UK General Election - May 7th 2015 (The Official Election Day & Results Thread)

[Torie]

Stop being dense everyone. UKIP will be 'surging' everywhere as they were not treated by the electorate as a serious option last time. Decent results for them in those constituencies were expected.

Are Tory voters voting ukip in safe lab seats for the hell of it?

Mostly Labour and LD voters doing so, with just some from the Tories. But these are working class Northern England seats. Not much gentry vote is in play.

[Torie]

Swindon North confirms it. RIP Labour.

Yup, the drain is from Labour and the LD's more so, with some swing from the LD's to the Tories at least in the south. Which is why the LD's are looking at a wipeout of their seats in the more rural south.

[Torie]

Tories up 5% in Battersea, Lib Dems, Green and UKIP all lost deposits. No surprises here.

Labour was supposed to do particularly well around London. Not in Putney. Wonder what will happen in Finchley.

[Torie]

Is there any seat that Labour might take from the Tories anywhere? I guess we will find out soon. They are set for their best shot right about now.

[Torie]

But the DUP just lost a seat.

[Torie]

Recount in Nuneaton, per BBC

I think that seat was about number 3 of the Tory held Labour targets.

[Torie]

Recount in Nuneaton, per BBC

I think that seat was about number 3 of the Tory held Labour targets.

No its about 38.

Not on the ITV board. Anyway, apparently the Tories held it.

[Torie]

Nuneaton hold by CON on a positive swing.  UKIP did worse than expected.  UKIP->CON tactical voting.

What is the percentage swing? I would like to see the numbers for this seat.

[Torie]

But the DUP just lost a seat.

?

That is what ITV said in passing, Antrim North or something. It did seem odd. It supposedly went to the SLDP.

[Torie]

Clwyd South:
37% Labour
30% Conservative
16% UKIP
10% Plaid Cymru
4% Liberal Democrat
3% Green

2010:
38% Labour
30% Conservative
17% Liberal Democrat
9% Plaid Cymru
3% BNP
2% UKIP

So basically the Liberal Democratic switched to UKIP? LOL.

It is more like LD->LAB, LD->CON, LAB->UKIP, and CON->UKIP.  CON->UKIP weaken a lot due to last minute tactical voting.  LAB->UKIP and UKIP->CON tactical voting are result of English Nationalism due to the threat from SNP.  In retrospect what save Cameron was agreeing to the Scotland Referendum.

UKIP's are voting tactically like a laser beam. It is as if they are all political junkies. Almost weird really.

[Torie]

UUP gain South Antrim from DUP

Who is UUP? The more militant Unionist faction of old?

[Torie]

UUP gain South Antrim from DUP

Who is UUP? The more militant Unionist faction of old?

The less militant Unionist faction of old returning to Parliament after a 6-year hiatus

IC.

[Torie]

Do the LD's have much prospect of ever coming back in their traditional stronghold of the west country?  What do you guys think?  Will Scotland vote again on its final exit during Cameron's term? Does anyone see Scotland as part of the UK ten years' hence?  The England map looks more and more like the US map - the left party has lots of seats that you have trouble seeing on the map without a zooming in, and not too much outside it (except up in the far north of England).  Is that trend likely to continue?  I wonder if Labour will over time continue to hold its more rural northern constituencies.

[Torie]

Nick Clegg is now officially the worst leader of any party this century.

Well, I suppose that might be arguably right from an electoral success standpoint, although the PC's back when lost all their seats but one in Canada when the Reform party split off.

But I must dissent strongly from my point of view that he was the worst leader. In fact, he was one of the best leaders ever. He took what he knew would be a politically damaging step to allow the UK to have a stable government in a time of financial crisis when that is what the UK really needed, and acted with honor and steadfastness in the coalition, even when it was politically difficult for him to do so. I salute him for his courage - and for putting Britain first over any party interest. Kudos to him. Would that more politicians act so selflessly.

[Torie]

Will the Tories get rid of the speaker Berclaw (sp), whom allegedly they don't like?

[Torie]

What you call "honor and steadfastness" I call "abandoning campaign promises en masse and going against nearly all of his party's supporters' wishes." Nick Clegg fandom at this point is just sad.

Agree to disagree.

No problem, although I question the bit about "going againt nearly all of his party's supporters' wishes." I would like to think that most LD party members are patriots too, in the best sense of the word. The LD leadership knew that there needed to be spending cuts. They were not innumerate.

I assume that the Tories will now get about the business of excising all those depopulated Welsh coal mining constituencies that as Al so colorfully put it, would rather drink battery acid than vote Tory, now that the LD's are not around to stop that particularly implementation of the one person, one vote principle.

[Torie]

If England was so satisfied with the current government, then why were the Lib Dems punished so harshly? Was it something like:

Voted Lib Dem in 2010, satisfied with current government -> Conservative
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, dissatisfied with current government -> Labour
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, mostly as an antiestablishment/protest vote -> UKIP

Also, I wonder how much there was polling error, and how much was just a last minute breaking of the undecideds to the Conservatives due to a combination of a) Miliband's personal unpopularity finally catching up to him and b) Fear of SNP influence, and c) UKIP tactical voting.

I feel it is b) and c).  Of course b) leads to c).

I notice that there are a lot of Labour held seats in Northern England, particularly in general the more rural ones, where the Tory plus UKIP vote was above 50%, and even more such seats if you put say half the LD vote in the center right column. Several more are very close to that. So that is something that Labour might worry about, if they don't want to become like the US Democrats, and be largely leashed to more urban seats. This might be particularly worrisome for them, if as may well be the case, Scotland, one way or the other, is gone for them forever more.

[Torie]

On the subject of the Lib Dems: what exactly is (or was ) their social base of support?

(apologies if this question has been answered before).

Before the late unpleasantness, the same social base as the bulk of the posters who post on this forum.

[Torie]

Is this the first time there have been no Liberal or Lib Dem seats in the South-West of England since the 1950s?

Yes

You think the LD's might be permanently finished there (well nothing is perhaps indubitably "permanent," but you know what I mean)?

[Torie]

If England was so satisfied with the current government, then why were the Lib Dems punished so harshly? Was it something like:

Voted Lib Dem in 2010, satisfied with current government -> Conservative
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, dissatisfied with current government -> Labour
Voted Lib Dem in 2010, mostly as an antiestablishment/protest vote -> UKIP

Also, I wonder how much there was polling error, and how much was just a last minute breaking of the undecideds to the Conservatives due to a combination of a) Miliband's personal unpopularity finally catching up to him and b) Fear of SNP influence, and c) UKIP tactical voting.

I feel it is b) and c).  Of course b) leads to c).

I notice that there are a lot of Labour held seats in Northern England, particularly in general the more rural ones, where the Tory plus UKIP vote was above 50%, and even more such seats if you put say half the LD vote in the center right column. Several more are very close to that. So that is something that Labour might worry about, if they don't want to become like the US Democrats, and be largely leashed to more urban seats. This might be particularly worrisome for them, if as may well be the case, Scotland, one way or the other, is gone for them forever more.

You can't just assume that UKIP voters prefer the conservatives to labour, any more than you could (as people did) assume that lib dem voters last time would prefer labour to the conservatives. In some areas and seats that's true, but in others its not.

It's not as simple as adding all the "right wing parties" together and comparing with the sum of all the "left wing parties" to find who should win a given seat. To give just reason why, many votes for third parties are protest votes designed to send labour and the tories a message, not an ideological statement.

Fair enough, but with respect to the UKIP voters up there who were formerly Labour voters, does that not indicate some estrangement with the party, an estrangement that will not be easy to assuage?

[Torie]

Anyone find a nice tidy list of the top thirty or so closest seats in terms of victory margin?

Here is it ranked by vote margin.

[Torie]

Here's a fun detail: Labour up 9.5 (to 22. in North West Norfolk. People who can remember the last election will know the explanation for this.

Wiki is just so fabulous. But really, what he said is what a considerably majority of the voters there thought.

[Torie]

Fair enough, but with respect to the UKIP voters up there who were formerly Labour voters, does that not indicate some estrangement with the party, an estrangement that will not be easy to assuage?

That doesn't mean that they're about to vote bloody Tory.

Give them time baby, give them time. Who would have thought Harlan County, KY would have become a Pub bastion 20 years ago?

[Torie]

I know these places and you don't and you haven't got a fycking clue what you're talking about.

All of that may be true, and probably is true, but that does not necessarily mean that you are correct either actually as to what the future portends. I will be interested in reading more, and seeing more polling, about these former Labour voting north England UKIP voters. If you come up with something, I would be appreciative if you send it my way. Cheers.

[Torie]

When did you move to Germany?  Here is actually an interesting piece on the matter, to cut through all the vitriol. Interestingly it notes that some of the 2010 Tory voters now supporting the UKIP had voted Labour before that. The "red" UKIP voters seem to be a classic case of the cross pressured voter, and remarkably similar to a similar cohort in the US, that slowly moved Pub in places where the private industry trade unions withered away.