Forecast #GE2019 – 17th September 2019

This is our latest forecast for a potential November 2019 General Election in the UK.

The forecast below is our standard forecast. It is based on a General Election occuring on the day of the forecast.

What does your forecast show? – We try to give as much information as possible, but only where it is statistically significant. We show a confidence interval on the seats and vote shares for the major parties.

What do you use for your forecast? – We use all the latest polling data, where available. We also look at the betting markets and other information to help guide our forecast. We calculate the interaction between the support for the parties on as local a level as statistically possible and then use this to run a Monte Carlo simulation of the election.

What has changed since the last forecast? – New polls from ComRes poll and Opinium have been included.

What do you predict will happen in Seat X? What is the probability of Party Y having more votes than Z? – As we approach the election we reduce uncertainity in our model and are able to answer questions like this. Whilst we do not automatically publish a prediction for each seat, we can indicate a most likely outcome if required and also probabilities of victory for each candidate.

I want to ask a question / get in touch – Write a comment below to get in touch.

Key Features

The overall summary of our forecast is “Hung Parliament – Possible Labour / SNP / Lib Dem coalition”.

Our updated forecast sees a slight shift to the Conservatives over the past few days but this is overshadowed by clear rises in support for the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party.

Although we continue to see evidence of a collapse in the Labour Party’s support across the country, this is now roughly matched by the fall in support for the Conservatives. Outside of London and Wales we see no evidence that the Conservatives will pick up any seats from Labour at all. Indeed, in some seats that Labour won from the Conservatives in 2017, Labour may even increase their majorities.

As a contrast we expect a resurgent Liberal Democrat party to win over half of the seats where they were second to the Conservatives in 2017. In Scotland we expect the SNP to regain almost all their losses in 2017 to Labour and the Conservatives.

We see good evidence that recent declines in support for the Brexit Party have been reversed. We now see a number of seats where strong Leave sentiment may even lead to a number of constituencies returning Brexit Party MPs. Our forecast presents a range of 2 to 11 seats for the Brexit Party, partly driven by a strong Liberal Democrat party taking support away from Labour in key seats where Leave sentiment is strong, but this forecast represents a long tail of probability and winning all 11 seats would require a specific combination of circumstances.

We look to the next set of opinion polls to confirm the pattern of Labour support moving to the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party. If this does continue then our forecasts will very likely increase in their seat range uncertainty, as the current levels of support for the parties together with the polling data on vote transfers since 2017, means that a large number of seats have the potential to move in a number of ways.

Our Northern Ireland forecast is based on limited data, primarily a poll from Lucid Point last month.

UK Forecast

Most likely result – Hung Parliament
Potential Labour / SNP / Lib Dem coalition

Scotland

Most Likely Result – SNP Majority of Seats

Wales

Most Likely Result – Labour Majority of Seats

London

Most Likely Result – Labour Majority of Seats

Northern Ireland

Most Likely Result – DUP Plurality