Replacing Starmer with Burnham would help, according to the poll, but it would not be a miracle cure for all Labour’s woes.
Switching to Burnham is worth an extra 4.4 points in the national vote share for Labour and 61 more seats. That would take Labour from 127 to 188 MPs and cut Reform UK’s tally from 316 down to 256. Farage would remain in charge of the largest party in parliament, but his path to Downing Street — via any sort of power-sharing agreement — would be narrower.
“Andy Burnham’s approval ratings remain relatively untested,” said Wride. “The question is whether he can maintain his popularity when he needs to quell, rather than join, the wave of anti-political sentiment gripping the U.K. Starmer was unable to do this, and the cost to his own popularity in just two years has been seismic.”
Burnham’s best case scenario
But the analysis also modeled a more “aggressive” interpretation, in which every respondent who said Burnham would make them “much more likely” to vote Labour is included in the tally of voters who do switch to Labour, alongside half of those who said they were “somewhat” more likely. In that best case scenario under Burnham’s leadership, Labour would narrowly overtake Reform on national vote share, with 26.0 percent versus 25.9 percent and become the largest party in parliament with 243 seats, still 83 short of a majority.
The geographical breakdown is particularly bleak for Starmer, especially when the pollsters asked voters to choose who would make the better prime minister, in a series of head-to-head questions.
The only region where voters prefer Starmer over Burnham is in London, a finding likely to reinforce the caricature of the prime minister as a creature of the metropolitan elites who is out of touch with the rest of the country. Burnham wins everywhere else, in a head-to-head with Starmer, peaking in his native North West on 72.7 percent support and Scotland on 70.8 percent.