This ComRes poll suggests UKIP will not be fading at the General Election
TELEGRAPH: UKIP vote no flash in the pan #tomorrowspaperstoday #BBCPapers pic.twitter.com/L1bqPLSZeD
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) May 30, 2014
ComRes have polled on behalf of UKIP donor Paul Sykes asking what UKIP voters in the Euros would do at the next General Election, the telegraph reports that
37 per cent of UKIP voters said that they were “certain†to support the party at the general election. Another 49 per cent said that they were “likely†to do so, while 14 per cent said that they would probably back another party.Â
To put this into context, last week, 4,376,635 people in this country voted UKIP, so if 86% of them voted UKIP in next year’s General Election, UKIP would receive at minimum 3,763,906 votes, in 2010, 919,471 people voted UKIP in the General Election.
If this there were to happen, it would make the next General Election very hard to predict, as last week showed UKIP polled very well across the country, from the Tory heartlands, to Labour’s heartlands such as winning the vote in Doncaster and narrowly finishing second behind Labour in Wales.
We could see all sorts of unusual results next year. We could more results like what we saw in Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber in the 1992 General Election, when the winning party won the seat with 26% of the vote, and the fourth place party a mere 3.4% behind first place.
I hope more pollsters start polling questions like this, because how UKIP supporters and 2010 Lib Dems supporters vote in next years’s election are going to be the two main factors in determining the account of that election. Survation last week found that 71% of UKIP Euro voters would vote UKIP at the next General Election, so this 86% isn’t that outlandish.
The full ComRes data tables are available here (and the sample size was 4,078)