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In the run up to the general election of 2010, several polling organisations carried out opinion polling in regards to voting intention in Great Britain (i.e. the UK excluding Northern Ireland, which is usually excluded from such voting intention surveys). Results of such polls are displayed below. The election took place on 6 May 2010, coinciding with the local elections. The previous general election was held on 5 May 2005. Rumours in autumn 2007 that Gordon Brown was about to call a general election imminently put all polling organisations, the press and political parties on an election footing, but he eventually announced that he would not seek a dissolution. According to many media and political figures, this was because he believed that Labour was likely to lose its majority in a snap general election. Gordon Brown has maintained that Labour would have won but he did not believe an early election was in the national interest. == Background == Since each MP is elected separately by the first past the post voting system, it is impossible to precisely project a clear election outcome from overall national shares of the vote. Not only can individual constituencies vary markedly from overall voting trends, but individual countries and regions within the nation may have a very different electoral contest that is not properly reflected in overall share of the vote figures. Therefore, the first past the post system means that the number of MPs elected may not reflect the overall popular vote share across the parties. Thus, it is not necessarily the party with the largest share of the popular vote that ends up with the largest number of MPs. (See details of the elections in 1951 and February 1974) Since 1935 no party has achieved more than 50% of the popular vote in a British general election. The voting system favours parties with relatively concentrated support: a widely distributed vote leaves a party at risk of getting a large vote share but doing poorly in terms of numbers of seats (as the SDP-Liberal Alliance did in the 1980s), whereas parties with localised votes can win seats with a relatively small share of the vote. That said, in previous elections, approximate forecasting of results were achieved by assuming that the swing in each individual constituency will be the same across the country. This system, known as uniform national swing (UNS) is used by much of the media in Britain to assess and extrapolate electoral fortunes from opinion poll data, though there has been criticism that such predictions may be naive and unreliable, even from providers of such data.〔(Predicting Results ) UK Polling Report〕 By using UNS projections, several media commentators and politicians have suggested that significant swings towards the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls may not necessarily amount to significant gains in terms of parliamentary seats, including predictions that even if the Liberal Democrats had the most votes, and Labour the least, it could be the case that Labour retains the most seats while the Lib Dems have the fewest.〔(Pollwatch: Election 2010 could be the death knell for first past the post ) The Guardian, 18 April 2010〕〔(The Lib Dems surge in Britain ) Washington Examiner〕〔(Election 2010: Lib Dem policies targeted by rivals ) BBC News, 19 April 2010〕 Normally governments can easily survive for a full parliamentary term on a majority of more than 20 seats over all other parties. Below that level there is a danger of by-elections and MPs crossing the floor of the House of Commons reducing the government to a minority such that it would be at increased risk of losing a vote of no confidence. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Opinion polling for the 2010 United Kingdom general election」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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