Such polling represents a reversal of the 2019 result, when Boris Johnson's Conservative party won with 45% compared to Corbyn's Labour on 33%. In Blair’s 1997 election landslide, New Labour won with 45% of the vote in Great Britain, over the Conservatives on 31%.
Assuming a uniform national swing under the 2019 constituency boundaries, this latest polling would hand Starmer a 33 seat majority, with the Conservatives falling to just 190 seats. The Lib Dems, Greens and Reform would have 30, 1 and 0 seats respectively. Notably, Jeremy Hunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jonathan Gullis, Grant Shapps and Greg Hands would be among the 175 Conservative MPs (as they stood in 2019) to lose their seats under this scenario.
But the constituency boundaries have now changed, introducing a further element of uncertainty, and limiting the insightfulness of uniform national swing analysis with 2019 election data.
One alternative is to 'backsolve' the 2019 voting for the new constituencies, weighting votes by the proportion of the population ‘overlapping’ between the old 2019 constituencies and the new constituencies. This method assumes uniformity in voting intentions across each constituency in 2019 (inevitably unrealistic for each individual constituency, but one which may wash out in aggregate).
This approach predicts Labour winning 356 seats, far ahead of the Conservatives on 200 seats (24 Lib Dem, 1 Green, 0 Reform).
The more precise polling methodology to predict voting outcomes under the new boundaries is MRP polling. However, these polls are intensive and time consuming. The two most recent MRP polls were conducted in January and February (this was a while ago,but voting intentions have not significantly moved since then). Taking the median of these two polls, Labour are predicted to win a landslide majority of 93 seats, and six senior Conservative ministers would lose their seats, including Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the much predicted, but very elusive narrowing of the polls will happen. But Labour will no doubt be happy with how the polls are looking, even if it does them no favours to be complacent - after all, there are still many months to come.
ThisVoteCounts, 30 March 2024