Blog/Polling

Nigel Farage has climbed to his highest-ever favourability rating with Focaldata, with 36% of the public now holding a favourable opinion of the Reform UK leader. While 42% remain unfavourable, putting Farage underwater overall, he remains the most popular of the UK's national party leaders.

On the voting-intention front, Reform's national vote share has reached 30% for the first time in one of our polls and the party now enjoys a comfortable 9-point lead over Labour. The survey, conducted between 8 and 17 October with a sample size of 2,057 respondents, resulted in the following headline voting intention figures:

• Reform: 30% (+1 since 1 October)
• Labour: 21% (-)
• Conservative: 19% (-1)
• Liberal Democrats: 13% (-1)
• Green Party: 9% (-1)

The cost of living continues to dominate the conversation on the most important issues facing the country, with over 60% of the public selecting it as one of their top three issues. Immigration and asylum remains in second place, while healthcare and the NHS rounds out the top three.

Finally, we used our new Text Highlighter tool to test responses to some of the party leaders' conference speeches with the public. The attached charts below show which parts of each speech extract the public responded most positively to. Across three of the four leaders, the theme of pride stood out as a key unifying idea which resonated strongly with respondents, though the theme took on different forms for different leaders.

Keir Starmer's framing of 'decency vs division' was his most effective section, with a country 'proud of its values' the best performing phrase of the extract. Likewise, Kemi Badenoch's nostalgic callback to the sense of pride she saw in the past was only beaten by her comment on Britain's stagnation. For Ed Davey, the concept of pride which tested well was centred around internationalism, in contrast to the nationalist 'unpredictable president' in the White House.

At least in the extract we tested, Farage's speech was the most linguistically distinct, with the Reform leader opting to convey an extremely gloomy outlook on the state of the country, filled with danger and decline. In a number of ways, the speech reflects his party's distinct political offering, which has seen them catapulted to the top of the polls by sweeping up the most pessimistic, unhappy segments of the voting public with very little challenge from the other parties.

Data tables for the survey can be found here.