According to three main polls on Wednesday, including one that predicted yet the leading may lose his seat, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is headed for an electoral meltdown in the UK public election on July 4.
The Tories are on track to succeed only 53 votes in the upcoming vote, an all-time low for the 190-year-old group, according to seat-by-seat study conducted by Savanta and Electoral Calculus for the Daily Telegraph. A More in Common study for the News Agents radio predicted a 155 seat reversal, while YouGov put them on 108 chairs, which would also be a record. That would be 10 % less than the Labour Party’s final victory over the Liberals in 1997.
Any of those results may be devastating for the Conservatives, who like to style themselves as the UK’s healthy group of government, good bringing in a long time in criticism. Even worse for Sunak, a Savanta survey reveals him losing his own seat in Richmond and Northallerton, which would be unprecedented for a serving prime minister, despite the Tory Arthur Balfour losing his seat in 1906, one month after resigning as premier.
” The Conservative party is set for the largest defeat in its history”, YouGov said in a statement. It said the governing party is set for” significant losses” in the South West, South East and East of England.
According to More in Common, the opposition is on the verge of a 162-seat majority, which is close to Labour’s best-ever election result, the 179-seat majority secured in 1997 by Tony Blair. YouGov projects a 200- seat Labour majority, Savanta has them with a 382- seat advantage.
Such numbers would have seemed fanciful just five years ago, when Labour slipped to its biggest electoral defeat since 1935 under Starmer’s left- wing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. More in Common sees Labour winning 406 seats, YouGov has them on 425 — a record — and Savanta sees them winning 516 seats — almost four in every five constituencies.
The Liberal Democrats will recover their status as the UK’s third party, which they lost in 2015 after being punished by the electorate for serving five years in coalition with the Tories, according to the trio of surveys. More in Common put them on 49 seats— up 38 on 2019’s tally, while YouGov put them on 67 — which would be a record. Savanta puts them on 50, almost level with the Tories.
While the other two surveys show him winning none, despite having recently overtaken the Tories in at least one national poll, YouGov sees Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party taking five seats. More in Common Director Luke Tryl stated on the social media platform X that a lengthy fieldwork period might not have been able to capture Reform’s recent rise in the polls.
Separately, a constituency poll by Survation in Clacton, where Farage is standing as a candidate, showed him easily winning the seat with 42 % of the vote, compared with 27 % for the Tory incumbent, Giles Watling. Survation reported that Arron Banks, a long-time friend of Farage, polled 506 adults in Clacton.
A 162 seat majority, according to the More in Common survey, would be more than twice as many as the one achieved by former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson five years ago, compared to the projected smaller Labour majority predicted by the more recent so-called multi-regression and post-strategy ( MRP ) modeling.
With only two weeks until the Conservatives can change the dial, Tryl said in a statement,” The fact that this projection shows the Conservatives barely holding 150 seats is one of the most favorable to the Conservatives.”
Savanta found that in Richmond and Northallerton, Sunak is heading for a 29 % vote share, compared to 34 % for his Labour rival Tom Wilson. Still, the other two surveys see the prime minister retaining his seat relatively comfortably.
