London, (Samajweekly) Keir Starmer is on course to clinch a landslide majority of 140 for Labour at the next UK general election, the first modelling based on a mega poll of new constituency boundaries suggests.
With the Conservatives still suffering from a large polling deficit, Labour’s support was found to be at about 35 per cent to 12 per cent ahead of Rishi Sunak’s party, The Guardian reported.
The results were revealed in an analysis of polling known as multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP), and will boost Starmer’s hopes of victory as the long campaign in the run-up to the next election progresses.
John Curtice, a political commentator, said that since the sleaze scandals that engulfed Boris Johnson and Liz Truss’s mini-budget, there had been a “very substantial” drop in support for the Tories. Though Sunak had sought to steady the party, Curtice said there had been only “a bit of a narrowing” of Labour’s lead, The Guardian reported.
The general election poses a headache to pollsters and campaign strategists, as constituency boundaries are being redrawn for the first time in several election cycles.
In the first MRP based on the new boundaries, conducted by FocalData and presented by the Best For Britain campaign group, Labour’s potential success was said to be under varying degrees of risk, The Guardian reported.
If the Reform party – the reincarnation of the Brexit party – repeats the tactic used in 2019, of standing aside in Tory marginals, Labour’s seats would still be at a healthy 401, leaving the Conservatives on 202.
Another scenario has Labour winning 370 seats to the Tories’ 232, based on redistributing undecided voters by their education profile.
If both were combined, under what was billed as Labour’s “worst-case scenario”, the model predicts a hung parliament – with the party about a dozen seats short of a majority, with 316, leaving the Tories at 286, The Guardian reported.
The poll of 10,140 voters was undertaken between April 20 and May 9.
