Conservatives in the U.K. are projected to get wiped out in next month’s general election. The party of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, which has led the country for more than a decade, is faced with a historic defeat, as voters have grown frustrated by the state of public services and by political scandals that have plagued the Tories in recent years, among other things.
While the center-left Labour Party is on track to win a huge majority, everyone seems to be focused on the Conservatives.
“We’re so used to thinking about elections in terms of who’s going to win, but this one, it’s much more about actually the state of the loss and who is going to be in opposition,” Louise Thompson, a senior lecturer in politics at The University of Manchester, told HuffPost.
Bad news has been piling up for Sunak. On July 4, he could become the first sitting prime minister to ever lose their seat in a general election, while his party may not even win enough seats to become the official opposition, according to a recent poll conducted by market research company Savanta for The Daily Telegraph, which forecasts the centrist Liberal Democrats winning just three fewer seats than the Tories.
The findings illustrate “the risk of electoral extinction that the Conservative Party is now having to contemplate,” Savanta’s political research director wrote in an op-ed.
🚨NEW Savanta MRP for @Telegraph
📈Lab projected for 382 majority
📉Cons fighting with LDs to be Official Opposition
Seat forecast
🌹Lab 516 (+316)
🌳Con 53 (-319)
🔶LD 50 (+42)
🎗️SNP 8 (-40)
🌼PC 4 (+2)
⬜️Other 0 (-1)
17,812 UK adults, changes to last GE notional results pic.twitter.com/JNfSE82XQr
— Savanta UK (@Savanta_UK) June 19, 2024
Meanwhile, a YouGov poll released last week showed Reform UK — the populist right party of Nigel Farage, who’s an ally of former President Donald Trump — overtaking the Conservatives for the first time, spreading even more alarm in Tory circles.
“No other poll reported the same finding, though every poll has reported a fall in Conservative support and nearly all a narrowing of the Conservative lead over Reform,” polling expert John Curtice noted on the BBC.
“Standing at just 20%, Conservative support is now at its lowest ever in British polling history,” Curtice added.
The current projections indicate a stunning reversal of the electoral map following the 2019 general election, in which the Conservatives won nearly 44% of the vote under Boris Johnson and Labour came in second with just over 32%. At the time, the Brexit Party — Reform’s predecessor, which didn’t run candidates in constituencies held by the conservatives — came in sixth and didn’t win any seats.
Robert Johns, a professor of politics at the University of Southampton, told HuffPost it’s not surprising that the Conservatives have become unpopular after 14 years in power,