General Election Forecast: Kurunegala District

Kurunegala was an ancient royal capital of Sri Lanka for 50 years, from the end of the 13th century to the start of the 14th century. Now it’s the capital city of the North-Western Province. Kurunagala electoral district has 1,348,787 registered voters and they elect 15 of the 225 members of the Sri Lankan Parliament which is the 3rd highest number of members of parliament from a single district. Like in 2015 Sri Lanka’s current Prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksha is contesting for the parliament in Kurunagala district.

Past Elections

In recent years with UNP populists, Johnston Fernando and Dayasiri Jayasekara crossing over to the SLFA made Kurunagala is a SLFA stronghold. Even In the 2015 general election after defeat in the presidential election SLFA was able to win the district with 8 seats to 7. In 2010 SLFA won Kurunegala by a landslide with 10 seats. JVP usually had more than 5% support in Kurunagala but they were not able to win a seat in Kurunagala for last 15 years. In the recent presidential election, Gotabhaya Rajapaksha won the district comprehensively with 57.90% voter support. He got 652,278 votes in his favour in the election.

General Election 2020

Numbers.lk conducted a national online poll between 20th July to 27th of July of 2020. We got 1,844 responses overall and 186 of them are from Kurunegala district.

Since it’s an online poll it’s difficult to achieve the random sampling of demographics that an election poll requires. Since the poll is not a random sample of Population of Sri Lanka; we used the swing of voters from one party to another from the presidential election to the general election to forecast the outcome of the election.

Here is a full breakdown of voter swing in Kurunegala District:

According to our projections, here are the final results of Kurunegala district,

Note: We expected little more support for an SLPP in Kurunagala than our poll indicate. But this is the result we got.

Key Takeaways:

• SLPP will win the district with 8 seats. SJB will win 5 seats, UNP & NMPP end up winning 1 seat each.
• Our poll suggests NMPP will able to win a seat from Kurunegala this time around.
• Since the margin of the poll is 3% there is a chance SJB could win an additional seat at the expense of the NMPP seat.
• Akila Viraj Kariawasam will be the only member elected to the parliament from UNP.
• Not Surprisingly Mahinda Rajapaksha is leading the preferential votes of SLPP and Jhonstan Fernando is the distant 2nd in the list.
• Nalin Bandara and Indika Bandaranayake Leading the preferencial votes of SJB.

Do you agree with our projections? let up know in the comments section.

Read More:

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• General Election Forecast: Gampaha District
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