Labor leader Keir Starmer poses for a photo during a visit to the Vale Inn on June 27, 2024 in Macclesfield, England. In the final week of the campaign, Labor outlined plans to expand opportunities for young people.
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LONDON – One of the main narratives has circulated since Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a general election in May – that the opposition Labor Party will win the vote by a landslide.
While voter polls may differ in scale and methodology, the results point in one direction, showing that the centre-left Labor Party has a lead of around 20 points over the Conservatives. Labor is on track to win around 40% of the vote while around 20% of support is expected to go to the Tories, according to poll tracker Sky News.
British reform, led by arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage, appeared with 16% of the vote, after eating away at Tory support, while the Liberal Democrats appeared to gain around 11% and the Greens with 6%. The Scottish National Party is predicted to win 2.9% of the vote.
Labor candidate and leader Keir Starmer is keen to reduce the level of support enjoyed by the party, fearing voter complacency and being seen as “in the bag” – an attitude that could lead to voter apathy and reduce the number of supporters. opinion polls, or backlash from the Conservative-leaning part of the electorate.
“The Labor Party wants to be able to convince the voters that it is really the center that they go out and vote, because otherwise the Tories will win, and the Tories are desperate for people to think that they still have a chance, and that’s why it’s worth turning,” the top pollster in Britain John Curtice told CNBC.
Questions have been raised in the past about the accuracy of UK voter polls, with previous projections or underestimations of support for various political parties. These errors often occur due to inadequate sampling or factors that are more difficult to control, such as voter “shyness” when polled about the party they want to support.
Labor Party leader Sir Keir Starmer speaks ahead of the UK general election on July 4, 2024.
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However, this year, experts tend to agree that if the polls show a swing for Labour, even if the measure of support is wrong, the overall result will be the same: a convincing win for the opposition party.
“My position is (that) the polls should be taken but not inhaled,” Curtice said wryly. “The point is, you don’t have to look at them to give you exact accuracy, you have to give them a reasonable indication of the direction of travel.”
“It’s happening because this is an election where one party seems to be ahead, like in 1997, the polls may be slightly out – but no one will notice,” he said. the year when Labor won a landslide victory over the Conservatives, ending the party’s last 18-year reign.
Labor ‘spin’?
The Labor Party itself has been keen to downplay the polls, with a spokesperson telling CNBC that the party does not comment on projections, “because they vary and fluctuate.”
“However, we are working hard to get the message out to voters about the changes ahead of the only important poll, on July 4,” a spokesman said.
Former Labor campaign and communications director Alastair Campbell, one of the key strategists behind the party’s rebranding in the 1990s as ‘New Labour’ before its monumental election win in 1997, told CNBC that he is skeptical of current voter polls.
“I’m very concerned about the way the election debate is going now, almost all of the debate going on right now is about these polls,” he told CNBC two weeks ago.
Former Labor Party strategist Alastair Campbell
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“Apart from a few postal votes, no one has voted yet. And I just don’t believe for one second that the Conservatives will get virtually wiped out, I just don’t believe it,” he said.
“I just think there’s something very wrong with this poll, I could be wrong, and it’s right that Labor is moving forward. on what the parties are saying.”
Polling expert Matt Beech, director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Hull, said Campbell’s position was designed to persuade Labour-friendly voters to vote.
“They want to make sure they get a majority. They all know about (the lead-up to the election in) 1992 with the phenomenon of ‘Tories blushing,’ when the polls said Labor would win and they didn’t… (But) they didn’t really worry about what you want a landslide tsunami like in 1997,” Beech told CNBC.
He added: “So if you keep banging that drum (that the polls aren’t right), you’re going to say to Labor-loving voters, ‘please get out and vote.’ But it is not that ‘we are afraid that we will not win, we will win comfortably, but we want a majority that allows us to push our agenda and we want to win this two terms.’“
