Unite to Remain announce pacts in 60 seats across England and Wales

Unite to Remain have announced that the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens will not run candidates against each other in 60 seats across England and Wales.

Commenting, Best for Britain chief executive Naomi Smith said:

“We applaud the work of Unite to Remain in helping to fight tribalism and secure the kind of cross-party working needed to stop Brexit.

“Best for Britain has been calling for pro-EU parties to work together for a long time. Our petition topped 100,000 signatures and we brought MPs of all stripes together in a cross-party delegation which travelled to Brussels last month.

“While we won’t necessarily be backing all of Unite to Remain’s candidates at the moment, we will review our next round of polling and take an informed decision on who we think is the best placed candidate to prevent a Tory victory in each seat.

“Through these agreements and Best for Britain’s tactical voting tool, the Remain movement is more organised than ever and ready to fight this election.”

Best for Britain’s tactical voting tool is at getvoting.org

Key findings from Best for Britain’s October MRP data*:

• IF no tactical voting occurs, the Conservatives will win 364 seats, Labour would win 189 seats, Lib Dems would win 23 seats, Plaid would win 3 seats and the Greens would win 1 seat (Conservative majority of 44)
• IF Remain voters use their vote tactically, however, this will change. We predict that it would take only 30% of pro-Remain voters to use their vote tactically for pro-Remain parties to swing the election and deprive Boris Johnson of a majority
• Under this scenario, the Conservatives would win 308 seats, Labour would win 233 seats, Lib Dems would win 34 seats, Plaid would win 4 and the Greens would win 1 seat (pro-Remain majority of 4)
• IF 40% of pro-Remain voters use their vote tactically, the Conservatives would win 276 seats, Labour would win 255 seats, Lib Dems would win 44 seats, Plaid would win 4 seats and the Greens would win 1 seat (pro-Remain majority of 36)

*Our data predicts the SNP to win 52 seats

Methodology

This study was carried out for HOPE not hate and Best for Britain by Focaldata, a polling agency that specialises in understanding niche audiences using a technique called MRP (multi-level regression with poststratification) to estimate opinion to each Constituency in the UK.

Focaldata collected vote intention data from 46,000 respondents between September and October 2019 from numerous panel companies including YouGov which were commissioned by HOPE not hate and Best for Britain.

What is MRP?

The MRP (multi-level regression with poststratification) polling method has two main elements. The first is to use a survey to build a multi-level regression model that predicts opinion (or any quantity of interest) from certain variables, normally demographics. The second is to weight (post-stratify) your results by the relevant population frequency, to get population level (or constituency level) estimates. At the end of this process you get more accurate, more granular estimates of public opinion than traditional polling.