My Fingers Crossed for Labour and PM Gordon Brown. I believe that Clear Thinking British Citizens Will Throw their Support behind Labour! God Bless Labour & PM Brown! Amen!
Two last polls before Thursday's long-awaited general election both predict that David Cameron's Conservatives will fall just short of a majority when all the shouting is done.
YouGov, polling for The Sun newspaper (which has endorsed the Conservatives), sees the Tories nailing down between 300 and 310 seats. ComRes, polling for ITV News and The Indpendent newspaper (which endorsed the Liberal Democrats) anticipates they'll fall just below 300.
Remember that in the 650-seat House of Commons, 326 is an unassailable majority – but these numbers can get squishy.
If the Commons hangs on a knife edge, Northern Ireland may play a critical role.
Ulster Unionist parties are expected to capture about 10 seats and to back the Conservatives.
Sinn Fein will probably take a handful of seats as well, but those seats remain empty in London because the republicans do not sit in Parliament on principle (they oppose British rule of Northern Ireland.) In practice, that means Sinn Fein will not vote against any party trying to form a government – so the Conservatives, backed by the Unionists, could push through a minority government with something on the order of a combined 320 seats.
With the possibility of a hung parliament looming large, ComRes asked voters if they would prefer to see Cameron or Gordon Brown as prime minister.
Neither gets a majority, but voters break just barely in favor of Cameron: 48 percent yes, 45 percent no. They vote against Brown 2 to 1: 33 percent yes, 61 percent no.
Another ComRes finding suggests voters overwhelmingly favor proportional representation over the current first-past-the-post system. More than eight out of 10 voters say the head of the party with the most votes should get to be prime minister.
This is my last post on polling for this general election; British law forbids the media from reporting on polls while voters are casting their ballots.
Thanks for listening, and may be the best man win. (Yes, they're all men.)
Posted by: Richard Allen Greene, The CNN Wire
Filed under: Election •General •Polls
