Britons will go to the polls on Thursday to elect a new parliament and government. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the election in hopes of winning an outright parliamentary majority that will make Brexit happen by the end of January.
Left-wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has a different plan. The anti-American Corbyn is pledging that, should he win a majority or form a minority government with support from the Scottish Nationalist Party, he’ll negotiate a new Brexit withdrawal deal with the European Union. Corbyn says he will then offer a second referendum presenting his new deal alongside the option of remaining in the EU.
Labour has had to obscure its Brexit position in this manner because many of its supporters want Brexit. But in fact, if the Conservatives don’t win tomorrow, Brexit will probably die.
So what to watch for? The national exit poll result — typically quite accurate within a three- or four-point margin of error — will be announced at 5 p.m. EST. From that point, we can expect results from various constituencies to trickle in over the next five hours. We should have a pretty confident view of the outcome by 10 p.m. EST.
But between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., we’ll want to look for key geographic indicators.
In England, the Conservatives’ strategy rests on picking up Labour-held seats in which voters offered support for leaving the EU. Early victories in the Midlands and the North may indicate a trend of otherwise-reliable Labour voters abandoning the party over its convoluted stance on Brexit.
An interesting question here is whether some Labour voters sympathetic to voting Conservative, or for the Brexit Party, might not have admitted their willingness to pollsters. The traditional stigma that the Conservatives carry in some northern seats means that these voters might prefer to simply cast their countermanding votes in the secrecy of the polling booth.
Scotland will also play a pivotal role. In 2017, the Conservatives significantly outperformed expectations in Scotland. But now they’re facing a resurgent and strongly anti-Brexit Scottish Nationalist Party, led by the charismatic Nicola Sturgeon. The results in about ten seats will offer the early signs as to how successfully the Conservatives held back Sturgeon’s attack.
The polls currently suggest a Conservative majority of 15-30 seats. But anything could happen, and we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
