Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, we're doing something a little different, and instead of tapping into the mood at

Westminster, we'll look at the political mood of the country as we move further into 2025.

We've once again teamed up with the guys at Thinks, the Global Insight and Strategy Consultancy,

who pulled more than 2,000 UK adults last week on how they feel about the first six months to live in government,

their view of the different opposition parties, and if they regret their vote at last year's general election.

They also conducted focus groups this week with voters in swing seats that backed Labour in 2024.

So to discuss what this all means for the political parties this

year, I'm glad to be joined by Ben Shimson, co-founder and CEO at Thinks, as well as Paulham editor,

Adam Payne, who sat in on his focus groups this week. And making a pod debut is top colleague

Sienna Rogers, Deputy Editor of our CIS publication, The House Magazine.

So, Ben, I'll start with you.

Can you just talk us through what you were trying to achieve with this survey and what

the kind of key takeaways are, really?

Yeah, so we've been sort of tracking what we call the mood of the nation, thinks

insight and strategy for the last four or five years.

Always just starting out with some survey work to understand where people are at in terms of their optimism and pessimism

for their own lives, for the local communities, and for the nation as a whole,

and then really digging into where people are at on the politics of the day,

the issues that matter to them,

but also how they're feeling about the different parties. And so this time around, we conducted

an online survey of just over 2,000 UK adults, which we did just at the very end of January.

...