What happened in Holborn & St Pancras?
Published here for the first time as a diagnostic, Survation’s poll of the constituency, taken in the final stretch of the campaign, helps explain the result.
What voters told us mattered
We’d not just been chatting around the area. Survation interviewed more than 500 voters in the constituency over eight days at the end of the campaign, mainly by telephone, and of strong interest was what voters told us about the top issue that would influence their vote.
Who voted for whom
The vote itself followed the issues. Among Asian voters our poll had Labour and the Greens level, each on 49% – a long way from Gorton, where Labour’s Muslim support collapsed by the end of the campaign, but not a Labour stronghold either. A third of Asian voters told us they didn’t yet know enough about Sagal Abdi-Wali to have a view of her; Polanski they knew, and liked, with a net favourability of +26 among them. Labour’s lead in the seat was built elsewhere: among Black, mixed and other minority voters, where Abdi-Wali led Polanski by 55% to 32%, and among white voters, where she led 37% to 27% with Reform, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems splitting the remainder. The Greens held their ground among Asian voters. They did not advance.
The Green ceiling
When the Green Party and the Camden People’s Alliance (which worked with the Greens tactically) stood here in May 2026, their results were impressive: a combined vote share in the mid-30s overall, and eight seats between them. That coalition largely held. Nearly four in five of those who voted Green or CPA in May told us they would vote for Polanski; around one in six had moved to Labour. Labour’s own May voters were, if anything, more loyal, with 84% sticking with Abdi-Wali and 12% going Green. Among those who voted Labour at the 2024 general election – for Keir Starmer, in this seat – 67% were staying with Labour and 21% had gone Green. So the Greens kept almost everything they had won in May, and found almost nothing new. The ceiling, not the floor, was the problem.
Leaders and candidates
Here, we can see that while Green leader and candidate Zack Polanski has a net favourability rating of +11, the public in Holborn and St Pancras score Labour’s leader at +24. Labour’s candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, has a favourability rating (+7) similar to Polanski’s and, despite her association with the former incumbent, looks to voters like a very different prospect from Keir Starmer (−19).
The rest of the field
The other candidates tell their own story. Reform UK took 9% in our poll, in a seat where Nigel Farage’s net favourability is −43 and 52% of voters are very unfavourable towards him – a reminder of the party’s ceiling in inner London even as it runs Labour close nationally. Reform’s voters were the only group for whom immigration was the dominant issue, named by a third of them. The Conservatives, on 7%, were running against a leader rated −19 here. The Liberal Democrats’ 5% came largely from Haverstock and Primrose Hill, where they polled 14%; a quarter of voters didn’t know Ed Davey well enough to rate him. And George Galloway, who stood here explicitly on Gaza, registered 2%. If this were a Gaza by-election, it was not visible in his column. Restore Britain, whose candidate we did not prompt by name, was the one party on the ballot our poll could not see coming – more on that below.What voters expected
Although perhaps a quarter of voters in the constituency said they were still undecided when we closed fieldwork on the Tuesday before polling day, the seat looked set to prefer Labour in this by-election:
What happened on the day
On the day, Sagal Abdi-Wali won with 12,292 votes, 45.2% of those cast, to Zack Polanski’s 8,928 (32.8%) – a majority of 3,364, or 12.4 points, on a turnout of 38.8%. The Greens’ share was what our poll had said it would be. Labour’s was four points higher. That gap is the undecided. A quarter of likely voters hadn’t made up their minds when we closed fieldwork on the Tuesday, and more than two-thirds of those had no lean at all. Where they did lean they split evenly – roughly one in ten each towards Abdi-Wali and Polanski – and they were a little less certain to vote than committed supporters. The result suggests those who turned out broke for Labour, and the rest stayed at home. Either way, the Greens found no late surge among them.
| Candidate | Survation poll 29 Sep–6 Oct | Leaners allocated | Result 8 Oct | Result v poll |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sagal Abdi-Wali – Labour | 41% | 40% | 45.2% | +4.2 |
| Zack Polanski – Green | 33% | 33% | 32.8% | −0.2 |
| Ewan Cameron – Conservative | 7% | 8% | 7.1% | +0.1 |
| Peter Newman – Reform UK | 9% | 9% | 5.9% | −3.1 |
| Patrick Stillman – Liberal Democrat | 5% | 5% | 3.4% | −1.6 |
| Tyler Johnson – Restore Britain* | – | – | 2.5% | – |
| George Galloway – Workers Party | 2% | 2% | 1.2% | −0.8 |
| Others (8 candidates) | 3% | 3% | 1.9% | −1.1 |
| Labour lead (points) | 8 | 7 | 12.4 | +4.4 |
*Restore Britain’s candidate was not prompted by name in the poll. Source: Camden Council declaration, 9 October 2026; 27,211 valid votes, turnout 38.76%.
Survation interviewed 504 adults aged 18+ living in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency by telephone and online panel, supplemented by a small number of face-to-face interviews, between 29 September and 6 October 2026. Data were weighted by age, sex, ward, ethnicity, highest qualification, 2024 general election vote and May 2026 council election vote. Headline voting intention is based on 315 respondents who were likely to vote or had already voted by post, with undecided and refused responses removed; a second figure (40% Labour, 33% Green) allocates undecided respondents to the candidate they say they are leaning towards. Figures for subgroups are based on smaller samples and are subject to wider margins of error. The poll was commissioned by Dale Vince.
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