Polling guru John Curtice says it will be ‘substantial challenge’ for Greens to win Holborn and St Pancras amid Burnham bounce
Curtice said that Polanski’s favourability rating went down after he shared a post on X criticising the police’s response to the Golders Green incident
The polling expert Sir John Curtice has said it will be “a substantial challenge” for the Green Party to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election as Andy Burnham’s Labour climbs in the polls.
Curtice told a Demos fringe at Green Party conference that at the local elections on 7 May, Labour was four points ahead of the Greens on 39%, when taking into account the Green vote, the vote for the Camden Alliance candidates, and local candidate Andrew Feinstein’s campaign.
Speaking to Left Foot Forward, Curtice said: “We know that the Labour party is a lot more popular than it was on May 7, and we know that the Greens are less popular. Therefore it becomes quite a substantial challenge.”
Curtice added: “If Polanski were to win, Westminster would go ‘I thought Burnham was a winner, what’s gone wrong?”.
He added: “If it’s a narrow defeat [for the Greens], Polanski will at least be able to claim to have given Labour a hard fight.”
Asked what a bad night for Labour would look like, the pollster said that if Labour increases its vote share compared to the 2024 election, “that would be a reasonably good result for Labour”.
However, he added: “They could well win the constituency with their share of the vote being even markedly lower than it was in 2024.”
Asked if it was “risky” for Polanski to have stood in Holborn and St Pancras, Curtice said: “Inevitably if you stand in a by-election as a party leader and lose it may raise questions in some people’s minds about whether you’re the person to take the party where it hopes to get to.”
“What he can talk to is the record of the last 12 months. The fact that this party has got to where it has is as a result of his charismatic outreach in a way that not even Caroline Lucas managed.”
Polanski’s net approval rating is now -24, the same as Nigel Farage’s. The Greens’ standing in the national polls has also gone down.
After Zack Polanski became leader last September, the party’s poll ratings went from around 9% to 15%, peaking around April this year. However, since then, the party’s support has been in decline.
On the drop in Polanski’s approval ratings, Curtice said: “He’s had one or two moments in the last 12 months, where thumbs should not have twitched so quickly.”
“The Golders Green incident, that’s where you can see, very clearly, that’s where his rating goes down,” Curtice said.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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