Labour Party heads into Saturday’s election with almost 28,000-vote advantage

The Labour Party goes into Saturday’s election with a solid 9-point lead and a 27,698-vote advantage, MaltaToday’s last rolling survey of the electoral campaign shows.

The accumulated results as at 8pm on Thursday 24 March, the last day of the campaign, showed the Labour Party with 53.5% support, an increase of 0.2 points from the previous day, and the PN at 44.5%, a decrease of 0.2 points over Wednesday. Third parties collectively registered 2%, retaining the same level of support they have enjoyed throughout the five-week campaign.

All changes remained statistically insignificant since they were well within the margin of error, which stood at 1.8% on a sample base of 2,995 respondents.

The results for the major parties have remained within a constant range for the length of the electoral campaign, suggesting that the PL is on course to secure its third consecutive election victory with a substantial margin.

Lower turnout

Malta Today’s rolling survey is projecting a lower turnout than the last general election.

The share of valid votes stood at 87% on Thursday, a decrease of 0.1 points from the previous day.

The share of valid votes is the basis on which an election is won and is normally around 1.2 points lower than the turnout figure (turnout is the share of eligible voters who have actually voted). The difference between them is the number of invalid votes.

In the 2017 election, while 92.1% of eligible voters went out to vote, only 90.9% of eligible voters cast a valid vote. MaltaToday’s survey is showing a decline of almost four points in valid votes cast.

It remains to be seen whether the efforts done by the two major parties to urge people to go out and vote will leave the desired result on Saturday and push the turnout even higher.

A higher turnout could impact the size of the gap between the two major parties.

Trust gap at 13 points

The trust barometer showed Robert Abela with a trust score of 44.1%, unchanged from the previous two days. Bernard Grech registered a score of 31.1%, the same as the previous day.

The trust gap remained stuck at 13 points, giving the PL a higher potential for growth among those who trust Abela but who are still undecided.

The share of those who trust none of the two leaders or are unsure was 24.8%.

READ ALSO: What will the undecided do? Four variables influence Sunday’s electoral result

What we did

A base survey with a sample size of 597 was released on Sunday 27 February. This survey was continuously adjourned every day. The latest data set includes a sample gathered between 21 February and 24 March.

The daily tallies boosted the sample size and enabled us to re-calculate the data on progressively larger samples.

Care was taken to ensure that daily samples were representative of the general population, reflecting gender, age, regional distribution and past voting patterns.

The results based on the accumulated tally comprising the previous day’s results were published between Tuesday and Friday on the MaltaToday home page.

This last survey includes the data for the last day of the election campaign.