A forest of final estimates is anticipated in this final 24 hours of the campaign. But unless they indicate that there has been a dramatic last-minute turnaround, it looks as though Sir Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister on Friday. What remains uncertain is just how badly things might turn out for the Conservatives.
The first uncertainty are the don’t knows. The polls are still reporting that on average those who voted Conservative in 2019 are twice as likely as those who voted Labour to say that they do not know how they will vote on Thursday. This is, in truth, one of the many symptoms of the wave of unpopularity from which the party has struggled to escape ever since Liz Truss left Downing St in October 2022. Many undecideds are as unhappy with the Conservatives as those who say they are going to vote differently this time around – they just are not sure what to do as a result.
Still, if any group of voters is going to drift back to the Conservatives in the final hours the undecideds are probably the most likely to do so. But even if all of them eventually vote for the party they backed in 2019, there are not enough of them to do more than put a three or four point dent in Labour’s lead.
The second uncertainty is how the electoral system will reward whatever share of the vote the Conservatives eventually acquire. A key message of the numerous MRP megapolls that have sprouted up during this election campaign has been that support for the party is falling more heavily in constituencies that the party is trying to defend.
In part this is arithmetically inevitable – the polls suggest the party’s vote could fall by 25 points across the country as a whole, but there are over 100 constituencies where the party did not win as much as 25 per cent last time.
At the same time, however, Reform are most likely to damage the Conservatives’ prospects in Tory-held seats. Reform’s predecessor party, the Brexit Party, did not stand in Conservative-held seats last time, and so whatever they win this time in these seats – primarily at the expense of the Conservatives – will be an increase on zero.
However the polls do not agree on just how strong this pattern will prove to be. Mr Sunak has to hope that it proves not so strong after all.
John Curtice is Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde, and Senior Fellow, National Centre for Social Research and ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’. He is also co-host of the Trendy podcast.
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