A major new opinion survey suggests a decisive result is possible in next month’s general election – with a big change in the East Anglian political map

Ipswich Star: Will the poll affect the Ipswich campaign? Picture; IPSWICH LABOUR PARTYWill the poll affect the Ipswich campaign? Picture; IPSWICH LABOUR PARTY (Image: Archant)

The special survey by pollsters Yougov - which accurately predicted the 2017 result suggests that Boris Johnson's Conservatives are set to make significant gains on December 12.

One of the seats the poll - commissioned by The Times newspaper - suggests they will win from Labour is Ipswich and the Tories could also win the North Norfolk seat currently held by the Liberal Democrats.

It says the Conservatives are only just ahead in Ipswich, by 43% to 39%, but across the country they are predicting Boris Johnson's party will win 359 seats, giving it an overall majority of 68 in the House of Commons.

They say the Labour Party would end up with 211 seats and the Liberal Democrats with just 13.

The survey says the Conservatives would also win Colchester and Waveney with comfortable majorities. Labour would finish second in both seats.

For the last seven days YouGov has interviewed approximately 100,000 panellists about their voting intentions in the 2019 General Election.

This is a much larger sample than usual polls, the samples in each of the constituencies are too small to produce reliable estimates if we analysed the data as constituency polls. Therefore in order to come up with estimates for each constituency Yougov used a technique called Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification (MRP).

The idea behind MRP is that it uses the poll data from the preceding seven days to estimate a model that relates interview date, constituency, voter demographics, past voting behaviour, and other respondent profile variables to their current voting intentions.

In 2017, when Yougov applied this strategy to the UK general election, it correctly predicted 93% of individual seats as well as the overall hung parliament result.