This research first appeared on the New Statesman podcast.

The full findings can be viewed in the link above this post ('Overview of results').

What we wanted to find out

• In April Persuasion released a large report on Reform curious Labour voters, examining the potential strengths of Reform.
• Less is known about the potential weaknesses in the Reform brand. What messages or communication strategies might Reform be vulnerable to if they are used by the party’s opponents?

What we did

• A Randomised Control Trial (RCT) message testing experiment involving 6,000 UK adults, split up into five treatment groups and one control group. Each treatment saw one message or approach designed to counter Reform.
• This had some limitations, acknowledged in the full deck, one of them was that it could only test five possible message territories - and so can only be thought of an initial exploration into this area.

What we discovered

• The message which tied Reform/Farage to corporate interests was the most damaging for them in this experiment, suggesting that raising the salience of economic conflict harms Reform. This supports wider research findings of Persuasion UK.
• Reminding people of Farage’s proximity to Trump is the second most negatively impactful message. Trump and Musk remain very unpopular with potential swing voters to Reform.

IPPR were not involved in this project (they partner with us only on policy projects).