trade, Russia and Ukraine, or, more recently Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
But discussions around critical minerals and global supply chains will undoubtedly drop down the agenda as leaders convene at a precarious moment. Keir Starmer, on his way over to Canada for a bi-lateral meeting in Ottawa with PM Carney before travelling onto the G7 summit in Kananaskis, underscored the gravity of the situation as he again spoke of de-escalation, while also confirmed that the UK was deploying more British fighter jets to the region amid threats from Tehran that it will attack UK bases if London helps defend Israel against airstrikes.
Canadian PM Mark Carney is greeted by President Donald Trump at the White House in May. Pic: AP
Really this is a G7 agenda scrambled as world leaders scramble to de-escalate the worst fighting between Tel Aviv and Tehran in decades. President Trump has for months been urging Israel not to strike Iran as he worked towards a diplomatic deal to halt uranium enrichment. Further talks had been due on Sunday – but are now not expected to go ahead.
All eyes will be on Trump in the coming days, to see if the US – Israel’s closest ally – will call on Israel to rein in its assault. The US has so far not participated in any joint attacks with Tel Aviv, but is moving warships and other military assets to the Middle East.
Sir Keir, who has managed to strike the first trade deal with Trump, will want to leverage his “good relationship” with the US leader at the G7 to press for de-escalation in the Middle East, while he also hopes to use the summit to further discuss the further the interests of Ukraine with Trump and raise again the prospects of Russian sanctions.
“We’ve got President Zelenskyy coming so that provides a good opportunity for us to discuss again as a group,” the PM told me on the flight over to Canada. “My long-standing view is, we need to get Russia to the table for an unconditional ceasefire. That’s not been really straightforward. But we do need to be clear about what we need to get to the table and that if that doesn’t happen, sanctions will undoubtedly be part of the discussion at the G7.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (R) is greeted by Mark Carney as he arrives in Ottawa ahead of the G7
But that the leaders are not planning for a joint communique – a document outlining what the leaders have agreed – tells you a lot. When they last gathered with Trump in Canada for the G7 back in 2018, the US president rather spectacularly fell out with Justin Trudeau when the former Canadian president threatened to retaliate against US tariffs and refused to sign the G7 agreement.
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Since then, Trump has spoken of his desire to turn Canada into the 51st state of the US, a suggestion that helped catapult the Liberal Party beyond their Conservative rivals and back into power in the recent Canadian elections, as Mark Carney stood on a ticket of confronting Trump’s aggression.
With so much disagreement between the US and allies, it is hard to see where progress might be made over the next couple of days. But what these leaders will agree on is the need to take down the temperature in the Middle East and for all the unpredictability around these relationships, what is certain is a sense of urgency around Iran and Israel that could find these increasingly disparate allies on common ground.
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