Election predictions are dangerous at the best of times and these are far from the best of times for election predictions. The start of the 2017 campaign in Wales saw the Conservatives entertain hopes of beating Labour for the first time in a hundred years.
This did not transpire – to put it mildly. The Conservative vote did increase, but Labour’s vote increased by twice as much, gaining nearly half of all votes and their best result in years. They captured key marginal seats such as Gower and Cardiff North in an election where they were supposed to be deeply in defensive territory.
Just over two years later we find ourselves in similar territory – a Conservative Prime Minister seeks a mandate to deliver Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour seek to confound expectations by turning a bad polling scenario around at the last possible moment.
There are key battlegrounds in Wales, important to the UK-wide election. A cluster of several Labour seats in North-East Wales fit the Tory target bill in their support for Brexit and assailable majorities. Labour have won every election in Wrexham since 1935, and yet anything but a Conservative victory here would be close to a disaster for the blue team. The seat now has a paltry 5.2% Labour majority, the smallest in a cluster of five North-East Wales seats that Boris Johnson’s road to a majority run through.
A relatively large number of Wales’ 40 seats now run on small margins. Deryn’s new seat projector (seatprojector.deryn.co.uk) has the latest Welsh polls showing the Conservatives gaining four seats from Labour. However, just two extra percentage points moving from Labour to the Conservatives brings that total up to nine seats – which would put Labour on 19 in total and the Conservatives on 16.
This election is therefore not of huge historical significance only for Brexit – the Conservatives are aiming to turn Wales itself into a country it can win. This was also the case in 2017, but during the campaign polls swung heavily from a 10% Conservative lead in Wales to a 12% Labour lead, before an eventual victory of 15.3% by Labour.
As in 2017, then, the question of the election will be whether voters who have backed the Labour Party their entire lives, often carrying the torch of a tradition created by past generations of their family, can bring themselves to put an X next to the words ‘Conservative Party’. Boris Johnson will have to do what Theresa May failed and steady their hands.