Support for Tories shrinks by half since 2019 election
MORE than six in 10 people who voted Conservative in 2019 now say they will vote for other parties or have not decided who to vote for, according to a poll.
Just 38 per cent of the 13.9 million people who backed the Tories when Boris Johnson was leader have said that they will definitely vote for them again.
Reform UK has attracted 16 per cent of the remainder, according to Yougov.
The pollster also reported that 9 per cent of voters would switch to Labour, 3 per cent would defect to the Liberal Democrats and 2 per cent would vote for the Greens.
The only glimmer of hope for the Conservative Party is that 32 per cent of the people who voted for them in 2019 have said that they do not yet know who they will support in the next election, meaning that millions of votes could potentially be recovered if Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, can find a way of appealing to them.
The poll was commissioned by a group of Conservative donors called the Conservative Britain Alliance and carried out by Yougov, working with Lord Frost.
Yougov carried out a gold standard MRP poll, which stands for multi-level regression and post-stratification, the method which successfully forecast the results of the 2017 and 2019 elections.
It surveyed 14,000 respondents over the course of New Year – around seven times as many people as a typical poll.
Ominously for Mr Sunak, the poll took into account the likely behaviour of those who say they are undecided, and it predicted a Labour majority of 120.
The Conservative Party is forecast to lose 196 seats, even more than it lost in Labour’s 1997 landslide win, leaving it with just 169 seats to Labour’s 385.