This week party leaders made their final appeals to voters. Labor and Liberal Democrat leaders visited some of their most ambitious targets yet, while the Prime Minister took a scattershot approach, fighting for votes in even some of the safest Conservative seats.
Watch their journeys this week in our animated map below.
This campaign is being fought across new electoral frontiers, with many constituencies undergoing significant changes since 2019.
For the purposes of this analysis, we use notional results based on calculations by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, honorary professors at the University of Exeter, who estimate the 2019 electoral seat results if they had taken place in the new electoral boundaries.
Crisis time
We are quickly approaching election day. In their final maneuvers, the Conservatives have tried to win back stray voters and convince undecided voters, while Labor has strived to stick to the script and avoid any mistakes.
The Conservatives are defending themselves against a potential Labor landslide and are fighting on multiple fronts, while both leaders are wary of losing votes to smaller parties or of apathy when people believe the outcome is already a foregone conclusion.
The big picture
It has been a long five weeks for the Tories, whose campaign has been mired in several high-profile embarrassments: from Sunak’s D-Day gaffe to the growing salacious scandal surrounding allegations of insider betting at Westminster.
This did not help his attempt to narrow the polls, and the campaign remained deep in defensive territory throughout. The Prime Minister visited seats with an average Conservative majority of 25%.
Almost 9 in 10 (88%) of Sunak’s 51 election visits were to seats his party defends. Fourteen of these are places where the Conservatives’ closest rivals are the Liberal Democrats, and the remaining 34 are in places where Labor is the strongest opponent.
In contrast, 84% of Starmer’s 44 election visits were to the seats Labor is targeting. All but four were places the Tories are defending.
The Labor Party’s challenge has been to generate enthusiasm for a Starmer government. On average, the target seats he visited need a 10.5-point vote to become Labor gains – just above the figure Tony Blair achieved in 1997.
However, Labor has to achieve more than this – a record swing of 12 percentage points over the Tories – to secure a majority, and Starmer has been visiting seats that require a vote swing of as high as 18 points.
The Labor leader has mostly avoided the mainly Conservative versus Liberal Democrat battlegrounds in the south, but has ventured into parts of the southeast that only Blair had previously managed to win.
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey has apparently been having more fun on the campaign trail, with a series of attention-grabbing stunts including rollercoaster photos and dips in the Thames.
All but one of his 40 campaign visits were to seats that the Liberal Democrats target, including one Labor-held seat and one SNP-held seat, with the rest of his time spent targeting Conservative-held seats.
Hiding in plain sight
A theme that has been shared in the campaigns of the two main parties is their reluctance to send their leaders out into the public or large crowds.
Rishi Sunak has seen small crowds in many business places, and the micromanagement of his audience was revealed early in the campaign when at one event it was discovered that supposed members of the public were Conservative councillors.
Sir Keir Starmer has played into his football calls, visiting two stadiums including Northampton Town this week, but has also mostly stuck to closely managed events.
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One leader who is not afraid of crowds is Reform’s Nigel Farage. Starting his campaign on a pub bench in Clacton, this week he had a homecoming of sorts in Newton Abbot, where 1,500 spectators came to see him speak on Monday. The city was the location of UKIP’s headquarters in its heyday.
Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, also ran a much more public-facing campaign in his various campaign stunts.
The Greens are the only ones who have actually made use of celebrity endorsements. This week they gained vocal support from two Hughs – chef Fearnley-Whittingstall and actor Grant.
Upping the bet
The types of seats Labor and Liberal Democrat leaders visited were markedly different this week.
Sir Keir Starmer has been hitting increasingly ambitious targets, visiting Leicestershire North West this week, which requires an 18-point swing for Labor to win, the biggest on its track so far.
This has also been Sir Ed Davey’s tendency. In the final week of the campaign, he visited seats where the Liberal Democrats need an average of 17 points to win, up from 12 points the previous week.
The prime minister has been less consistent. Indicative of the broad coalition of voters that Johnson has built and that Sunak has to defend, his visits have ranged from the most marginal defenses to what should be the most secure of majorities.
Popular places
Over the past 37 days, the three main English party leaders have made 135 visits to 119 unique constituencies. This represents more than 18% of the UK seats covered by Sunak, Starmer and Davey.
The seats with the most visits, three each, are Redcar in the North East, Wimbledon in London and Sunak’s own constituency of Richmond & Northallerton in Yorkshire.
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Redcar, visited twice by Sunak and once by Starmer, is a Tory defense where the Tory candidate for minister appears vulnerable to Labour.
Davey has his eye on the highly marginal London seat of Wimbledon, which the Lib Dems have never won before. He visited twice, while Sunak was in the Tory defense once during the campaign.
And the prime minister visited his own constituency three times, most recently this week. He is defending a 46.9% majority, but some MRP polls say there is a chance he will lose it.
Dr Hannah Bunting is an election analyst for Sky News and co-director of the Electoral Center at the University of Exeter.
O Data and forensic analysis The team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to delivering transparent Sky News journalism. We gather, analyze and visualize data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite imagery, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia narrative we aim to better explain the world and at the same time show how our journalism is done.
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