Even with a lead of 11.7% Starmer’s party falls short of a majority

For some time I’ve been planning a piece on how difficult it is going to be for LAB to win a majority at the next election and overnight I got down to it.

I started by using the Electoral Calculus seat predictor to try to get a broad picture of the sort of poll leads that Labour requires if it is to win an overall majority next time. My first and as it turned out only calculation was simply to switch the LAB and CON shares from last time leaving all the other numbers the same.

The result is in the panel above and is really quite striking. For whereas at GE2019 Johnson was returned with an 80 seat majority on an 11.7% vote lead the same lead for Starmer’s party does not get him over the line.

Of course Electoral Calculus gives a simplified picture but the overall message is bang on – it is the distribution of the Labour vote which is very high in its strongholds but there are not enough marginals.

These, based on GE2019, are the LAB targets and in the current context we should assume that gains from the SNP are going to be remote.

All this leads me to the overall betting conclusion that laying a LAB majority on Betfair at a 17% chance is a great value bet.