How much could undecided voters sway the election result?

Undecided voters who feel politically adrift and disillusioned by their choices in the general election could play an important role come July 4th.

Latest polling by Redfield and Wilson Strategies done one week before the election found that one in ten people still don’t know how they will vote, amounting to more than four million people. 

Rishi Sunak has attempted to scare undecided voters into voting for him, by warning of a Labour ‘supermajority’ as the polling predicts Keir Starmer is on track for a landslide. 

However the poll by Redfield will not be much comfort to the Tories, as it revealed that a dwindling pool of undecided voters are just as unlikely to vote Conservative as they were when the poll was last conducted. 

Only 12% of undecided voters said they are leaning closer to voting Conservative, while 20% of undecided voters said they are leaning closer to voting Labour. 

This rather dampened the desperate plea from the Daily Mail, which broke the polling story on Thursday with the headline ‘it’s not too late to stop a Keir Starmer supermajority’.

In fact, it suggests that Labour are on course to gain even more votes through the undecided come polling day, as the research also revealed there were almost twice as many undecided voters who said they were leaning closest towards not voting at all than voting Tory. 

It was pointed out that the Conservative supporting Mail ran a very similar story on the morning of the 1997 election with the headline ‘the great don’t know factor’, however the Conservative Party were subsequently dealt a crushing defeat as Tony Blair’s Labour won a landslide majority, as was predicted.  

The Liberal Democrats could also sway another 12% of currently undecided voters, while 11% said they are leaning to vote for Reform, 8% to the Greens and 11% said other. Of all the undecided voters, 23% said they were leaning closer to not voting than voting. 

It didn’t get any better for Sunak as the polling found he held a -38% net approval rating with undecided voters, 14% less than his rating with all voters. This compared to a -12% approval rating for Keir Starmer with undecided voters, versus +11% with all voters. 

Research by Ipso found that 7% of people who intended to vote Conservative in January are now undecided but still likely to vote, whilst 9% said they were now less than certain or unlikely to vote. This backs up the fear for the Conservative party that their results could also be more affected by former Tory voters just staying at home this year.

Hannah Davenport is news reporter at Left Foot Forward

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