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The final United Kingdom election polls make grim reading for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.
YouGov’s MRP poll (more on that below) predicts Keir Starmer’s Labour will win 431 seats, up 229 from 2019, with the Tories on 102, down 263 seats from the last election. These numbers would give Labour a majority of 212, the largest the party has ever enjoyed. Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats were on 72 seats, up 61.
Nigel Farage’s insurgent right-wing Reform UK, meanwhile, was predicted to win three seats.
A massive Labour landslide would be a transformative result for British politics, sending the Tories packing after 14 years of rule and five prime ministers, during which Brexit and ongoing rows over immigration have divided the country.
A poll by More in Common released Wednesday predicted a 210-seat majority for Labour, showing the party on 430 seats, up 228 from the last election, while the Tories were down 239 seats on 126. The Lib Dems returned as the third party with 52 seats, up 41, while the Scottish National Party held 16 seats, a loss of 32. Reform UK won two seats.
A Focaldata poll also published Wednesday suggested an even higher majority for Labour of 238, allocating the party 444 seats to the Tories’ 108 seats. The Lib Dems would also return as the third party with 57 seats, while the SNP held just 15 of Scotland’s 57 seats. Reform would again win two seats.
YouGov, a long-standing pollster, correctly predicted a hung parliament in the 2017 general election in an MRP poll when other polling suggested a strong majority for the Tories.
MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) polls use a far larger sample size and involve looking at each person’s voting intention and their demographic characteristics, including their age, income, occupation and level of education, as well as their past voting behavior.
The pollster then maps these factors onto the rest of the country, looking at how many voters fit that characteristic in each constituency using data from sources including the latest census, which allows seat-by-seat predictions.
In the House of Commons, 326 seats out of 650 are needed to govern with an overall majority. Labour’s last election-winning Prime Minister Tony Blair won the 1997 general election with a majority of 179, winning two further elections with smaller majorities.
