Reform UK’s ‘huge potential’ laid bare in map of 2025 elections – hundreds due in ‘fertile’ Farage territory
Reform UK’s ‘huge potential’ has been laid bare in an eye-opening map of 2025’s elections, with hundreds due in Farage-supporting areas.
It shows the location of all 2,334 council wards up for re-election in May 2025, the first major batch of elections since Keir Starmer’s Labour party won a massive majority in July.
Poll-aggregating service ElectionMapsUK said the map shows ‘huge potential for Reform’ with swathes of ‘fertile’ Farage territory up for grabs in the local elections.
This includes contests in all five current Reform MPs’ seats.
More broadly, it refers to elections due across the east and southeast of England, in much of the West Midlands and in parts of Yorkshire and the Humber, all areas where Reform recently polled as the biggest party.
That poll did ask ‘who would you vote for in a General Election’, but it still shows support rallying around Farage.
As is clear from the sea of blue in the first map, the Conservatives recorded incredible results in 2021’s local elections, recording a net gain of 235 councillors.
Largely thanks to Boris Johnson’s popularity, Labour suffered a net loss of 327 councillors.
But four years on, the Tories now find themselves in the precarious position of defending the most wards in 2025.
Indeed, Kemi Badenoch’s party have a whopping 1,428 councillors defending their seats in May, more than triple Labour’s 368.
This is where Reform UK comes in. Nigel Farage’s party won a microscopic two wards in 2021, standing only a handful of candidates.
But in the four years since, Reform UK has undergone a dramatic professionalisation, weeding out dodgy candidates and setting up local party branches to try and take on the mainstream parties.
The transformation won them 14.3 per cent of the vote share in July’s General Election, but only five MPs. Reform candidates came second in 98 constituencies.
However, Farage’s party has recorded spectacular polling over the last few months, narrowing the gap to Labour and the Tories to just two or three percentage points. One poll even gave them a small lead over Labour.
This has been boosted by billionaire Nick Candy’s public defection from the Conservatives to Reform, a historic meeting with the world’s richest man Elon Musk and several deeply unpopular decisions from Labour.
While strong polling is encouraging, Reform will be desperate to translate it into electoral wins.
Indeed, when Nigel Farage shared an image with Nick Candy on X, Elon Musk retweeted it asking, ‘when is the first electoral opportunity?’
As the first map shows, May 2025 is that first opportunity, and it will likely come at the expense of the Conservatives.
While the Tories are enjoying something of a resurgence from the Sunak wipe out, the electoral high of 2021 will be extremely tough to follow, with Reform set to win swathes of seats from the party.
Some commentators are saying the main challenge for Reform will be if they can get enough candidates to stand. They only managed 12 per cent in elections earlier this year.
Elsewhere, the Liberal Democrats will be mounting defences in 290 wards in May 2025, and the Greens in 57.