LONDON – An exit poll projected a surprisingly strong showing for Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party in Britain’s election Thursday, suggesting it is within touching distance of forming a new government.
The opposition Labour Party fared worse than expected, the exit poll suggested, and Cameron’s coalition partner, the Liberal Democrat Party, was expected to lose most of its seats. The biggest surge was for the separatist Scottish National Party, which was expected to take all but one of the seats in Scotland.
The exit poll, based on interviews with 22,000 voters, differed strongly from opinion polls conducted during the month-long election campaign, which had put the Conservatives and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party neck-and-neck with about a third of the vote share each.
Political leaders said they would wait for actual results before jumping to conclusions, and some in the Labour Party expressed skepticism about the poll.
“I have to say it just doesn’t feel right,” said longtime Labour adviser Alistair Campbell.
The survey was conducted by pollsters GfK and Ipsos MORI for Britain’s broadcasters and released as polling stations closed at 10 p.m.
Results began coming in within an hour of polls closing. The seat of Houghton and Sunderland South in northeast England was the first of the 650 to complete the traditional election-night ritual: Votes in each constituency are counted by hand, and the candidates – each wearing a bright rosette in the color of their party – line up onstage as a returning officer reads out the results.
The first three seats of the night all went to Labour – but all three had been expected to.
The exit poll projected that the Conservatives would get 316 seats – up from 302 and far more than had been predicted – and Labour 239, down from 256. The Liberal Democrats would shrink from 56 seats to 10, and the Scottish nationalists would grow from six to 58.
If the exit poll is accurate, the Conservative Party would be in a commanding position to form the next government by seeking partners from smaller parties.
There could be a re-run of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that has governed since 2010. The poll put the two parties’ total at 326 – just over half the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
Cameron could seek support from the right-of-center Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland, which had eight seats before the election, or the anti-European U.K. Independence Party.
The Conservatives and Labour have both watched voters turn elsewhere – chiefly to the Scottish nationalists, who will dominate north of the border, and the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party.
UKIP ran third in opinion polls, but the exit poll predicted it would win just two seats because its support isn’t concentrated in specific areas. The Greens were forecast to get two seats.
Conservative politicians did not declare victory, and Labour did not concede defeat, as everyone waited to see whether the poll’s surprising predictions would be borne out.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown was skeptical.
“I’ll bet you my hat, eaten on your program, that it is wrong,” he told the BBC.
The chief exit pollster, John Curtice of Strathclyde University, said the methodology was the same as in 2010, when the poll turned out to be very accurate.
He said it looked as if Conservative and Labour gains had canceled each other out across England and Wales, and that Labour had lost much of its support in Scotland to the SNP.
The carefully stage-managed campaign lacked impromptu drama, but many voters felt that the stakes were high in an election that shattered the dominance of the two major parties.
All day across this nation of 64 million people, voters streamed to schools, churches and even pubs for a say in their country’s future.
“This is the most exciting election I can remember,” said Lesley Milne, 48, from Glasgow, who supports the Scottish National Party. “It’s time to shake up the politicians in London and the SNP are the people to do it.”
Television debate appearances in which the public put questions directly to the politicians made plain that many distrust promises to safeguard the economy, protect the National Health Service from severe cutbacks and control the number of immigrants from eastern Europe.
Britain’s economy – recovering after years of turmoil that followed the 2008 financial crisis – was at the core of many voters’ concerns.
In Whitechapel, one of London’s poorest communities that is home to a large ethnic minority population, voters struggling in the wake of the worst recession since the 1930s wanted a change in leadership.
“The first priority is the economy, the second one is creating more jobs, and the third is living expenses – they’re going higher and higher,” said Shariq ul-Islam, a 24-year-old student of Bangladeshi descent.
Just a few minutes away is the City of London, the traditional financial district where many bankers earn salaries that their Whitechapel neighbors can only dream of.
Here, Christopher Gardner, a 34-year-old finance industry official, had trust in the Conservatives.
“There are some issues that have been caused by austerity previously – they’re the only people that I’m confident will resolve that,” he said.
About 50 million people were registered to vote, and turnout appeared to be high across the United Kingdom’s four parts – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Even Denmark’s prime minister popped into a British polling station – though not to vote. Helle Thorning-Schmidt was in South Wales to support her husband, Stephen Kinnock, a Labour Party candidate for the constituency of Aberavon.
Even as Labour faced disaster, it looked likely Kinnock would win the seat, a party stronghold.
Asked how they would celebrate his win, she said: “Let’s wait and see how things go today.”
Sylvia Hui, Paul Kelbie, Gregory Katz and Martin Benedyk contributed to this story.
