07/04/2024July 4, 2024
Why seat projection figures are so difficult and so liable to swing
Rather like in the US, the majoritarian or “first-past-the-post” voting system in the UK can make it difficult to predict the most important part of the election outcome, how seats are divided up in the House of Commons.
Effectively, Thursday’s election is 650 separate and unconnected mini-votes. In every constituency, the candidate with the most votes wins.
A party has the numbers to govern if it wins 326 of these races. The party vote share at the national level is fundamentally unimportant to seat numbers. There are no runoffs or second rounds, and usually no coalitions.
Smaller parties have long railed against the system as unfair, but never have enough seats to bring about any reform; Labour and the Conservatives have traditionally both endorsed and benefitted from the system.
On the one hand, it makes matters simpler arithmetically. But it can make predicting seat numbers in the House of Commons a perilous game for pollsters.
At least 40 seats are considered marginal or at risk for both the Conservatives and for Labour — often in direct competition with each other, or sometimes in competition with third parties like the Lib Dems, Reform, or the SNP in Scotland.
Tiny changes in overall popular support across these battleground contests could swing many or even all of them. And that could be the difference between Labour winning around 400 seats, or even approaching 500, in the case of a Survation poll prediction that was near the upper range of any prognoses prior to the polls.
Labour’s all-time record haul of seats to date came in the 1997 general election, Tony Blair’s first of four wins, when they claimed 418.
The phenomenon is similar to the way the so-called “6% of six states” in the US — the undecided voter cohort in the most crucial battleground states — is expected to have an outsized influence on the 2024 presidential election in the US.
The first glimpse of just how right, or wrong, the predictions are will come with the exit polls, released just after voting finishes at 10 p.m. in the UK (2100 GMT/UTC).
The post UK election: Sunak’s Tories facing Labour landslide appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
