At long last, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has managed to schedule a general election for Dec. 12. The result will decide not only the fate of Johnson and his governing Conservative Party but also whether the new Parliament will pass his Brexit deal.
What are the Conservatives' chances of gaining the number of seats they need to form a majority government? We see four possible scenarios.
1. Current polling results give the Conservatives a comfortable majority.
Right now, polls put the Conservatives on track to win a comfortable majority of 357 seats; 326 are needed for a majority. If these numbers hold, their principal rival, the Labour Party, will capture only 198 seats, a large falloff from the 262 the party won in 2017.
2. Labour surges in popularity, as it did during the 2017 campaign.
While these numbers are encouraging for Johnson, he would be mistaken to celebrate just yet. During the 2017 campaign, Labour surged from its initial polling in the mid-20s to finish with 40 percent of the popular vote, while the Conservatives lost over 11 percent of their pre-campaign supporters. If Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is able to engineer a similar comeback in 2019, his party would win almost exactly as many seats (261) as in 2017 and, crucially, reduce the Conservatives to only 289 seats — far short of what they would need to continue governing.
Since the smaller Liberal Democratic and Scottish Nationalist (SNP) parties strongly oppose Brexit, they would never support the Conservatives. In turn, this would open the door for a Corbyn-led minority Labour government, supported on an issue-by-issue basis by the Liberal Democrats and the SNP. Further, British politics and policies would move in a decidedly leftward direction.
3. Johnson gets a “bounce” when Nigel Farage sends voters his way
What if, instead of a Labour surge, there’s a “Boris bounce”? That could happen if the Conservatives attract a sizable number of the pro-Leave voters who are supporting Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, which he joined earlier this year after resigning from his U.K. Independence Party. Like UKIP, the Brexit Party has only one major goal: getting the U.K. out of the European Union. Farage and his Brexit Party showed their appeal in the May 2019 E.U. Parliament elections when they came in first, with over 30 percent of the vote. The Conservatives were reduced to a dismal 9 percent — the party’s worst showing ever in a national election.
If the Conservatives were to move half of Brexit Party supporters, who are polling at about 11 percent of the whole, that would give the Conservatives a solid majority of 396 parliamentary seats, while reducing Labour to only 178 seats. If the Conservatives can get half of the Brexiteers and Labour gets its uptick, Johnson can still emerge with a small but probably viable majority of 339 seats.
4. Farage runs against Johnson’s Brexit deal, keeping his followers away from the Conservatives.
This may be what the election rides on: whether Farage urges his followers to vote for the Conservatives, as the party has done in the past. Last week, he claimed that the Conservatives’ recently negotiated deal is not a “real Brexit.” He threatened to run a nationwide election campaign against it, asking his supporters to vote for his party’s candidates, even if they have no nope of attracting enough votes to win seats in Parliament. Johnson replied that he has no intention of trying to negotiate a new deal and will not form an electoral alliance with Farage if the Brexit Party does somehow get into Parliament.
But Farage has changed his mind and says that Brexit Party candidates will not run for seats held by the Conservatives for fear of splitting the Leave vote. Brexit Party candidates will run only for seats held by Labour.
Survey data we gathered earlier this year indicates that nearly two-thirds of Brexit Party supporters are former Conservative partisans. And recent polls show that many of them favor the Conservatives’ E.U. deal. Farage, however, is a charismatic figure who has repeatedly shown that he can rally anti-E.U. and populist sentiment across the British electorate. If he changes his mind again and decides to fight it out with the Conservatives, it could be disastrous for Johnson and his party. If 5 percent of Conservative voters abandon the party for Farage’s Brexit Party, the Conservatives could conceivably win just 324 seats, putting them in the minority.
Boris needs Nigel
Although the election campaign is very much in its early days, Boris needs Nigel. If Brexit Party supporters vote Conservative, Johnson and his party should safely take a majority even if Labour does rally somewhat during the campaign. But without Farage and his Brexiteers, Johnson will find himself in choppy political seas. His tenure as prime minister — and the Conservative Party’s governing status — could sink abruptly on the evening of Dec. 12.
Harold Clarke is the Ashbel Smith professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) is a professor in the department of politics and international affairs at the University of Kent. Marianne Stewart is a professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Paul Whiteley is a professor in the department of government at the University of Essex. Together, Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley are authors most recently of “Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union” (Cambridge University Press, 2017).—