The Facts4EU.Org Election Eve ‘Poll of Polls’
Just how many seats will Nigel Farage’s Reform UK take off Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak?
Montage © Facts4EU.Org 2024
With the election tomorrow, we review the latest polling – Will there be upsets?
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour will win, but by how much? We suspect the people might surprise the pollsters. In this report we present our Election Eve ‘Poll of Polls’. We also ask about the dangers for democracy if Reform UK win a much higher vote share than the LibDems, but end up with 40 fewer seats.
The political landscape in the United Kingdom will change tomorrow. The general election will probably result in a seismic change, the likes of which we haven’t seen for a great many years. In this last day before the UK electorate (or at least the 80% who have not already cast postal ballots) goes to the polls, Facts4EU.Org reviews the latest polling.
We ask :
- What is the likely result for Labour?
- Just how bad might it be for the Conservatives?
- What are the chances of the LibDems making ‘a bungee jump’ into being the Official Opposition?
- What if Reform UK wipe the floor with the LibDems in vote share but end up with far fewer seats?
- Will the devastation of the Conservative vote result in a realignment of British politics?
Election polling has become ever more sophisticated. Somehow we seriously doubt whether they will come close to being right, but we’re presenting their final views anyway.
Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary
The Facts4EU.Org ‘Poll of Polls’ – Vote share
We aggregate 23 recent national polls to bring you
the pollsters’ best estimates for the General Election tomorrow
We have taken all the polls which started sampling just over one week ago, on 24 June. We then averaged the results and present the summary below. There were 23 polls which met the criteria and the total sample size was 127,632.
- Lab : 39.9%
- Con : 21.1%
- Reform : 15.8%
- Lib Dems : 11.3%
- Green : 5.8%
- Others : 3.1%
- SNP : 2.9%
[Sources : JL Partners | Savanta | More in Common | Deltapoll | We Think | Opinium | Whitestone Insight | Techne | Redfield & Wilton | YouGov ]
© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2024 - click to enlarge
Translating votes into seats is more difficult
Some of the polling companies take their results and, extrapolating from the data and asking additional questions, attempt to predict the number of seats for each party.
This becomes problematic for pollsters when looking at those parties whose vote is spread relatively evenly across the country. There are constituencies which are easier to predict, because of a particular party’s strength in an area. This is especially true of the LibDems who tend to focus their efforts on a relatively small number of seats even though they may have candidates nationwide.
For an insurgent party such as Reform UK, making inroads to the extent they might win a seat is a more difficult proposition. Without the resources or the time to establish a strong local presence in each constituency, and without enough ‘foot soldiers’ on the ground, they run the risk of achieving a good result nationally in terms of their percentage of the vote but of coming ‘a good second’ in many seats. And there are no prizes for second place in our ‘first-past-the-post’ system.
Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary
The Facts4EU.Org ‘Poll of Polls’ – Seat predictions
We aggregate the last 11 national polls to bring you
the pollsters’ best estimates for numbers of seats
We have taken the last 11 ‘MRP’ polls which attempt to predict seat numbers for each party. These are polls which took place during or after the moment Nigel Farage became Leader of Reform UK, one month ago today. We then averaged the results, weighted them towards the most recent, and present the summary below. The total sample size was 265,229.
- Lab : 461
- Con : 89
- Lib Dems : 56
- SNP : 16
- Green : 4
- Reform : 3
- Plaid : 2
[Sources : Survation (MRP) | JL Partners (SRP) | Find Out Now/Electoral Calculus (MRP) | We Think (MRP) | Focaldata (MRP) | YouGov (MRP) | Savanta (MRP) | More in Common (MRP) | Ipsos (MRP) ]
© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2024 - click to enlarge
Observations
After tomorrow our world will start changing
Clearly Keir Starmer’s Labour will win tomorrow and he will become Prime Minister. The scale of his victory is less certain. Yes, it will be a landslide but we suspect the numbers will be less than the pollsters predict. Experience tells us that Labour supporters often don’t make the effort to actually vote – particularly in this case when they know Labour will win anyway.
We must stress that the Facts4EU.Org 'Poll of Polls' does not represent our prediction of the final result. We would call it very differently. It is merely an indication of what pollsters think might happen, but some of their results vary wildly from each other.
Reform versus the LibDems
We believe that Reform UK might perform better than the pollsters are predicting. Whether this translates into seats is down to the way their vote is distributed. We will certainly have the LibDems in Parliament with far more seats than a party (Reform) which gained a much higher vote share.
We may have a situation where almost one in six voters (who vote Reform) feel disillusioned and disenfranchised, which is not healthy for democracy. Some will say “’Twas ever thus” but this time the contrast and resentment might be more sharply defined. Whatever the results in the early hours of Friday morning, if we end up with Reform getting a 40% higher share of the vote than the LibDems, but ending up with less than 10% of the LibDems' number of seats, this is not a good look for democracy in the UK.
And what of the Tory wipe-out?
The really big question is whether the size of the Conservative Party’s annihilation in Parliament provokes a fundamental realignment in British politics. The rump that will be re-elected will consist of a great many One Nation Tories on the ‘social democrat’ fringe, wholly unrepresentative of the population at large. Many true Conservatives will lose their seats.
This leaves the door wide open for the initial discussions - which we know have taken place between Reform and certain senior Conservatives - to accelerate. Watch this space after the election…..
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Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Wed 03 Jul 2024
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