Reform U.K. is on track to win 13 MPs, the final major poll of the General Election has predicted. The Telegraph has more.
Mr. Farage returned to frontline politics to lead the insurgent party in the second week of the election, prompting it to surge in the polls.
For the last survey of the campaign, Survation interviewed a total of 1,679 British adults for its “last call”, with fieldwork conducted between Monday, July 1st and Wednesday July 3rd.
A previous seat-by-seat prediction that Reform would win seven seats was subsequently revised upwards to 13, while it was also on track to win 17% of the popular vote.
Sir Keir Starmer was predicted to win a bigger landslide for Labour than Sir Tony Blair[‘s 418 seats] with 475 seats.
However, this would come from just 37.6% of the vote, a smaller share than the 40% achieved by Jeremy Corbyn when he lost the 2017 general election.
The Conservatives were projected to win 19.9%, the Liberal Democrats 12.1% and the Green Party 7.2%.
This would translate to the Tories winning 64 seats, less than one-fifth of the 349 MPs the party had at the end of the last parliament when Rishi Sunak called the election.
They would only be four seats ahead of the Liberal Democrats, who were set to win 60 seats by making significant gains in the “Blue Wall” – traditional Tory heartland seats in the Home Counties.
Survation arrived at its prediction by quizzing 34,558 respondents across previous weeks and predicting which constituencies would end up voting for which parties.
Once its interviews between Monday and Wednesday were completed, these findings were then applied to its seat-by-seat poll.
Worth reading in full.
It seems a bit off that during the campaign the pollster predicted just seven seats for Reform but jacked it up to 13 on the last day – a cynical person who sees opinion polls as akin to propaganda might wonder if the lower estimates were intended to demoralise supporters while the last-minute higher estimate is to salvage reputation. But let’s assume it was an innocent error in the assumptions, now duly corrected.
As ever, it’s very hard to predict what is happening in every seat, where local conditions, personalities and tactical voting can make a big difference in tight contests. So it’ll be very interesting to see how things pan out and how many seats Reform actually manages to snag. A start-up party winning any under First Past the Post is a major achievement, of course – and a reflection of just how angry and disillusioned voters are with both the Tories and Labour.
Look out for the exit poll at 10pm, which typically gives a very accurate indication of how the country has voted and what it means in terms of seats and majorities. We’ll report on it here at the Daily Sceptic.
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