A number of polls at the beginning of the campaign showed some fairly divergent poll results, with as much as a 16 point Tory lead over Labour and as little as a 7 point lead.  A week into the campaign has shown a more consistent lead of around 12 points in numerous polls, not overly different than the first projections shown on ericvotes, which continues to base projections on a final narrowing of the margin to 9-10 percentage points.  Thus with perhaps a few modifications, changes in shading and a about a dozen change of seats, the projected electoral map is essentially unchanged, with a respectable Conservative majority of 354 total seats projected.

What is perhaps more critical are the swings in the underlying dynamic – in 2017 the two main parties had the highest combined total vote share in some time at 82.4%.  With noted gains with both the new Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats, that combined vote share for the Tories and Labour is likely to collapse below 70% and may end up in the mid-60s on election day.

Polls vary to some extent in terms of who is gaining support from whom, but in comparing 2017 versus 2019 voting intentions, a few trends are very apparent:

  • Labour is struggling more than the other two parties in retaining their levels of support, with as much as a forty percent of their 2017 vote indicating gravitation towards other parties.  Roughly 5% of that support  is going to the Brexit Party , comparable to the same level of support going to the Greens and minor parties.  As much as 10% of their support is headed towards the Conservatives (which might be the most significant swing in the campaign – if it holds, giving the Tories a 20-30 seat majority); more support, perhaps 12-15% is headed towards the Remain supporting Liberal Democrats, although this may not be as decisive if, in a given constituency, the initial Liberal Democrat support and/or the 2017 Labour support was too small to overtake Conservative leads.  This is especially the case in southern parts of the country where the Liberal Democrats are projected to outpace their national gain in vote share.
  • The Conservatives are looking at retaining 3 out of 4 of their 2017 voters, while they lose 10% of their vote to the Brexit Party, they off set this with a smaller gain from Labour, (6-8%) and run 2-3% greater than even with the Liberal Democrats in terms of vote swapping, for an overall net decrease of around 3-5% of national vote share.
  • The Liberal Democrats, oddly enough, while making significant gains to over 15% of the national vote share, (more than double from 2017), they are actually retaining the same 3 out of 4 voters as their Conservative counterparts.  I suspect that some of this is attributable to vote swapping, or some Liberal Democrats less than enthusiastic for an unequivocal Remain stance.  As noted above, they are 2-3% points worse for vote swapping in relation to the Conservatives, but that might end up at being even or 2-3% to the better in the Southwestern and London regions of the country (which might be the second most significant swing in the campaign, and the one that keeps the Conservatives closer to 350 than 400 seats).  Labour, according to recent surveys, is bleeding more support to the Liberal Democrats than any other party.  It remains to be seen if that is sufficient to put more LD tan/orange on the map, given that both Liberal Democrat and Labour support in large parts of the southern England were low to begin with, especially outside of London and the Southwest.  The swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats might be more limited in the industrial north and Western Midlands of England, given that the Remain Liberal Democrats are more out of step with the stronger Leave sentiment in those regions.  The reduced likelihood for LD gains from Labour in the northern/heavier Leave regions is also a key component in limiting overall Tory gains, keeping Labour closer to 200 rather than 150-160 seats.
  • The Scottish Nationalists are likely to gain in seats and vote share north of the English border.  While they and the Liberal Democrats share essentially the same Remain message, their hand is strengthened both with established incumbencies in a majority of Scottish seats, in addition to the pro-independence stance that has gain further traction in the wake of 2016’s Leave vote.  The main causality of any resurgence of the SNP will be the Conservatives, simply because they have the seats to lose, whereas Labour and the Liberal Democrats are scarcely on the board.

This finally leads us to the Brexit Party, which didn’t even exist in 2017 but seems to pick up where the UK Independence Party (UKIP) left off, it’s resurgence attributed to intense discontent over the government’s attempt to execute leaving the European Union and a commitment to seeing the project through.  While they did actually lead some polls in the aftermath of some of the (Theresa) May government’s failures on securing a deal, the more unequivocal position of the Boris Johnson Conservatives have dampened support for the party, which, being led by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, appears set to gain a tenth of the vote share in next month’s vote.

This will likely not lead to any seats, although it may very well limit both Tory gains and Labour loses.  I will expound on both those points in that order.

Firstly, the main basis that I would predict no seats is the fact that UKIP, in 2015 with it’s highest vote share ever, at 12.6%, gained exactly one seat, that of a Conservative incumbent in Clacton who previously quit the party and retained the seat in a subsequent by-election as a UKIP candidate.  As the graphic below shows, Brexit/UKIP candidates are likely to do strongest in the East, at the mouth of the Thames and in the north, northwest. This largely corresponds to the Brexit vote share, having done well in the eastern and northern sections, although the West Midlands region, with the highest share of Brexit votes, only has a couple of seats in the Birmingham area, less than what one might expect. 

UKIP/Brexit/Leave Strongholds

There is not a perfect correlation between referendum votes for Leave and UKIP/Brexit support.  A number of the highest UKIP vote constituencies in 2015 did not make the top 10 in the 2016 referendum, and in some cases barely made even the top 100.  It further is apparent that the ratio between UKIP votes and referendum Leave votes and UKIP votes (which we are essentially extrapolating into potential levels of Brexit Party support) is relatively low, averaging just under 1 in 3 for Labour held constituencies (that is, out of 3 Leave votes in 2016, only 1 of those votes backed UKIP the year before), with Conservative-held constituencies only slightly more favourable for UKIP at 2:5 (of 5 Leave voters in 2016, 2 backed UKIP the year previously).  The magic ratio, for any constituency that voted at least 66% for Leave, is around 2:3 for UKIP 2015/Leave 2016 for the Brexit Party to be in serious contention in any given constituency.  There simply is no evidence that is happening, and support would need to be closer towards 20% nationally for the Brexit Party (given a broad distribution of support between England and Wales) before they even are looking at more than a handful of seats.

The other point to consider is who is losing the most with the Brexit Party’s resurgence (even as it has now appeared to have fallen back into the high single digits), and those signs point more to the Conservatives than Labour.  Indeed the most current opinion surveys show that roughly by a 2 to 1 difference, with roughly 10 percent of the 2017 Conservative vote share versus 5 percent of Labour’s for that same year, the Brexit Party is gaining more at the Tories’ expense, even in the Labour held northern constituencies which made a decisive difference in the 2016 referendum vote.  The more obvious point of reference would be to determine which party lost the most vote share to UKIP in 2015, but that is complicated by the fact that the Liberal Democrats suffered huge loses that year, and most of the beneficiaries were not UKIP but Conservatives, Labour and Scottish Nationalists.  Thus a retroactive ‘who gained the most with UKIP’s collapse’ is more instructive – where the overall result of some 170 constituencies (where they still ran candidates and had significant losses over 2017) shows that the Conservatives and Labour gained about evenly, the key Labour-held Brexit strongpoints in the industrial north showed that the Conservatives outpaced Labour gains with UKIP’s collapse. While it is entirely possible that some previously reliable Labour sections of support switched to UKIP in 2015 and moved to the Conservatives in 2017 (perhaps mirroring a more global movement towards right wing, blue collar populism), the fact remains that the current numbers point to more of a downside to the Tories, more of an upside for Labour with any increase in Brexit Party support over UKIP in 2017.

Finally, with the Brexit Party it should be noted that since the beginning of the election campaign the polling has trended downward for their party.  Perhaps wanting to avoid the potential economic impacts of a hard-Brexit, many believe that as the Conservatives have now committed themselves as the party delivering the change that they ultimately seek, namely a clean break from the European Union, many hardliners might be more readily persuaded to support the Tories’ new leadership under Boris Johnson rather than risk electing Labour and Liberal Democratic candidates who could, in their minds, only further delay, if not thwart, the entire Brexit enterprise in a fractious parliament much like the one after the election 2 years earlier.

In sum, the Conservatives are projected to get 354 seats with 37% of the vote; Labour 26.6% and 202 seats; the Scottish Nationalists 3.8% of the vote and 46 seats; Liberal Democrats 15.4% and 26 seats; Brexit takes 9.9% and zero seats, the other parties (Plaid Cymru, Green and Northern Ireland), 22 seats and 7.4% of the vote.

Next week will be a special focus on the Scottish and Welsh separatist and Northern Irish political parties.