A new YouGov poll has put Plaid Cymru in first place in Wales for a Westminster general election – an unusual position for the party, which typically performs better in Senedd elections.
The poll shows Plaid on 28%, Reform UK on 21%, the Green Party on 19%, Labour on 15%, the Conservatives on 12% and the Liberal Democrats on 4%.
However, the results must be treated with caution due to the small sample size of just 121 unweighted voters (114 weighted) in Wales. Research was carried out on 2 and 3 November.
Professional pollsters are typically reluctant to draw firm conclusions from polls with such low sample figures, though the results are nevertheless extraordinary. The Green Party highlighted that it was in third place, ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.
Across England, Reform led with 28%, whilst in Scotland the SNP topped the poll with 35%.
Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, recently commented on the challenge of interpreting such polls under the First Past The Post system: “It shouldn’t take an expert to translate public opinion into seats. But the brutal truth is that in our system, votes don’t add up to representation, they get filtered, distorted and wasted along the way.”
He added: “With Reform UK on just over a quarter of the vote, they will probably get the most MPs, but who knows if that means they will be in government alone? Who knows how many seats the other parties will get. That’s not stability. That’s chaos wrapped up as tradition.”
