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Best for Britain published another MRP poll on Tuesday, which saw the Conservatives win 129 seats in the next General Election. This accounted for 28.8% of the vote (excluding those who did not know and did not vote).
The MRP poll is a big improvement for the Tories compared to the previous one conducted by Focaldata. In the autumn of last year, they found that the Tories would win just 64 seats. This is because the Tories won 22.7% of the vote.
One way to assess the likelihood of the vote share yielding the number of seats predicted by this MRP poll is to look back to 1997. The two graphs below show the extra swing to the Conservatives that would be needed for them to lose 165 seats. successfully held. In both cases, they considered a perfect swing from the Conservatives to the party that came second in the seat.
The Conservatives won 31.5% of the vote in Great Britain in 1997. A vote share in the region of 23% would be nine percentage points lower than what was achieved in 1997. Based on this analysis, that would leave the Tories. with 11 seats, much lower than the 64 seats Focaldata estimated last Autumn.
However, if we apply the same logic to the 2.5 percentage point swing provided by MRP this week, then the Conservatives would have won around 121 seats in 1997. That is quite close to the 129 seats estimated by MRP.
There are, of course, many caveats to this analysis. Just assume a perfect swing for the party in the second place is pessimistic in the extreme from the point of view of the Conservatives. Furthermore, the 1992 and 2019 elections produced different results in many ways. In particular, the starting position of the Lib Dems is not as good as it was after 1992 and the Tories hold different seats now than they did in the 1990s.
However, if the Conservatives’ share of the vote falls to 1997 levels or beyond, it will be a bad night for them. This analysis may provide a clue as to how bad the Conservative poll numbers will be if they don’t improve between now and polling day.
Tom Leveson Gower
Tom Leveson Gower posted on PB as TLG86
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