Prediction: Labour landslide may come on similar vote share to 2019

WestminsterPrediction

With three weeks to go until the general election, our modelling predicts that Labour may win a landslide victory with 391 seats on a very similar share of the votes to that achieved by Jeremy Corbyn’s party in 2019. This result would surely strengthen the case for electoral reform in the UK.

Where the parties stand 3 weeks out

Clearly since the start of the campaign Labour and the Conservatives have lost ground compared to the smaller parties. Our model doesn’t conform to the exact numbers being shown in mainstream opinion polls, but rather applies the general direction of travel from them to the actual results of the most recent local elections.

Here’s where the parties stand on our model 3 weeks out from the election:

PartyPredicted VotePredicted SeatsChange w/ 2019
🌹 Labour34.6%391+194
🌳 Conservatives22.1%144-232
🔶 Liberal Democrats14.8%64+56
🌻 Greens11.0%2+1
➡️ Reform10.7%3+3
🎗️ SNP3.3%21-27
👤 Other3.5%25+5

Why are the Lib Dems and the Greens higher than Reform when opinion polls say otherwise?

Simply put: parties’ capacity on the ground is important. Before the local elections in May, Reform were polling 12.8% on average in opinion polls… but in seats where all 5 major parties had candidates they actually only got 9.6% compared to the Greens’ 10.8% and the Lib Dems’ 13.8%.

The Green Party and the Liberal Democrats are parties with long histories and tens of thousands of genuine grassroots activists to knock on doors and get their vote out. Reform is popular because they are platformed disproportionately on TV, but they don’t really have the ground game to back it up and we think our model will prove itself come polling day.

The funny, if rather unsettling thing about this prediction is that Labour would win a massive Parliamentary majority on 34.6% of the vote, when Jeremy Corbyn famously got crushed in 2019 after winning 32.1% of the vote. No doubt the ruling right-wing of the Labour Party would attempt to claim this as a masterful victory, but the reality is it would lay bare our broken voting system and strengthen calls for proportional representation.

As a final thought – under PR, the seat total could look more like this: LAB 225, CON 144, LD 96, GRN 72, RFM 70, SNP 21, OTH 22.

Daniel Johnston Menezes

Game developer, font designer and founder of earthize.org, involved in green activism for over a decade.

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