Reform UK's support base: dedicated followers or soft support?

Key points

• A genuine core exists: polls in 2025 and 2026 found 84–85% of Reform UK's 2024 and 2025 voters would vote for the party again — the highest retention of any party.
• But the coalition around it is shallow: only 29% of current Reform UK voters say the party is the only one they would consider (July 2026); around four in ten are open to the Conservatives and to the right-wing breakaway Restore Britain.
• Support is anchored to one issue: 86% of Reform UK voters name immigration as a top issue, roughly double the national rate — loyalty to a cause and a brand more than to the party as an institution.
• Membership is large but self-reported: Reform UK claims more than 268,000 paid-up members (December 2025), making it, by its own count, Britain's largest party. The figures are not independently audited.
• Election wins have limits: the 2025 and 2026 local-election breakthroughs came on turnouts of about a third of electors, so they overstate likely general-election strength.

Aims

This report asks whether Reform UK — as of 2025–26 — commands a large body of dedicated, stable supporters, or whether its support is broad but soft. It examines four kinds of evidence: the party's actual election results, surveys of voter retention and loyalty, its membership claims, and the signals of fragility in polling. The question matters because the answer determines how much of Reform UK's current support would survive a scandal, a rival on the right, or the test of a general election.

Research

The electoral record, 2025–26: strong, but at low turnouts

In the May 2025 English local elections Reform UK won 677 seats — 41% of all seats up for election — and took overall control of ten councils, its first-ever control of any council. The academics Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher estimated its equivalent national vote share at 32% (House of Commons Library). The party repeated the trick in May 2026: across 136 English councils it won more seats than any other party on roughly a quarter of the vote (23.8% by the PollCheck aggregation), which the BBC summarised as "big gains at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives", including council takeovers such as Newcastle-under-Lyme (61.4% of its seats from 38.7% of the vote — Electoral Reform Society). Reform UK also led conventional voting-intention polls for more than a year from early 2025, a run its own pollster YouGov noted was unmatched by the SDP–Liberal Alliance surge of the 1980s or UKIP's peak.

Three caveats temper this record. First, local-election turnout was about 34% in 2025; an analysis by the constitutional think tank ICFS calculated that in the ten councils Reform UK took control of, its majorities rested on roughly 13% of registered electors. Second, academic analysts at the Nuffield Politics Research Centre (University of Oxford) caution that local elections amplify protest voting and that such voters have historically returned to the large parties at general elections. Third, first-past-the-post gave Reform UK a large "winner's bonus": the same 2026 elections saw it win just five of Sefton's seats on 25% of the vote there (Electoral Reform Society). The results prove enthusiasm; they do not yet prove a general-election coalition.

Retention: the strongest evidence of a committed core

Survey measures of repeat voting consistently show Reform UK's existing supporters are unusually sticky:

• YouGov, July 2025: 84% of people who voted Reform UK in the 2024 general election still intended to vote for the party a year on — the highest retention of any party, against 51–52% for the Conservatives and Labour. Only 8% of 2024 Reform UK voters had defected to another party.
• Focaldata, May 2025: of voters who backed Reform UK in the 2025 local elections, 85% said they would do so again at a general election — the joint-highest figure of any party, alongside the Greens on 83%. Focaldata concluded the results showed "a systematic consolidation of support", not a mid-term protest.
• Lord Ashcroft's polls, September 2025: 2024 Reform UK voters rated their likelihood of voting Reform UK again at 73 out of 100 on average, up from 64 in March 2025. Ashcroft estimated Reform UK's "floor" — current supporters highly likely to stay — at just under 25% of the vote, against roughly 15% for Labour and the Conservatives.

But the coalition above the core is shallow

The same pollsters find that the extra layers of support Reform UK has added since 2024 are loosely attached. YouGov's large voter study of July 2026 describes a three-part coalition: voters who backed Reform UK in 2024 and would again, 26% of everyone who voted Conservative in 2024, and a smaller group of Labour defectors. Its findings on the strength of that coalition:

• Only 29% of current Reform UK voters say Reform UK is the only party they would consider voting for.
• 40% are open to voting Conservative — including 73% of Conservative-to-Reform UK switchers (who would "return home") and 33% of 2024 Reform UK voters.
• 43% are willing to consider Restore Britain, the party founded in early 2026 by the expelled former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe — rising to 49% among 2024 Reform UK voters.
• A majority of the coalition hold at least one reservation about the party (17% doubt it has the talent to govern); Labour-to-Reform UK switchers are the least sold — 31% back Reform UK mainly because they see other parties as worse, and only 11% would consider Labour again.
• 86% name immigration as one of the most important issues, versus 42% nationally — the coalition is held together by a single issue and by Nigel Farage (favourable with 91% of its voters) rather than by attachment to the party organisation.

A separate survey of 11,342 Reform UK supporters, run by the polling firm Focaldata for the campaign group Hope Not Hate (fieldwork August–September 2025, published November 2025), segmented the coalition into five groups "united by anger and distrust yet divided over identity, economics and Britain's direction". Hope Not Hate judged the largest non-core group — the "reluctant reformers", about 19% of all Reform UK supporters — to be backing the party "out of frustration with mainstream politics rather than conviction" and to be the most persuadable segment. (Hope Not Hate is an anti-extremism campaign group; its segmentation is useful but not neutral.)

Membership: the dedicated pool is real, but self-counted

Reform UK claims to have more than 268,000 paid-up members (December 2025), which it says makes it the largest political party in Britain by membership, ahead of Labour (BBC News; the Guardian, both reporting the party's own claim). The party stopped publishing membership totals at the end of 2024, when its reported figure was 333,235 (Daily Mail). Membership numbers are self-reported by parties and not independently audited, and methods of counting differ, so the figures should be treated with caution (BBC News). Even taken at face value, members are not voters: a few hundred thousand members would be a small share of the party's poll ratings and says nothing about whether those members will turn out. Still, the membership boom is the clearest single sign of a large pool of committed followers — unusually large for a party that won its first seats only in 2024.

Fragility under alternative measurement

One dissenting measure deserves attention. Lord Ashcroft's polls do not ask the standard "which party would you vote for?" question; they ask how likely (0–100) a voter is to back each party. The psephologist Peter Kellner (formerly of Ipsos) has argued that the gap between that method and conventional polls exposes the softness of Reform UK's support: in August 2026 Ashcroft's method put Reform UK on just 18% and in third place — its worst reading on any pollster since November 2024 — while no conventional pollster had Reform UK anywhere near so low. Kellner's reading: conventional polls capture a protest mood that lifts Reform UK, while the likelihood question reveals how little of that support is firm. He concluded that "Reform's support is softer than that of other parties" and that the party should "beware the fragility factor".

The right-flank split as a loyalty test

Rupert Lowe, Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth, was suspended and expelled in 2025 after a bitter dispute with the party leadership (he was accused of bullying staff), and in early 2026 he launched the rival party Restore Britain. YouGov's July 2026 study found 43% of current Reform UK voters — and 49% of its 2024 voters — would consider voting for the new party. For a large minority of the base, in other words, loyalty is to the nationalist-right cause and to Nigel Farage's personal brand rather than to Reform UK as an organisation.

Analysis

The evidence points to a two-layer structure. There is a real, and for a party of its age unusually large, committed core: retention of 84–85%, a repeat-vote likelihood of 73/100, an estimated core floor near 25% of the vote (larger than Labour's or the Conservatives'), and a claimed membership bigger than any other party's. These measures all improved between 2024 and 2026, which argues against reading Reform UK as a pure protest bubble.

But the decisive margin above that core is soft. Only 29% of current Reform UK voters are exclusive to the party; around four in ten are open to the Conservatives and four in ten to Restore Britain; the majority hold reservations; and the vote is anchored to a single issue (immigration) and a single figurehead (Farage) rather than to the party as an institution. The core itself is probably large enough to absorb bad news — its members and voters have already absorbed the 2025 split with Lowe, the constant controversies around candidates and councillors, and the party's internal turmoil. It is the soft layers above the core that determine whether Reform UK's 2025–26 poll ratings become a general-election breakthrough or fade, and those layers are, by definition, the most persuadable.

Confidence in the evidence

• High: the retention and repeat-vote figures — several independent pollsters (YouGov, Focaldata, Ashcroft) converge on the same picture of a sticky core.
• Medium: membership claims (self-reported, un-audited, counting methods disputed); the "willing to consider" figures for Restore Britain and the Hope Not Hate segmentation each rest on a single survey.
• Low–medium: extrapolating from local elections to a general election — low turnouts (about a third) and first-past-the-post seat bonuses inflate Reform UK's local results, and academic analysts note that local-election protest voters have historically returned to the big parties.
• Missing: independently audited membership numbers; direct trend data on Reform UK voters' party identification through 2026; the 2024-vote history of 2026 local-election Reform UK voters; and any polling after the September 2026 donations investigation.

Conclusion

Reform UK does have a large body of dedicated supporters — larger, relative to its vote, than the old parties' cores, and demonstrated across membership, retention and polling between 2024 and 2026. But the majority of its current support sits in shallow, loosely attached layers: issue-anchored rather than institution-loyal, with a large minority open to rivals on both flanks. The committed core is probably resilient enough to absorb bad news; the soft margin above it is what will decide whether the party converts its 2025–26 highs into a general-election breakthrough or stalls. The tests to watch in the coming months are post-scandal polling, Reform UK's next membership count, and whether Restore Britain harvests the soft edge of the vote.

Sources

1. House of Commons Library — Local Elections 2025: results and analysis, updated 8 July 2026.
2. Elections Centre (Rallings and Thrasher) — Local Elections Handbook 2025.
3. Nuffield Politics Research Centre, University of Oxford — The Reform Revolution.
4. ICFS — Unpacking the Results of the 2025 England Local Elections, May 2025.
5. Focaldata — Six myths about the local elections, May 2025.
6. YouGov — How would Britain vote, a year since the 2024 election, July 2025.
7. Lord Ashcroft Polls — Flags, free speech, illegal migration, process v. outcomes…, 23 September 2025.
8. The Guardian / Hope Not Hate — Who supports Reform and why?, 13 November 2025.
9. BBC News — Reform claims to now have more members than Labour, 12 December 2025.
10. The Guardian — Reform UK claims it has overtaken Labour as Britain's largest party, 12 December 2025.
11. Electoral Reform Society — What can we learn from 2026's English local elections, 14 May 2026.
12. PollCheck — 2026 English Local Election Results, 7 May 2026.
13. BBC News — Election results at a glance (2026 local elections), 8–9 May 2026.
14. YouGov — Big YouGov Voter Study 2026: How solid is Reform UK's rise?, 13 July 2026.
15. Peter Kellner — Dear Nigel: beware the fragility factor, 10 August 2026.