Beaconsfield’s Labour candidate has disputed an ‘outlier’ projection that suggests the Liberal Democrats could unseat Tory incumbent Joy Morrissey in the general election on July 4.

While Electoral Calculus’ projection of voter outcome in the Beaconsfield constituency on Thursday suggests the party most likely to challenge the frontrunner Conservatives is the Lib Dems, other polls indicate a Tory win with Labour in second place.

Labour candidate for Beaconsfield Matthew Patterson told the Free Press he thought Electoral Calculus’ prediction was an “outlier” and pointed to other predictions that put his party on a higher footing than the Lib Dems.

YouGov - like all other forecasters - puts Ms Morrissey in the lead with 38 per cent of the vote, followed Mr Patterson at 27 per cent and the Lib Dems at 11 per cent, a step behind Reform UK's 19 per cent.

Survation and More in Common’s polling also puts the Lib Dems substantially behind Labour, which is in turn more than 10 per cent behind the predicted Conservatives vote. 

 

Ipsos and the Financial Times both put the Lib Dems ahead of Labour by between 1 and 5 per cent, while the Green Party hangs under 10 per cent of the vote share prediction and Reform only emerges as a viable second-place candidate in Focaldata’s polling forecast.

Collection of polling data varies widely between different organisations, with some like YouGov and Focaldata using a multi-level and post-stratification model (MRP), based on questioning representative groups and breaking their answers down by demographic.

Electoral Calculus and the Financial Times aim to translate support levels for each party – and their fluctuation since 2019 – into seat projections, and Suvation and Ipsos base their estimates on telephone polling.

Meanwhile relatively new initiative More in Common diverges from other projections in its ‘squeeze’ questioning methods – asking people who they would pick if they were forced to vote and formulating intention polls accordingly.