Election campaign tracking: Southern England becomes major battleground | UK news

Other events slowed the campaign this week, hurting Rishi Sunak more than Sir Keir Starmer. Both party leaders visited fewer but more marginal constituencies than last week.

Follow their journeys on our animated map below.

This campaign is taking place across new electoral boundaries, with many constituencies undergoing significant changes from 2019.

For the purpose of this analysis, we use notional results based on calculations by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasheremeritus professors at the University of Exeter predicting the results of the 2019 election if it had been held on the new constituency boundaries.

The battle buses leave

The first televised debate and the 80th anniversary of D-Day mean there was less time on the campaign trail this week. Overall, this created problems for Sunak, who faced widespread criticism for his “mistake” in leaving Normandy to return early in the campaign.

That wasn’t his only bad news Sky/YouGov MRP survey released on Monday, showed his party on the brink of elimination, and his absence left room for Reform UK to gain support at Nigel Farage’s rally.

While the Prime Minister and Starmer may have kicked off the campaign trail this week, they kicked things off on Saturday by each launching a new battle bus.

On his first visit to the North East, Sunak chose the aptly named Redcar to launch his blue bus. It is not the first time that his colorful name has been mentioned. On election night in 2019, Boris Johnson claimed to have “turned Redcar Blue-car” and signaled a collapse for Labor in the Red Wall.

It only takes a 5.5 point swing for Labor to take Redcar from the Tories. The MRP Sky/YouGov poll indicated that his old MP, Labor candidate Anna Turley, was likely to do so. Looks like it won’t be a blue car for long.

The Prime Minister then traveled to Blyth & Ashington. His predecessor’s seat was the Conservatives’ first win of 2019, but boundary changes now see it as a Labor defence. There is little prospect of Sunak turning things around as our MRP poll puts Reform UK in second place, ahead of the Tories.

Starmer joined Labor deputy leader Angela Rayner to launch her own battle bus. They chose Boris Johnson’s old home of Uxbridge & South Ruislip to start their 5,000-mile journey across the country. In a constituency where ULEZ may have cost him the 2023 by-electionthere is some irony in the return of the diesel engine for the first time here.

A calmer week with smaller majorities

Starmer’s pace of campaign visits has slowed, averaging 0.6 compared to 1.2 per day in the first week of the campaign. Sunak’s pace has similarly halved, from 2.2 visits per day to 1.1 this week.

Both party leaders ventured into more marginal seats in the second week. Last week I showed conservatives in deep defensive territory where the average majority they defended was 23.5%. This week it fell to 18.1%, but the MRP Sky/YouGov poll still suggests all but one will fall to either Labor or the Lib Dems, while the remaining Tory seat, Melksham & Devizes , is a waiver that could go either way. .

Of those won by the Tories in 2019, the average majority Labor would need to overturn in the target seats they visited last week was 19.5%. While the average across the three stops this week is a more modest 8.1%.

The leader who bucks this trend is Sir Ed Davey. All nine of his visits last week were Tory-held targets, with an average majority of 15.6%. That rose to 25.3% this week, but the Tories are in such a tight spot that the MRP poll suggests they are winnable targets for Davey’s party. His stop on Tuesday in Shropshire North, where the Lib Dems came third in 2019, shows his campaign is as much about the message as it is about getting an MP.

It demonstrates the scale of the challenge for the Lib Dems, who have just 16 target seats that require a vote swing of less than 5 points.

Regional battlegrounds

There are now 54 of the 650 places that were visited during the campaign by Sunak, Starmer or Davey.

The South East seems to get the most attention, with 12 visits in total. This highlights the importance of the region to all English parties. There are 91 constituencies here, including the Greens’ sole seat in Brighton and a number of Lib Dem targets.

Eighty-one of those 91 seats were won by the Conservatives in 2019. The MRP Sky/YouGov poll suggests that number could be more than halved, leaving them with 37 seats. A majority (28) could go to Labour, the poll suggests, with the rest to the Lib Dems.

This is by no means the most devastating regional result for the Tories, who could be completely destroyed in the North East and North West.

As with any survey, these numbers are subject to uncertaintyand it only reflects the attitude of voters at the time they were polled – from 24 May to 1 June, before Nigel Farage re-entered the race.

The absence of the main protagonists on the campaign trail this week has left Farage dominating the news coverage. Supporters of the Tory election threat gathered in Clacton, where Reform’s Nigel Farage is hoping to repeat UKIP’s only general election success.

While Sunak has visited all regions at least once, there are four regions that Starmer has yet to reach. The Labor leader was not in the North East, South West, Yorkshire and The Humber or Northern Ireland. He ends his campaign week in London, a region he has visited three times – joint favorite with the North West and South East.

None of the main party leaders arrived in Scotland this week, but SNP leader John Swinney visited at least five constituencies north of the border. They are expected to hold two of these, but three are considered discards in our MRP. The party launched its battle bus in Glasgow North, a constituency with a 13.4% SNP majority which could still be won by Labour.

The Prime Minister returned to the South West on Friday, becoming his most visited region. He stopped at three constituencies and visited four more in the previous week.

So far Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride, from Central Devon, is the only cabinet member to have hosted the Prime Minister, suggesting he could be seen as more of a hindrance than a help to their re-election chances.

Many of the cabinets are in tight fights, with 12 of the 26 up for election likely to lose their seats in the MRP Sky/YouGov poll.

The three constituencies of Wimbledon, Bury and Harpenden and Berkhamsted have garnered the most visits so far, with Sunak and Davey spending time in both Wimbledon and Harpenden, and Sunak and Starmer visiting Bury North. All are conservative mandates, two with majorities of less than 2.5%. Wimbledon is third on the Liberal Democrat target list, with Bury North seventh on Labour’s list.

Dr Hannah Bunting is a Sky News election analyst and co-director of the Electoral Center at the University of Exeter.

The Data and forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to delivering transparent journalism from Sky News. We collect, 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 storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.