It would appear the British media’s recent campaign to anoint Jeremy Corbyn as the New Hitler and paint the Labour Party as the Nazi Party 2.0 has backfired with a vengeance:
Boris Johnson is on course to win the general election with a majority of 28, but his lead over Labour has more than halved in the final weeks of the campaign, according to the polling analysis which correctly predicted a hung parliament in 2017.
YouGov’s final MRP model predicts that the Conservatives will win 339 seats, with Jeremy Corbyn’s party on 231 and the Liberal Democrats on 15.
The seat-by-seat model, which is based on thousands of interviews, puts the Tories on 43 per cent of the vote and Labour on 34 per cent. The forecast suggests the race has tightened since the previous MRP results on November 27 showed the Tories on course for a majority of 68.
There are other possible explanations, of course. One is that the UK media stopped talking about Brexit for the last three weeks, and short memories have convinced Labour’s Leave voters to stand by their traditional party identification. Another is that the pollsters are doing their usual job of pro-Labour puffery, although this would tend to be contradicted by the non-stop anti-semitism campaign of the last month.
And then there is always the perfectly reasonable suggestion that the media simply has no idea what it is talking about. We’ll find out soon enough. Regardless, it is worth noting that a majority of 28 is not at all a bad outcome for the Conservative Party, as buried deep in the body of the article is this little fact.
A majority of 28 would be the Conservatives’ best result since Margaret Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987.