General election 2024 poll tracker: How do the parties compare? (2024)

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Latest update: 3 July 2024

There has been a small but noticeable narrowing in the polls, writes senior political analyst Peter Barnes.

Polls published this week have tended to show the Conservatives gaining a little support whilst Labour has fallen back slightly.

And, in fact, if we compare the polls now with those from the beginning of the campaign both parties have seen their average rating fall but Labour's has dropped a bit more than the Conservatives'.

This shouldn't be exaggerated. Labour still has a commanding lead of about 18 points on average.

Reform UK are in third place - the rise we saw in support for them during the middle of the campaign has stalled in the final two weeks.

The Liberal Democrats are above where they started the campaign. The Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru have been pretty stable throughout.

More polls could still be published, but any that come out on Thursday won't be included in the BBC poll tracker. Like other broadcasters the BBC has to abide by strict rules on how elections are reported on polling day.

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All polls are based on a sample of people interviewed, typically more than 1,000, which is then weighted to be representative of the country.

There is always a margin of error, meaning the real percentage could be higher or lower than any one poll suggests.

We estimate that the true support for each party lies within the ranges shown here.

Each dot in the chart shows one poll result for a party.

We summarise all that information with an average line that makes it easier to understand the trend.

To get an appropriate range of polls for our averages, we use those conducted by members of the British Polling Council.

Its members agree to the same rules on transparency, but the council has said membership should not be seen as a guarantee of quality.

The polls we include have come from BMG, Deltapoll, Electoral Calculus, Find Out Now, Focaldata, Ipsos, JL Partners, More in Common, Opinium, Norstat (formerly Panelbase), People Polling, Redfield and Wilton Strategies, Savanta, Survation, Techne, Verian (formerly Kantar Public), WeThink (formerly Omnisis), Whitestone Insight and YouGov.

We only include the headline percentages on voting intention, which pollsters calculate by excluding or otherwise adjusting for those people who answered "don't know" or "won't vote".

Most of the polls included cover Great Britain, although some do poll the whole of the UK. People surveyed do not get the option to choose parties which only stand in Northern Ireland.

We include data that is in the public domain. Some polling companies will not publish all data for all parties at the same time.

The true position for the Conservatives and Labour might be within five percentage points of our average.

Nine out of 10 polls just before election day have been within that range of the eventual national vote shares in the 2010 to 2019 general elections.

The gap has been smaller for other parties which campaign throughout Great Britain, such as the Liberal Democrats, Green party and Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) and smaller still for the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

Our estimate of a party's support is a rolling average of polls.

A party's share on any given day is the average of their results from polls taken over the previous fortnight. We only take the most recent poll from each company for that day's averages.

• Different companies find the people who take part in their polls in different ways
• The precise wording of the question varies between pollsters, and some pollsters ask more than one question to reach their voting intention figures
• Pollsters apply "weights" to their data to try to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population. So if a particular poll has a smaller proportion of female respondents than there are in the wider population, their responses will be given extra weight in the final results. But different companies take different factors into account
• The companies have different ways of treating people who initially say they do not know how they will vote, or are not certain if they will vote.

For voting intention, polling companies typically ask interviewees a question along the lines of: "If a general election were held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?"

Some polling companies have not given their interviewees the choice of some parties, including them within the "other" category.

For example, Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party until 2021, has only been included as an option in every poll featured in our tracker since autumn 2022, while support for Plaid Cymru is included among "other" parties in polls released by Techne.

Produced by Grace Richardson, Scott Jarvis, Becky Rush, Allison Shultes, Libby Rogers, Daniel Wainwright, Aidan McNamee, Jana Tauschinski, Debie Loizou, Preeti Vaghela, Robert Cuffe, John Walton.

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