Sadiq Khan on course for historic landslide in mayor of London election, new poll shows
Sadiq Khan is on track for the biggest landslide in mayor of London election history, with new polling showing him with a 25-point lead.
The Opinium/Evening Standard poll has the mayor on 53 per cent of the primary vote, which would see Khan win the election in the first round of voting – a feat no other candidate has achieved.
Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey trails on 28 per cent, while Liberal Democrat candidate Luisa Porritt and Green Party candidate Sian Berry are both on 7 per cent.
UKIP’s Peter Gammons is on 2 per cent.
Khan has 66 per cent of the vote when preferences are taken into account, while Bailey has 34 per cent.
Adam Drummond, head of political polling at Opinium, said: “Sadiq Khan is probably going to be re-elected as mayor as his main rival, Conservative Shaun Bailey, is poorly known and doesn’t seem to have the qualities that previously successful Conservatives in London have needed to win in an increasingly Labour-leaning city.
“In all of the issues we tested, Mr Khan’s approach is preferred to Mr Bailey’s but, despite the partisan lean of London as a whole, Boris Johnson’s approval rating is higher than the percentage intending to vote for his candidate.
The mayor of London election is decided through a preference vote, with two candidates going through to the second round if no one gets more than 50 per cent of the primary vote.
A winner is then chosen from the remaining two by taking preferences into account from the voters who chose eliminated candidates as their first preference.
However, the government laid out plans last week to change this to a First Past the Post model like in General Elections.
Home secretary Priti Patel said First Past the Post – which awards seats in General Elections to whoever has the highest vote count and does not take into account preferences – “provides for strong and clear local accountability”.
Patel said that “transferable voting systems were rejected by the British people in the 2011 nationwide referendum” and that therefore local elections should be changed to reflect this.
It comes after Boris Johnson included in his 2019 election manifesto a pledge to further roll out First Past the Post at the local level.
The Electoral Reform Society, a campaign group that aims to get rid of First Past the Post, hit out at the decision.
“The [2011] alternative vote referendum was a specific question with binding results, not a carte blanche to change any electoral system at any time,” they said