For the past year, the story of British politics has seemed straightforward enough: Reform UK topping the polls by hoovering up disaffected Tories and working-class Labour deserters, while the Greens surge on the back of dissatisfied progressive voters fleeing Keir Starmer’s government. Each party feeding on a different wound.
But new polling analysis is complicating that picture significantly – and pointing to something that, even a few months ago, would have seemed far-fetched: the Green Party may now be drawing support directly from would-be Reform voters.
What the data shows
Writing in the New Statesman, senior data journalist Ben Walker – who also co-founded polling aggregator Britain Elects – has identified a striking pattern in polling of people who did not vote in the 2024 general election but say they are certain to vote at the next one.
Last summer, almost half of this group said they would vote for Reform. That figure has now fallen to around one in three. At the same time, 16% of previous non-voters who are certain to vote say they would now choose the Greens – up from 12% a year ago.
The crucial detail is what did not change: the overall number of previous non-voters who say they are definitely going to vote next time has stayed constant. No one has dropped out of the pool of likely new voters. They have simply shifted their first preference – from Reform to Green.
That is the data point driving Walker’s central question: might the Greens be taking Reform votes?
Why this matters – and why it’s surprising
The conventional analysis of the current political landscape treats the Green and Reform electorates as largely separate. Reform draws heavily from older, whiter, more economically anxious working-class voters in post-industrial towns. The Greens, particularly under Zack Polanski‘s leadership, have been seen as consolidating a younger, urban, university-educated base of former Labour and Lib Dem supporters.
The idea that voters are moving between these two parties – which occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum on almost every conventional measure – initially seems counterintuitive.
But Walker argues there is a segment of the electorate for whom the choice between Green and Reform is less about ideology and more about something simpler: the desire to shake things up. Some voters are looking more to “shake things up” than pursue a necessarily right or left platform. They may see little difference in a Green or Reform vote – and there are more of these voters than meets the eye.
He adds a striking supporting data point: a not insignificant number of Green voters would actually prefer Nigel Farage to Keir Starmer in Downing Street. It is a finding that underlines just how much the Green surge is being driven by anti-establishment sentiment, not just environmental or left-wing conviction.
This is also consistent with broader findings about what is driving the Green vote. The Greens are no longer just an environmental party with a tightly defined, ideologically consistent base. With a larger share of the electorate behind them, their voters are more diverse, more economically driven and less singular in focus – the appeal is less about all things green, and more a broader, left-leaning, protest-oriented politics, Labour-adjacent but distinct.
The national picture
The backdrop to Walker’s analysis is a national polling landscape that has shifted considerably in recent months, and which is now deeply uncomfortable for both Labour and Reform.
An Ipsos Political Monitor from March 2026 showed Reform still holding a seven-point lead over Labour – but that lead was down from fifteen points just four months earlier in November 2025. The Greens were the biggest movers in the poll, with their vote share increasing five percentage points following the Gorton and Denton by-election.
One YouGov poll put the Greens ahead of Labour by five percentage points. According to Britain Elects, Labour’s lead over the Greens is just two points – and it has been narrowing for weeks.
For Labour, the implications are severe. The party is not merely losing votes in one direction. Its core support is fragmenting across the political spectrum – to Reform on the right, to the Greens on the left, and to non-voters in the middle. In London, the Greens are a clear second, just four points behind first place. In parts of the north, Labour is now in third.
Gorton and Denton: the by-election that changed everything
The Green surge cannot be discussed without reference to the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, which produced one of the most startling results in recent British political history. The Greens won the seat – a Labour stronghold for decades – with a majority of over 4,000, pushing Labour into third place behind Reform.
While much of the early analysis focused on the constituency’s large Muslim population and its particular dissatisfaction with Labour’s approach to Gaza, the picture on the ground was more complex. Organisers at the count told Walker that in Denton – a more white working-class area – Labour was not in clear second place behind Reform. Labour was neck and neck with, if not behind, the Greens.
That finding is significant. It suggests the Green surge is not purely a function of Muslim or student-heavy demographics. The party appears to be making inroads in exactly the kind of traditional working-class territory that Reform had been expected to dominate.
What May 7 could mean for the Greens
Walker’s analysis takes on particular urgency given the proximity of the local elections, now just weeks away.
In London, the Greens are expected to make significant gains. Councils including Hackney, Newham and Islington have been identified as potential Green targets. The party’s mayoral candidate for Hackney, Zoë Garbett, has generated optimism among Green activists about the possibility of a high-profile result in the capital.
Walker writes that if the Greens do well in May, they could become the first-choice option for anyone looking to keep out Reform – but that they may also be in a position to attract prospective Reform voters themselves, not just progressives looking for an alternative to Labour.
For Reform, this represents an entirely new strategic problem. The party has spent the past year consolidating a coalition of disaffected voters who felt mainstream politics had nothing to offer them. If the Greens are now competing for some of those same voters – on the basis of disruption rather than ideology – then Reform’s position at the top of the polls is less secure than the raw numbers suggest.
The bigger picture: multi-party Britain
What emerges from Walker’s analysis is a portrait of an electorate in profound flux – one where the traditional left-right axis is a poor guide to how people actually think about their vote.
New polling from Merlin Strategies found that just six in ten of the public think Labour and the Conservatives will survive as major parties until 2029 – roughly the same confidence level applied to Reform and the Greens. The assumption that smaller parties are here today and gone tomorrow no longer holds. Voters increasingly believe the political landscape has genuinely changed.
In that environment, the idea of a Green voter who would prefer Farage to Starmer, or a would-be Reform supporter who ends up backing Polanski, is less contradictory than it appears. Both choices represent the same underlying impulse: a rejection of the status quo, and a search for something – anything – that feels different.
How the Greens manage that volatile coalition of support, and whether they can hold it together beyond the novelty of breakthrough results, may be the defining question of the next chapter of British politics.
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