Final Call

Our final pre-election post is written by Dylan and gives an overview of what’s happened to the polls over the campaign, and where we’ve ended up with all the final polls in.

There’s loads of fascinating insight in there but I think they key point is that the underlying data is pointing towards very heavy tactical voting, especially in the south.

Exactly what the result looks like may depend on how much late returning “undecided” 2019 Tory voters outweigh or are cancelled out by heavy tactical voting, as well as some further drift to Reform from Tories and Labour.

We will find out soon. And I’ll be back on Saturday with an analysis of what just happened.

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Final Call

The final polls are in, but what do they say and how have they moved?

There are a few ways of calculating an average of final polls, but broadly they will all tell the same story – Labour are on around 40%, maybe a little lower, the Conservatives are at about 21%, Reform in the mid-to-high-teens, the Lib Dems in the low teens and the Greens around 6%. Labour’s lead is two points less than it was at the start of the campaign, but is still gargantuan, with the narrowing less when you account for the mid-campaign methodology changes undertaken by a few pollsters. It is a polling situation that is somehow both familiar – leads of nearly 20-points have been the norm since autumn 2022 – and shocking – the Tories are expected to only get around one-in-five votes!

Of course, any discussion of final polls is not complete without the heavy caveat of potential polling error, which is somewhat guaranteed given the spread of their projections. But, for the purposes of this, we are just going to take the polls as they are – there is little point second-guessing based on something that will soon become apparent tonight. It is also worth stressing that even if the polls with the narrowest leads are as wrong as all polls were in 1992 (the British election with the largest polling error), they would still point to leads more than the five-point lead that Focaldata estimate Labour need for a majority.

Polling Breakdown

In the majority of the groups featured in our weekly polling breakdowns, both parties are at least slightly down on where they were when Sunak called the election, with the basic pattern of the Conservatives and Labour dipping in unison – like train tracks. But this is not to say there has been no differentiation and no interesting stories.