A poll claiming Nigel Farage is on track to win the Clacton Parliamentary seat by a comfortable margin would be by a degree “unprecedented in modern electoral history”.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage is standing for election to the United Kingdom House of Commons for the eighth time, and polling suggests he may be on the verge of being sworn in to Westminster. Beyond a nationwide swing to Reform UK, the party he founded and now leads again, speat-specific polling by mainstream British pollster Survation by Farage ally Aaron Banks says he is likely to win big in Essex in 15 days time.
Survation performed their research in Clacton last week and said by their reckoning Farage’s Reform could overturn a huge 72 per cent Conservative vote from 2019 and get a clear win with 42 per cent. The Conservatives would come second with 27 per cent and Labour third with 24 per cent. The Times notes this latest poll buttresses earlier findings by Ipsos, another British pollster, which said it expected Reform to win by an outright majority at 53 per cent, followed by Labour on 24 and the Tories on 17 per cent.
The newspaper cites Damian Lyons Lowe, the founder of Survation, who said of the enormous swing he foresaw, saying: “In examining the history of UK elections, we find that swings as large as the one currently projected in Clacton are extremely rare. The projected swing in Clacton from the Conservative Party to the Reform UK party is 43.5 per cent. This is considerably larger than many significant historical swings.
“The swing currently projected in Clacton, from a 72 per cent Conservative vote share in 2019 to a 42 per cent vote share for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in 2024, would indeed be unprecedented in modern UK electoral history. This kind of dramatic shift highlights a significant realignment of voter preferences and could signal broader changes in the political landscape.”
While Farage will no doubt wish to toast the findings, it is evident pollsters are having a tough time prognosticating support for new political force Reform, which spiritual successors the Brexit Party and UKIP aside has never fought a nationwide election before and defies the old conventions of the two-party system. Recent nationwide polling has on one end of the spectrum found Reform beating the Conservative for votes nationwide — a historic achievement if they prove to be founded — to coming a distant third.
A Savanta poll published by The Daily Telegraph today predicts a Conservative Party bloodbath with even the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could face losing his seat next month, the first time this would have happened in British history.
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