How would each party have done if May’s elections were across all of Britain?

The elections held across the UK on 7 May 2026 produced a series of dramatic outcomes, and the political ramifications of those results are still playing out.

Different areas of Britain vote differently, and each year’s local elections happen in different parts of the country. If a party does well in the local elections, it might just be that elections were happening in areas where their supporters are more likely to live.

So, in my last article, I suggested keeping an eye on two sets of data produced by separate academics after the English local election results were in. Both datasets have been running for around 45 years, and both seek to do the same thing – estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole of Britain, rather than just in certain parts of it.

The Projected National Share (PNS) is produced by Professor Sir John Curtice for the BBC and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) is produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher for Sky News.

We expected that both measures would indicate that UK public opinion is now unprecedentedly fragmented, with support spread more thinly across more parties than ever before. This is exactly what happened.

Professor Sir John Curtice’s Projected National Share

The results of the May 2026 PNS are as follows:

Reform UK: 26%
Greens: 18%
Conservatives: 17%
Labour: 17%
Liberal Democrats: 16%
Others: 6%

May 2025’s PNS was the first in which five parties scored over 10%. One year on and five parties have scored over 15%.

Other things to note are as follows:

• The 26% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the PNS series. The previous lowest was the 28% recorded by both Labour and the Conservatives, in May 2019.
• It is the first time in the history of the PNS that neither Labour nor the Conservatives feature in the top two parties. The Greens are in second place, with 18%.
• There is only 10-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 26%) and the fifth-placed party (Liberal Democrats: 16%).

Although not showing quite as fragmented a picture as the PNS, the NEV still breaks a number of records.

Rallings and Thrasher’s National Equivalent Vote

The results of May 2025’s NEV are as follows:

Reform UK: 27%
Conservatives: 20%
Labour: 15%
Greens: 14%
Liberal Democrats: 14%
Others: 10%

Things to note are as follows:

• The 27% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the NEV series. The previous lowest was the 29% recorded by Labour, in May 2013.
• It is the first time in the history of the NEV that five parties received more than 10% of votes.
• There is only 13-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 27%) and the fifth-placed parties (Greens: 14%; Liberal Democrats: 14%).

The different order of the parties in the NEV and PNS just shows the impact a few percentage points has when the parties are so close together. These data sets don’t mean that, for instance, Reform UK would win 26% or 27% of MPs in a UK general election. With First Past the Post it’s really complicated for voters to work out how their votes will translate into representation.

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Random results from England’s local elections

There are numerous examples of this multi-party politics playing out in individual council elections across England, with seat after seat seeing the largest party receiving the support of barely a third of local voters. With these sorts of voting patterns, First Past the Post throws out some pretty random and bizarre results, making it hard for voters to know how votes will tranlate to representation in their area. A flavour from last week’s local elections are below:

• Sefton = Lab majority (55% of seats), with 29% of votes*
• Calderdale = Reform UK majority (63% of seats), with 31% of votes
• East Surrey = Lib Dem majority (56% of seats), with 28% of votes
• Bexley = Conservative majority (64% of seats), with 33% of votes
• Lewisham = Green majority (74% of seats), with 42% of votes

Many councillors are elected in wards where each voter has as many votes as there are positions to be filled. When some voters have 2 votes and others 3, and some decide to not cast all their votes as well, you can’t simply add up all the votes to calculate the vote shares. For councils with wards that elect more than one councillor (multi-member wards), we have calculated vote shares by using the number of votes for each party’s best-placed candidate in each ward. This is the approach taken by local election experts Professors Rallings & Thrasher of The Elections Centre, a major resource for local election data in the UK.

Now that the elections are over, we will continue to keep a close eye on the opinion polls and see where our multi-party politics heads next.

Do you think we need a voting system where every vote counts?