United Kingdom General Election 2024 : (Date to be confirmed)

[JimJamUK]

If I run* should I do it as an independent or for Reform? I think independents have more chance of a victory than attaching a minor party label to your ballot line. Plus if you run for a party they might tell you that you have to run in some absolute hole in Sunderland or Southampton rather than in your local seat. However, Reform did ask me to apply for the local elections (I didn't). They're not a serious outfit though. The other issue is that I know my local MPs and don't really want to stand against them. Plus my local Labour candidate is kinda fit.

*Quite unlikely I actually go through with it but I've always wanted to do it.

Given your politics, presumably standing would help rather than hurt her?
Have Reform got anything to offer a prospective candidate such as yourself (pay for the deposit, activists to campaign etc)?

[JimJamUK]

As always, an MRP with a large Labour lead will find Labour winning in places that initially look very unrealistic. If you assume the Labour lead will reduce by the election, then so will the ‘unbelievable’ Labour gains.

[JimJamUK]

- the usual ridiculous age divide
- something of an education divide, though note that this seems to be mostly among older voters
- weak gender gap
- little effect of "class" (though of course they mean the dubious ABCDE system)

A shame they didn’t break this down by age as well, as IIRC previous breakdowns show a decent bit of social grade voting once you separate out by age group. Of course, if they showed this regularly then it might undermine the methodological choice in the 1st place…

[JimJamUK]

I'm a bit mystified at how the Tories still manage to do as well as they do among people 70 and over. Its not as if the Labour Party is some newfangled party that old people have never voted for. Briton who are 70+ are of a generation who likely would have voted in large numbers for Labour in the 70s and 80s and again in the big Blair landslides. So who are the people who consistently voted Labour in the 70s, 80s, 90s and to some extent in the 00s - who are now steadfastly sticking with the Tories under Sunak or else flirting with Reform UK?

Quite a large number of people. Overwhelmingly they voted Leave (and hold correlated socially conservative/authoritarian views) and have done relatively well out of the current government (the state pension has risen faster than other benefits, and ridiculous property prices benefit people who largely own their own home).

Honestly, Labour should be content that they are getting a noticeably average swing among pensioners, somewhat unwinding the massive swing to the Tories over the last few elections. That the Tories still lead among them just shows how massive that swing really has been.

[JimJamUK]

How much worse than 1997 can the result be expected to be for the Tories in terms of seat count, given depolarization since then? Is something like "Liberal Democrats become the Official Opposition" a pipe dream or a realistic prospect? (Also, there's a lot of skepticism over the 'Reform UK' surge being real. Is there a time when we'll know whether it is or isn't? Also, are most 'Reform UK' voters individuals who despise the Tories but can't actually envision themselves voting for a party not on the right, or are they against-all voters who might well end up casting a vote for Labour or the Lib Dems to turf the Sunak government?)

The Lib Dems are unlikely to become the official opposition, as you would truly have to see a Labour landslide, massive tactical voting for the Lib Dems, and a genuine Reform surge. The semi-realistic outcome is that the Tories do get smashed, but the level of Conservative to Labour switchers required would in practice mean Labour would be winning random seats in southern England that pre-coalition would have voted Lib Dem on such an occasion.

As alluded to above, the Reform ‘surge’ seems to be way too hyped by the polls. They are nowhere near achieving what UKIP did even before their peak, as evidenced by their underwhelming by-election performances and their near non-existent local election votes. The polls indicate they are appealing to politically engaged voters who demographically look the sort who turn out to cast a protest vote, yet actual results indicate the opposite. It looks to me like poor sampling. There is a lot of unhappiness with the Tories, including on the right, but it’s not voting Reform at the moment.

FWIW, polling indicates that Reform voters are mostly 2019 Tories with a Brexit Party minority. Their voters overwhelmingly have a very negative view of Starmer/Labour which doesn’t suggest many of them would switch to Labour if Reform didn’t stand/collapsed. Of course, many could just stay home instead of going back to the Tories. That’s not to say there aren’t quite a few ‘Reform-esque’ voters (voted Tory/Brexit Party, Leave and don’t like immigration) who could vote Labour, it’s just that such people are currently indicating they’ll switch to Labour or more likely are ‘don’t know’ at the moment.

[JimJamUK]

Would love to meet some Labour 2019/Tory 2024 voters. Who even are they? Accelerationists? Mark Latham imitators? Idiots? Leicester East?

In no particular order:
People rushing through the poll clicking anything
People who genuinely changed their political views eg; culture wars, radicalised by COVID etc
Ethnic minorities (mainly Hindus) who liked Corbyn and/or like Sunak
Random people with extremely weird/niche/non-existent political views eg; I somehow know a 2019 Corbyn voter who literally voted for Trump for fear Biden would be a Trojan horse for Venezuelan socialism.

[JimJamUK]

Usual caveats apply, but we have a constituency poll of Godalming & Ash (Jeremy Hunt's new seat) by Survation for 38 Degrees:

Lib Dem 35% (+1)
Con 29% (-24)
Lab 23% (+15)
Reform UK 8% (+8)
Green 3% (+1)
(changes from 2019 notional)

True, but it’s honestly kinda believable?

The Lib Dem vote looks about right (the loss of the Labour votes they squeeze come the GE being balanced out by this being the sort of place where a lot of Tories will actually be moving direct to them), the generic Labour vote being half what they get nationally is fairly realistic, and the Tory collapse, exactly what the national polls would suggest.

[JimJamUK]

This kind of terrible polling is terrible news for the government in a fifth year of its term. Did Major ever see such dire results in 1997, or had he already started to recover by this point?

They bottomed out at 25% in early 1995, almost immediately surged a couple of points, and then had a glacial recovery to 30% over the rest of the Parliament. The decent swing at the end of the Parliament was from Labour to Lib Dem, and there may have been a significant swing (or systematic underestimating of the swing) from Labour to Lib Dem at the last minute.

[JimJamUK]

It was the Lib Dems that did well during the 1997 campaign itself, which could potentially be good news for Ed Davey (especially if any more shock polls come out where leader of opposition could be a contested position).

Not the case in 2015, 2017 or 2019 though, and Davey does not strike me as somebody about to inspire a wave of enthusiasm (the previous Lib Dem campaign surges largely involved getting people who’d voted for them at the last election to return, along with positive attention given to the party during the campaign).

[JimJamUK]

It’s worth noting that despite increasing their seat numbers, there was actually a substantial swing away from the Ashfield Independents last year (especially once you focus on only the parts of Ashfield Council in Ashfield constituency). They still dominated of course, but Labour (and to some extent the Tories as well) look a lot irrelevant than you might think at first glance.

FWIW, Reform and the Ashfield Independents are both fighting over a lot of the same voters (the formers paltry 5% in 2019 shows this), and with the latter on paper much more relevant it is more likely to split this vote rather than coalesce it around Reform. As others have said, this is very good news for Labour who want a weakened Ashfield Independent vote and now get a weakened Conservative vote as well.

[JimJamUK]

Was waiting for a few more polls - but we now seem to have a trend. Across pollsters, and several aggregators, the Tories are being pushed down to end-stage Truss numbers. To be fair, it’s been an awful fortnight for them, so the picture may improve - but it’s kinda wild things have gotten *this bad* again.

The comfort for the Tories, and it is only modest comfort, is that since the Truss debacle the switchers have noticeably moved to Reform rather than Labour. Given the limited evidence of actual Reform voters, that suggests the Tories would in practice poll somewhat better in an actual general election than polling suggests. But given this is all in comparison the Truss era popularity…

[JimJamUK]

I think that even the LibDems are expecting their vote to nosedive in Finchley next time.

I mean, anyone predicting a Lib Dem victory in Finchley could take a look at the last local elections there… (see also Kensington and Cities of London constituencies).

[JimJamUK]

I mean, anyone predicting a Lib Dem victory in Finchley could take a look at the last local elections there… (see also Kensington and Cities of London constituencies).

To a degree it depends on candidate selection by the Lib Dems (or, really, if they have viable candidate options to start with). Has that happened yet in any of those seats?

They had viable candidates in 2019 because all of them were sitting MPs riding the wave of remainer backlash. The fact they won next to nothing in the 2022 elections (despite Lib Dems usually doing much better at local elections) suggests they haven’t used the 2019 result as a foundation, but rather it was a blip. Compare to somewhere like Wimbledon where they have solidified themselves as the local, and likely national, alternative to the Tories. The best of their 3 star candidates, Luciana Berger, isn't even a Lib Dem anymore.

[JimJamUK]

Apparently some "right wingers" are actually putting forward Tughendat as a possible PM now.

The mind boggles.

As someone who has no idea of the minutia of British government (but is trying to learn), why is this odd? His Wikipedia page makes him seem like a generic Tory. Or is the weirdness the fact that he's not particularly extreme?

He came 5th in 2022, and is seen as on the moderate wing of the party (voted Remain, supports net zero etc). Also relatively anti-Boris. There’s no clear reason why right wingers would prefer him to Sunak, never mind give him a coronation as leader.

[JimJamUK]

I know MRP polls are supposed to be viewed in the macro, rather than the granular, but there’s some *weird* stuff in the Survation projection:

Labour winning the Tory-Lib Dem marginals of Hazel Grove, as well as Woking for one. They’re also winning Frome and East Somerset, the prototypical Lib Dem tactical voting seat.

The difficulty is that on a national and basically all demographic level, the Labour vote is up a lot while the Lib Dem vote is static. There is no scientifically rigorous way to model which constituencies will see tactical voting for the Lib Dems and which will see a credible Lib Dem vote fall away in Labour’s favour. They could stick some arbitrary tactical voting on the numbers eg; Labour vote will rise a lot less where the Lib Dems are 2nd, but it would clearly still be arbitrary and wrong in many places as well. There’s similarly a long-standing issue with MRPs (some more than others), where the vote for parties is flattened and it’s particularly striking for the Labour vote in Tory-Lib Dem marginals. A lot of this is simply a reflection of the underlying Labour vote (both natural Labour voters and people who are defaulting to them nationally as the non-Tory option) which will be squeezed by the Lib Dems come election day.

[JimJamUK]

Presumably Jeremy Vine will continue to be the swingometer guy. Opinions on him are fairly mixed. An important role is the 'grilling interviewer' - this has provided many memorable moments going back to at least 1964 when there was an 'interesting' encounter between Robin Day and George Brown. It won't be Neil or Paxman. Jo Coburn would be a reasonable choice, far better-suited to it than she is to being a presenter (a role she has for by-elections when the BBC bothers to cover them).

I think you’re being a bit too kind…

Personally, I would have Victoria Derbyshire be the lead presenter. She is clearly regarded as 2nd tier, but has enough experience and did a better job than Laura K and Fiona Bruce when she covered their shows for them.

[JimJamUK]

I find it hard to believe that the Labour vote is down from the last election in Wales, and I’m not exactly convinced that Reform would get the same vote as the Tories if an election was held today either…

https://twitter.com/redfieldwilton/status/1783163993567150556?s=61&t=I1DE8_c...

[JimJamUK]

There is a constituency poll showing Penny Mordaunt narrowly ahead in her Portsmouth North constituency. It should be noted that this poll was commissioned by her constituency party and asked respondents what they thought of her before it asked the voting intention question.

The initial reporting I saw missed out this part funnily enough.

[JimJamUK]

And today Sunak has a re-election pitch that seems to amount to "things are so dangerous and scary that you can't risk voting for anyone else, but give us another five years - totally ignoring our record for the previous 14 - and everything will suddenly become wonderful. Honest!"

Seriously, who is advising him on this stuff?

“I believe in that innate confidence in ourselves that has always run through our island story”

Completely vacuous word salad.

[JimJamUK]

Why has turnout fallen? It was in the high 70s for most of the post war era but in the 60s starting with Blair. The vote record remains John Major in 1992! The UK has nearly 10 million more people now.

www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/

It’s declined especially among younger and working class voters. The former looks largely generational and will lead to a long term decline in turnout. The latter can be partially explained by how politics has become a lot more middle class, the change being most drastic in the Labour Party. Working class politicians are now a small minority in Parliament and Labour have a much less explicitly class based appeal now.