General Election poll tracker: Will Labour or the Conservatives win?
Thursday 4 July 2024 22:40, UK
The live poll tracker from Sky News collates the results of opinion surveys carried out by all the main polling organisations - and allows you to see how the political parties are performing in the run-up to the general election.
If you can't see the latest polls, tap here for the full version of this story
By charting changing voting intentions from January 2020 to now, the tracker allows you to monitor the evolving picture as we head towards July's election.
Below you can learn more about the methodology, and how to read the data.
How does the tracker work?
The main line
The main line travelling from left to right shows the average support that each party was recording on a given date. The average is a simple mean of each of the most recent polls from all pollsters recognised by the British Polling Council.
Pollsters have slightly different methodologies in how they interpret raw results from the sample of people they ask. Our average uses a maximum of one poll per pollster, which means it is not skewed by pollsters who happen to publish surveys more regularly than others.
If the most recent poll by a given pollster was more than 28 days ago, we exclude it from the average.
The dots
The dots on the chart represent results from individual polls. If you click on a dot you can see the details of that particular poll for each party, including the name of the pollster who carried it out and the date they finished asking people.
Read more about the general election:
Find your new constituency and how it's changed
How does the exit poll work?
The pollsters
The polls we include are all those by pollsters recognised by the British Polling Council (BPC).
The BPC is an association of polling organisations that publish polls, with a commitment to promoting transparency.
It is concerned only with polls and surveys that set out to measure the opinions of representative samples - such as the views of all adults, or all voters.
Membership is limited to organisations who can show to the satisfaction of the BPC that the sampling methods and weighting procedures used are designed to accurately represent the views of all people within designated target groups.
How are polls carried out?
Most polls these days are carried out online. Pollsters use a panel of people whom they know demographic information about - such as age, gender, education and where they live - so they can pick a sample that best represents the whole UK.
If polls are carried out over the phone, they will ask people this information at the time so that they can factor it into calculations.
Over the course of a few days, they ask these people their political preference and then take into account how many people of different demographics they've asked - and adjust the results according to what each pollster thinks is the best way to make the sample most representative of the country as a whole.
In general, pollsters should ask at least 1,000 people to get a reliable result. Statistical theory indicates that you are unlikely to get much more reliable results by asking any more than a couple of thousand people - even in a country of almost 70 million - but too many fewer than 1,000 could make the poll less likely to accurately reflect the views of the population.
Credits
Chart design and implementation:
Dr Will Jennings, Sky News election analyst
Daniel Dunford, senior data journalist
Yetunde Adeleye and Jenai Edwards, designers
Production:
Przemyslaw Pluta, lead data engineer
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.