Labor leader Keir Starmer poses for a photo during a visit to the Vale Inn in Macclesfield, England, June 27, 2024. In the final week of the election campaign, Labor outlined plans to expand opportunities for young people.
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LONDON — Ever since Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a general election in May, one dominant narrative has been circulating — that the opposition Labor Party will win the vote in a landslide.
While voter polls may vary in size and methodology, the results all point in one direction, showing centre-left Labor leading the Conservatives by around 20 percentage points. According to statistics, Labor is expected to win about 40% of the vote, while the Conservatives are expected to receive about 20% support Sky News Poll Tracker.
The Reform Party, led by Brexiteer leader Nigel Farage, is expected to get 16% of the vote after eroding support from the Conservatives, while the Lib Dems are expected to get around 11% and the Greens Received 6% of the vote. The Scottish National Party is expected to win 2.9% of the vote.
Labor candidate and leader Keir Starmer has been keen to play down the level of support the party enjoys, fearing a sense of complacency and the impression that “their pockets are deep” among voters – a stance that could trigger apathy and support from voters A decrease in voter turnout.
“Labour wants to be able to convince voters that it’s absolutely central that they turn out to vote because otherwise the Conservatives will win, and the Conservatives desperately want people to think they still have a chance and therefore deserve to show up,” said John Curtis, the UK’s top pollster (John Curtice) told CNBC.
The accuracy of UK voter polls has raised questions in the past, with previous forecasts over- or underestimating support for various political parties. These errors are often due to inadequate sampling or factors that are difficult to control, such as voters being “shy” when it comes to voting for the party they intend to support.
Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer speaks ahead of the UK general election on July 4, 2024.
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This year, however, experts tend to believe that the polls are showing Labor leaning so strongly that even if the scale of support is wrong, the overall result will be the same: a convincing victory for the opposition.
“My attitude is that you should poll, not inhale,” Curtis said wryly. “The point is, you shouldn’t look at them to give you precise information, they should give you a reasonable indication of the direction of travel.”
“It just so happens that because in this election one party is clearly so far ahead, just like in 1997, the polls can be wildly off and no one will notice,” he noted, referring to the same year. Labor defeated the Conservatives in a landslide, ending the latter’s 18-year rule.
Labor “spin”?
Labor itself is understandably keen to downplay the polls, with a spokesperson telling CNBC the party does not comment on forecasts “as they will vary and fluctuate”.
“Instead, we are working hard to get our message of change to voters ahead of the only poll that matters on July 4,” the spokesman said.
Alastair Campbell, Labour’s former campaign and communications director and one of the chief strategists who rebranded the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s before its huge electoral victory in 1997, told CNBC , who expressed doubts about current voter polls.
“I’m really worried about the way these election debates are unfolding right now, where almost everything in them is about polling,” he told CNBC two weeks ago.
Former Labor strategist Alastair Campbell
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“Other than a few mail-in ballots, no one has voted. I don’t believe for one second that the Conservative Party is going to be wiped out, I just don’t believe it,” he said.
“I just think something is going very, very wrong with these polls, and I could be completely wrong, Labor does keep leading. But I just hope that during our election we can talk less about the polls and more about the polls.” About what the parties said.
Pollster Matt Beach, director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Hull, said Campbell’s stance was aimed at persuading Labour-leaning voters to vote.
“They want to make sure they get as big a majority as possible. They were all very aware of the ‘shy Tory’ phenomenon in 1992[on the eve of the election]when the polls said Labor was going to win but they didn’t… (but) They’re not really worried about that, they’re hoping for a landslide tsunami like there was in 1997,” Beech told CNBC.
He added, “So if you keep beating the drum (the polls are incorrect), you’re saying to Labor-leaning voters, ‘Please get out and vote.'” But that’s not to say “we’re actually afraid we’re not going to win.” , we will win easily, but we want a majority that will allow us to push our agenda and we hope this victory means we are there “. .“
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