Three British opinion polls released late on Saturday presented a grim picture for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, and one pollster warned that the party faced “electoral extinction” in July 4’s election.
The polls come just over halfway through the election campaign, after a week in which both the Conservatives and Labour set out their manifestos, and shortly before voters begin to receive postal ballots.
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Market research company Savanta found 46% support for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, up 2 points on the previous poll five days earlier, while support for the Conservatives dropped 4 points to 21%. The poll was conducted from June 12 to June 14 for the Sunday Telegraph.
Labour’s 25-point lead was the largest since the premiership of Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, whose tax cut plans prompted investors to dump British government bonds, pushing up interest rates and forcing a Bank of England intervention. “Our research suggests that this election could be nothing short of electoral extinction for the Conservative Party,” Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, said.
A separate poll by Survation, published by the Sunday Times, predicted the Conservatives could end up with just 72 seats in the 650-member House of Commons - the lowest in their nearly 200-year history - while Labour would win 456 seats.
The poll was conducted from May 31 to June 13. In percentage terms, the Survation poll had Labour on 40% and the Conservatives on 24%, while former Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party - a right-wing challenger to the Conservatives - was on 12%.
A third poll, by Opinium for Sunday’s Observer, and conducted from June 12 to June 14, also showed Labour on 40%, the Conservatives on 23% and Reform on 14%, with the two largest parties yielding ground to smaller rivals.
The feeling I’m getting is that Tories will mostly be staying at home on polling day, and I don’t think that’s going to be a wipeout in the long term. I don’t think the bar will have to be very high for them to return next time.
What this election is very likely to do is wipeout their ability to raise money, and that’s the big long term danger for them.
The tories are better funded that another political party by a large margin. They’ll be fine.
…because they have been the party of power.
People don’t pay money to parties that don’t have any way on delivering. If the come back with sub-100 seats, their doners will be looking for more effective ways to spend their money.
Unfortunately, if the US is any precedent, that’ll mean assaults on civil society, women’s, gay and trans rights, and attempts to poison discussions of environmental issues.
In the US all of that was enabled because they got their useful idiots in power. We’re throwing them out. I don’t see the similarity.