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This is a good point to take stock of where things are in the election. We have two weeks to go and now have a run of polls, including quite a few constituency ones and separate ones for NI, Scotland and Wales. In addition there is the big YouGov MRP poll, which predicts a 68 seat Conservative majority. MRP is a polling method that looks beyond national aggregates and Uniform National Swing (almost useless for predictions these days). It does this by taking a large sample and seeing how identifiable socio-economic groups are behaving (e.g. white men on lower incomes with no university education) and then applying it to each seat using census data for that seat. Ignore the nonsense people like Paul Mason are coming up with, this is either desperate straw clutching or simple innumeracy and failure to understand how these things work. What can we tell from the cumulative polls then?

Since the election was called both big parties have seen their vote share rise, at about the same rate (so the average gap has been constant). The Conservatives got through 40% and are now consistently polling in the low 40% range - about what they got last time. They have clearly consolidated most of the Leave vote behind them. The Conservative plus BXP vote is around 47-48% (which is about the share of the electorate who say they would vote Leave in a hypothetical second referendum). Clearly a significant part of the Tory vote is Remain and a part of the Labour Vote is Leave - it's how those two chunks distribute that is going to be vital. The Conservatives are pretty much at their peak now so their national vote share will probably plateau now or even decline very slightly.

Labour meanwhile are polling in the low 30%s range. They have made up ground since the start but are still clearly down on where they were in 2017. (They are about 8% down). To stop the Tories getting a majority they have to increase their vote share to around 36-7%. The question is how do they need to do that? The simple answer would be that they need to squeeze the LDs further and push them down to 10% or less. That however is almost certainly the wrong answer because of where those LD voters are. Getting them to vote Labour would boost the Labour vote share in places where they already hold the seats or are too far behind. What they need to do is stop working class leave voters in places like Stoke On Trent and Darlington from switching to the Conservatives.

The regional polls tell the following stories so far. In Scotland the Conservatives are doing much better than expected, partly because Nicola Sturgeon has made the election as much about another Independence Referendum as Brexit. So it looks as though they will retain almost all of their seats with a chance of actually winning one or two. Labour however is still heading towards losing all but one of its seats. In Wales the Labour Party has made a big recovery and instead of losing 9-10 seats will probably hold most of them, by narrow margins. In London and the SE Labour is doing better than expected and looks set to hold many of the seats it won last time such as Canterbury, and Leamington. There's several seats where it must fancy its chances, such as Southampton Itchen, and Chipping Barnet. The LDs are doing very badly and getting squeezed by both parties nationally but their vote seems to be doing very well in particular seats - Dominic Raab could be a surprise casualty for example. However they will certainly lose a couple so the likely outcome is quite a few second places in the SE (they'll go backwards in the SW) but only a small number of gains.

The key place is a swathe of small town ex industrial seats in the North and Midlands. Currently these are predicted to go Conservative, because of a further shift of working class leave voters to the Tories since 2017. So the key battle in the next two weeks will be there. If the Labour Party can win back enough of them the Conservatives will only gain a few seats and they won't have a majority. If they can't or the Conservatives continue to make ground then the Tories will get the kind of majority YouGov is predicting.

As things stand I expect there will be a Conservative majority of around 30-40. I would be less surprised by a smaller majority than by a larger one. The next week is crucial - by the end of it we will know if Labour has shored up its 'red wall' or not. I expect that strong Remain figures such as Keir Starmer will be kept away from the spotlight and people like Richard Burgon, Ian Lavery, and John Trickett will be trotted out more.