UK's Johnson now less certain of election victory: YouGov
World News
December 10, 2019 / 5:08 PM / Updated 10 minutes ago
Andy Bruce, David Milliken
3 Min Read
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s election race has tightened markedly over the past two weeks and Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now likely to win only a modest majority in Thursday’s vote, according to a closely watched forecast released on Tuesday.
The 28-seat Conservative margin of victory predicted by pollsters YouGov, down from 68 two weeks ago, is narrow enough that the firm said Johnson could fail to win an outright majority, given the uncertainties inherent to forecasting - an outcome that would prolong Brexit uncertainty.
“Based on the model, we cannot rule out a hung parliament,” Anthony Wells, YouGov’s director of political research, told The Times newspaper, which published the results.
Johnson called the election to break what he viewed as a deadlock in parliament, where his minority administration had been unable to pass legislation governing Britain’s departure from the European Union, which has been delayed until Jan. 31.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-election-yougov/uks-johnson-now-less-certain-of-election-victory-yougov-idUSKBN1YE2OP?il=0
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YouGov’s forecasts are based on more than 100,000 interviews with voters over the past week.
The so-called multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) modeling approach - which factors in voters’ age, gender, education and other variables to predict results in every British voting district - enjoyed success in 2017.
In late May 2017, just over a week before the June 8 election, YouGov’s model correctly projected the then Prime Minister Theresa May would lose the Conservative Party’s majority, even though she had been ahead in most polls.
