In all 17 of our polls since June 2025, the Conservatives have been between 18% and 21%.

The Conservatives are on 19% in Survation’s latest Westminster voting intention poll, conducted for Mandate Research on the 29th of September, the day of Andy Burnham’s conference speech. That’s within the same narrow range, but five points below where the party was in December 2024, shortly after Kemi Badenoch became leader, and more than four points below the 23.7% it won at the 2024 general election.

While the headline figure has barely moved, there are still signs of improvement for the Conservatives. Since last winter, Badenoch’s own ratings have improved and the Conservatives have won back some of the voters they had lost to Reform UK. These improvements are yet to translate into vote or seat gains though, and our latest MRP has the Conservatives losing nearly a third of their 2024 seats.

Badenoch is doing better than her party

In our poll of the 22nd and 23rd of September, 42% say Kemi Badenoch is doing well as leader of the Conservative Party and 33% say she is not, a net score of +9. That’s little changed from the end of June (+6), and across our six polls since then her net score has moved between +2 and +11. More people now have an opinion of Badenoch: the share who don’t know has fallen from 31% to 25%, and the share saying she is doing well has risen from 38% to 42%.

Voters also appear to have warmed to Badenoch over time: when asked if they like or dislike Badenoch, her net score was −1 in November 2025, against +8 and +7 in our two September polls.

This is not entirely driven by Conservative voters either: among those who voted Conservative in 2024, her net score is +63, against +68 at the end of June. Among 2024 Labour voters her net score has moved from −19 to −4, and among those who currently intend to vote Reform UK from +20 to +28. On best Prime Minister she is on 21%, level with Nigel Farage (21%) but well behind Andy Burnham (37%).

The leak to Reform has slowed

When Badenoch became leader, 78% of those who voted Conservative in 2024 said they would do so again. By last winter that had fallen to 64%, with 30% saying they would vote Reform UK. Averaged across our polls since mid-August, it has recovered to 69%, with 23% going to Reform. In our latest poll it was 72%

That recovery though has done little for the headline figure. 2024 Conservative voters make up only about a fifth of likely voters, so winning back five in every hundred of them adds about one point to the party’s share.

The larger problem for the party is they are winning almost no one new. Of its 19% in our latest poll, nearly 15 points come from people who voted Conservative in 2024 and fewer than 5 from everyone else, a figure that has barely moved since June.

Fewer seats and tighter margins

The Survation x 38 Degrees MRP, with fieldwork from the 20th of August to the 4th of September, projects the Conservatives to win 85 seats on 19.7% of the vote, down from the 121 they won in 2024. That puts them third, behind Labour (272) and Reform UK, which rises from 5 seats to 153. Note: Counting the leading party seat by seat gives 81 Conservative seats; the 85 below is the median across all model runs.

 On the central projection, the Conservatives hold 68 of their 121 seats from 2024, lose 51 to Reform UK and 2 to the SNP. They gain 13 from Labour, mostly in the south and east of England and London, including Chelsea and Fulham, Cities of London and Westminster, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip. These gains are narrow, with a median lead of 1.1 points.

Across the 121 seats the Conservatives won in 2024, the median majority was 7.6 points. Across the seats they lead in the projection, it is 4.8 points, and 42 are held by under five points. The Conservatives are second in 157 seats, 62 of them behind Reform UK.

 Tactical voting is where the Conservatives have most to gain. In the same MRP, 18% of voters say they would switch in a two-horse race. If all of them did, the Conservatives would win 131 seats and Reform UK 62: of the 91 seats Reform would lose, 46 would go to the Conservatives

Badenoch’s own seat is safer than in 2024

Badenoch won North West Essex in 2024 with a majority of 2,610 votes over Labour, 4.8 points. The MRP puts her on 32%, ahead of Labour on 24.5% and Reform UK on 22%, a lead of 7.5 points and a 97% probability of holding the seat. Her share is down on 2024 (35.6%), but Labour’s has fallen further (30.8% in 2024).

While Badenoch’s personal standing and the party’s hold on its 2024 voters have both improved since the winter, the party’s vote share has not followed, and at 19% the Conservatives remain below their worst general election result, the 23.7% they won in 2024, with the worst before that being 30.7% in 1997.

Should the party win fewer than the 121 seats it won in 2024 at the next election, it will be their worst result for the second election running: 121 was already the fewest in the party’s history. Badenoch is rated better than her party, but that has not yet brought more people to vote Conservative.

If the Conservatives finished third, with Labour in government and Reform UK the opposition, as the MRP projects on current voting intentions, they would be neither in government nor the official opposition for the first time in the party’s history.