Who are Reform UK's 'red' and 'blue' voters? (Part 2)
In part 2 we explore what unites Reform UK's coalition of voters — and where the cracks begin to emerge
Reform UK’s voter coalition is complex. As we outlined in Part 1, they can broadly be split into two groups: Blue Reform voters who generally lean towards a small-state worldview, and Red Reform voters, who are far more open to state intervention and the need for strong regulations.
As a group however, they often don’t fit neatly into traditional left/right boxes. Instead, many orient their beliefs around a distinct brand of national populism — one that pits the ‘ordinary British person’ against a range of perceived elites: exploitative corporations, global capital, unaccountable CEOs, ‘woke’ cultural impositions and out-of-touch politicians.
In this second part, we’ll explore in greater depth what unites this coalition of voters, and where the cracks begin to emerge. You can also view the full report here.
And keep your eye out in the coming weeks for part 3 — the final section — where we’ll outline a few potential messaging strategies to engage these voters.
What unites Reform UK’s coalition?
Pessimism and disillusionment
There are two key factors which drive support for Reform UK, says Luke Tryl, director of More in Common. These boil down to: “[these voters] being more likely than not to think the country is getting worse, and more likely than not to feel disrespected.” According to the pollster, just 3 in 10 Reform UK voters say they feel respected, and as a group, they score particularly low in terms of their satisfaction with their finances and their work.
HOPE not hate’s research from September 2024 confirms a similar outlook. They found that 95% of Reform UK supporters believe Britain is in decline, while just 2.8% disagreed – figures which are significantly out of step with the broader public (see Figure 3). This bleak outlook is compounded by a strong sense of pessimism, with nearly 80% of Reform UK voters saying they are pessimistic about the future compared to just 21% who are optimistic.
Reform UK voters are also more likely to have given up hope that mainstream politicians will improve things. Over eight in ten (84%) think the political system is broken, while 92% believe that ‘politicians don’t listen to people like me’ (see Figure 4). While these are not uncommon sentiments in Britain today, the proportion is significantly higher than the national average, where 71% think the political system is broken and 69% think politicians do not listen to them.
Cultural grievances and national identity
Reform UK voters have a strong sense of national identity. When asked about their views on different political ideologies, ‘nationalism’ comes out as the most popular, closely followed by ‘conservatism’. For many, preserving what they see as traditional British identity goes hand-in-hand with resisting social and cultural change.
Polling from YouGov highlights the strength of these views among 2024 Reform UK voters. An overwhelming 89% agreed with the statement: ‘Young people today do not have enough respect for traditional British values.’ Large majorities also backed the statements: ‘Multiculturalism has made the UK worse’ (78%), and ‘Migrants coming to the UK across the English Channel should all be immediately removed and prevented from ever returning’ (86%). Reform voters are also far more likely than the general public to support reintroducing the death penalty in certain cases (see Figure 5).
As Figure 5 below shows, whether it’s issues of migration, culture, law and order, or progressive social values like support for transgender rights or the death penalty, Reform UK voters are markedly more hardline than the average voter, including Conservative voters.
A major driver of this worldview is a belief that the country is being reshaped by a liberal elite, whose values run counter to their own. In fact, polling shows that the second most popular reason for supporting the party at the 2024 General Election was that ‘Reform would oppose wokeness in all forms’ (50%), behind a belief that they would reduce immigration (71%).
This hostility to so-called ‘woke’ agendas is especially evident in views on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) regulation. YouGov polling found that Reform UK voters are significantly more likely than any other party’s supporters to say that DEI has ‘gone too far’. For example:
65% said DEI efforts for ethnic minority communities had gone too far (compared to 39% of Conservatives, 11% of Labour voters, and 12% of Lib Dems)
61% said the same about initiatives aimed at transgender people
51% said DEI had gone too far for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people
Distrust of big (foreign) business
Reform UK voters also tend to express economically populist sentiments, broadly agreeing that the economy is structured in a way that doesn’t benefit ordinary people. YouGov’s poll found that 73% think ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth, whilst 69% agreed that the rich should be taxed more than average earners. On top of this, 74% think big businesses take advantage of ordinary people and 78% said rich people are able to get around the law more easily.
These sorts of opinions suggest a large section of Reform UK’s voter base are unhappy with the direction of travel of Britain’s economy. As Luke Tryl says:
“If I listen to a group of Reform UK voters and they’re talking about the economy, they could be Corbynites. They’re saying big business prices are too high, we need to nationalise more. There’s this real sense that economic growth is set up to benefit the rich and powerful.”
These findings resonate with the controversial former academic Matt Goodwin’s 2024 research for the right-wing Legatum Institute, which found strong scepticism towards both globalisation and big business. He found that 60% of voters thought globalisation had made life in Britain worse, whilst just 6% said it had made life better and 21% said it made no difference. Similarly, 48% said the same of big business – compared to just 13% who think it has improved life and 31% who said it had made no difference. All of this paints a picture of an average voter that is frustrated by both the dominant economic model and the impunity of corporate elites.
Farage’s followers are clearly not aligned to a vision of Britain shaped by unregulated markets and dominated by global capital. In fact, Goodwin concludes from his research that:
“Reform is making inroads among people we might call ‘national conservatives’, voters who simultaneously hold strong concerns about the impact of illegal and legal immigration on the country but who also worry about the impact of corporations which they may perceive to be more interested in importing cheap labour from abroad than serving the interests of a national economy and national community.”
This goes a long way in explaining why Reform UK voters are also sympathetic to tariffs. Goodwin’s research found that over half (53%) said they would be happy to tax goods and services from abroad to prioritise British alternatives, even if they made them more expensive, meanwhile a third (35%) said they wouldn’t. Whilst there is division here – perhaps due to the prospect of a price increase during a cost of living crisis – it does suggest a large chunk of Reform voters are strongly supportive of prioritising UK businesses over foreign capital.
Reform’s leadership are seemingly aware of this. Whilst they were once seen as a party of ‘re-heated Thatcherites’, their pitch to the electorate at the previous general election was different. Their manifesto promised to lift the corporation tax threshold to £100,000 (from £50,000) and pledged to abolish business rates for small and medium- sized businesses on the high street, paid for by an “Online Delivery Tax” of 4% on “large, multinational enterprises”. Moves like this suggest the party is making a direct pitch to small business owners and positioning themselves as the party of domestic ‘family capital’, rather than national and international capital.
Public ownership is another area where the party has increasingly diverged from conventional pro-market policies. In their manifesto Reform promised “tighter regulation and new ownership models for critical national infrastructure”. This new model would “remove foreign ownership” of UK utilities and would see at least 50% come into public ownership with the other 50% owned by British pension funds.
This sort of economic nationalism finds broad support amongst their voter base. Over three quarters (77%) would like to see water companies better regulated, meanwhile 84% supported Labour’s proposal in the King’s Speech to make the CEOs of water companies personally liable for company wrongdoing. On top of this, proposals to bring key utilities into public ownership regularly get between 57% to 71% support depending on the poll – policies that were similarly popular amongst UKIP voters.
In general, Reform UK voters share a similar diagnosis of the problems facing Britain. In their eyes, the nation is in decline. The reasons are best attributed to what is perceived to be a powerful economic elite in the form of foreign capital and unscrupulous CEOs, and an influential metropolitan elite forcing ‘woke social values’ and pro- immigration policies on the rest of the country.
What divides Reform UK’s coalition?
While there is a shared diagnosis that Britain is broken — and that powerful metropolitan elites, big business and corporate greed are to blame — there is far less consensus when it comes to what should be done about it. And although Reform voters’ economic nationalism can lead to support for interventions such as nationalisation and stronger regulation of industry, that does not mean these voters are naturally economically left-wing.
On one side of the coalition are the so-called Red Reform voters: often economically precarious, probably former Labour or perhaps non-voters, and more open to state-led solutions. On the other side are Blue Reform voters: typically slightly more affluent, and more ideologically wedded to a small-state, low-tax vision of politics. Both camps may distrust the political establishment and share a populist outlook, but their economic prescriptions diverge sharply.
There is a clear disagreement, for example, over how much the state should be intervening to redistribute income. 42% of 2024 Reform voters say the government should not redistribute from the better off to those who are less well off compared to 33% that say it should.
A similar dynamic plays out when looking at the types of tax rises Reform voters would support. Polling shows that Reform voters are generally very sceptical of increasing the basic rate of income tax, with just 7% saying they would support it. But that figure jumps to 22% and 48% when asked about increasing the higher rate and top rate of income tax – a clear indication of Red Reform preferences. Meanwhile 60% and 34% respectively oppose such tax increases.
Interestingly levels of support for an increase in the level of corporation tax is split equally at 43% for and against. This aligns Reform UK voters far more with Conservative voters and likely reveals a strong wariness of state overreach unless targeted at a specific offending company or industry (e.g. water utilities).
Attitudes to welfare and benefits expose similar tensions. While some in the coalition support safety nets for working people, there is deep suspicion — particularly among Blue Reform voters — that the welfare system is abused. YouGov polling with 2024 Reform voters found 61% think benefits in the UK are too generous, compared to 16% that say they are not generous enough and 16% that say neither.
Finally, attitudes towards the state and the public sector are often critical. Polling on attitudes to government tax and spending priorities reveals this. One of the statements which drew the strongest support from 2024 Reform UK voters was: ‘The government could find all the money it needs if it made better decisions - like not giving fat cat train drivers a bumper pay deal’ (78%). This level of support put them on a par with Conservative voters (78%) and placed them dramatically out of step with Labour and Lib Dem sentiments – 22% and 31% respectively.
Similarly, when asked about reducing pension tax breaks for those on higher income tax rates, one of the most popular statements for Reform UK voters was: ‘It is blatantly unfair to raise these taxes for ordinary people when the government has just chosen to spend a load of money giving pay rises to public sector workers’ (72%). Again, this put them on a par with Conservative voters (72%) and out of step with Labour (25%) and Lib Dem (30%) voters.
Red Reform voters may be more sympathetic in principle to strikes and pay demands, but this is clearly dwarfed by a strong scepticism towards organised labour.
However, Reform UK voters’ attitudes towards worker protections are often far more supportive. What this likely speaks to is whether support for workers is understood through a lens of preventing big businesses exploiting their workers by banning, for example, zero hours contracts – something which UKIP voters similarly supported. Or, whether it is understood as over powerful unions pushing for excessive pay demands for public sector workers.
These differences matter. While Reform UK’s leadership has recently attempted to embrace more economically interventionist language — through calls for nationalisation, worker protections, or ‘re-industrialising Britain’ — their base does not yet speak with one voice on these issues.
The party’s challenge will be in reconciling these competing instincts. And for progressives, the opening lies in recognising that although Reform voters are far from reliably left-wing, there is clear space to win support — especially where economic policy can be framed as serving the national interest over an economic elite that puts profits ahead of workers and communities.
We’ll be releasing the third and final part of our analysis in the coming weeks looking at the types of messages that could do just this. Keep your eye out for our update.