Could the Labour Party blow its big opportunity?

The Labour Party now has an average poll lead of 23 percentage points, a deficit that no governing party has successfully overcome in an election campaign. The central scenario of The Economist’s prediction model, which draws from polls and the results in individual constituencies in elections dating back to 1959, is that Labour will win 381 seats to the Tories’ 192 (see chart 1), a thumping majority of 112 MPs. The model gives less than a 1% chance that the Conservatives would win a majority of seats if an election were held tomorrow. A separate analysis by The Economist, based on 100,000 responses to surveys conducted by WeThink, a polling firm, shows that 96% of voters have become less likely to support the Tories than they were at the election in 2019. Polling by Ipsos finds that voters think it is “time for a change” by a margin of 73% to 18%.