Does PM’s claim add up?

Rishi Sunak has claimed the Conservatives’ disastrous local election results prove the country is on course for a hung parliament and a Labour-led “coalition of chaos”. He seized on research by the election experts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher suggesting that if Thursday’s results were replicated in a general election, Labour would fall short of winning outright.

The problem with this theory is that the read-across from local polls to a general election is quite hard to do. Here are some points that need to be taken into account.

National vote share

Many polling experts are sceptical of extrapolating a potential national result from local elections. “It is not an estimate of parties’ general election prospects. It is not a poll either,” said Rob Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester. It was, he said, an attempt to estimate how local election results would look if everyone voted.

The places that vote one year are politically different from those that vote in another set of local elections. This year’s council elections, for example, took place disproportionately in urban England outside London.

Smaller parties

Evidence suggests people vote differently at local elections than they do in national polls, and are more likely to back smaller parties or independents in the former. This time, about 23% of votes went to parties other than Labour, the Tories or the Liberal Democrats. But while independents do well in local races, they are rarely as successful in Westminster contests.

Scotland

Last week’s local elections only took place in England and Wales, so the Rallings-Thrasher analysis assumed there would be no change in results in Scotland. At the last general election, Labour only won one seat there, a total doubled at the Rutherglen byelection in October. But the party’s fortunes in Scotland have transformed amid turmoil in the Scottish National party, which has just elected its third leader in 14 months, and Tory chaos at Westminster. Labour is expected to win a bigger chunk of the 59 Scottish seats available at the next general election.

Reform UK

Reform only stood in one in six of the council wards contested last week. Its impact may be greater at the general election, with its leader, Richard Tice, pledging to stand a candidate in every constituency. In wards where Reform did stand, the Conservative vote was down by 19 points, indicating most of its votes later this year could come from people who previously voted Tory. Labour experienced a slight boost in vote share in wards where Reform stood.