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

[Bacon King]

Do they still do the big swingometer, with the guy moving the thing back and forth to show the audience? Or does UKIP, SNP, etc. totally screw that up?

They have four this year - Con-Lab, Lib-Lab, Con-Lib and SNP-Lab.

quadruple swingometers!

truly, we live in exciting times

[Bacon King]

There are stories on Twitter of queues to vote in Liverpool Riverside, of all places.  But I'm always a bit sceptical of turnout rumours.

This was one of the seats the Green Party is targeting (not that it necessarily means much of anything)

[Bacon King]

JOIN THE FORUM LIVECHAT EVERYONE

www.mibbit.com

chatroom: #atlasforum

[Bacon King]

Remember that recounts don't always (or even usually) mean a close result.  Of course, with Balls's seat it should be very close, but usually recount requests come from smaller candidates trying to save their deposits. 

speaking of deposits, at this point in the night the Liberal Democrats have lost £141,500

[Bacon King]

It was the LD's (the Lost Deposit Party) whose totals collapsed

on that note, the final results for the Lib Dem Lost Deposit Tracker show the LD's losing their deposits in 340 constituencies, a majority of them, losing a total of £170,000 pounds. For reference, this is approximately the average cost of raising a child from birth to age seventeen.

[Bacon King]

Did Labour or the Tories lose their deposit in any places?

these are what I've found so far:

lost Labour deposits:

Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk; Ross, Skye & Lochaber; Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine

lost Tory deposits:

Glasgow NE; Liverpool Walton; most of their NI candidates

[Bacon King]

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

He'll still elected via secret ballot so it probably wouldn't work anyway

[Bacon King]

The Guardian: 9 Reasons to be cheerful about the election in spite of everything

[Bacon King]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_West_Derby_(UK_Parliament_constituency)

This might be their biggest epic fail. I'm sure someone will see what I'm referring to...

Liberal Democrat behind the Liberal candidate?

[Bacon King]

In more practical terms there's a class divide between the two parties, with UUP voters generally being the more well-off members of the Protestant community. The UUP is effectively the North Irish branch of the Conservative Party (not to be confused with the actual North Irish branch of the Conservative Party, which usually polls about 2% where they bother running candidates) but some portions of the UUP also have more of a leftist tendency than you really see anywhere in the Tories. Lady Hermon for example was on the left of the party and first sat as an independent when the Ulster Unionists initiated their ill-fated merger with the Conservative Party, back in 2010.

The DUP is interested in three things: 1) themselves, 2) the NI Protestant community in general, and 3) bringing home the bacon from Westminster for those first two things. They're less of a political party and more of a personification of that one SimCity advisor:



I hope this helps! Actual Brits, feel free to correct my misconceptions

[Bacon King]

FWIW, here is Lord Ashcroft's post election poll.

A third of LibDem support was just tactical votes

Edit: and Labour actually won voters who made up their mind on election day as well as those who made up their mind a few days before

[Bacon King]

FWIW, here is Lord Ashcroft's post election poll.

A third of LibDem support was just tactical votes

Edit: and Labour actually won voters who made up their mind on election day as well as those who made up their mind a few days before

Actually, per my math, more than 3/4 of the LD vote were tactical voters trying to stop another party. 19% of the electorate were tactical voters. A third of them (34%) voted LD, or a tad over 6% (6.46%). The LD's got 8% of the vote (7.9%). 6/8 = 75% (81.18% to be exact - 6.46%/7.9% = 81.18%). With the Greens out there and getting some traction, I suspect that there is a substantial possibility that the LD's will just disappear. There is political space for only so many parties at any one time. The LD's never made much sense to me in recent years anyway. They had no real raison d'être. They have next to none now.

I am assuming that this poll has at least some nexus with reality of course.

No need to do math, it says the exact number in the poll itself. Look at question six, on the bottom right of the first page of the summary. When prompted with, "Here are some reasons people have given for deciding on the party they voted for. Which three were the most important in your decision?" it shows that 34% of LD voters said "I voted tactically to stop another party from winning" (and looking in the detailed results shows that 22% of LD voters even said it was their #1 reason).

One can assert that the bulk of the UKIP vote is not available to the Tories, but that post election Ashcroft poll suggests otherwise, and about half if I recall correctly have voted Tory before.

I would argue that Ashcroft's poll offers no rationale that UKIP voters can in any way be lumped in with Tory voters like you've done. It says 40% claim to be former Conservative voters but it also says 25% are traditionally supporters of Labour; page 14 of the detailed results shows that only 37% of 2015 UKIP voters were 2010 Tory voters. I honestly doubt that the Conservative Party could realistically win over very many of the UKIP voters who haven't voted for them in the past, especially considering there's probably a significant class divide there. Even if Labour fails to win them back, I imagine they're much more likely to either keep casting protest votes or become disillusioned non-voters than they are vote Conservative.

[Bacon King]

Where can you find the official results by constituency (without clicking 650 times)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2015_United_Kingdom_general_election_by_parliamentary_constituency

If you were meant to ask for a map, heres one that doesn't put you in a separate page every time you click and can just slide around.


http://principalfish.co.uk/election2015/

The wikipedia article only shows 152 constituencies from Aberavon to Clacton.  Do you know where I could find the rest?

Wikipedia's editors appear to be adding new constituencies at a steady rate so it should be finished sooner rather than later

[Bacon King]

so if I'm understanding the chart right, the only party that attracted a meaningful number of new voters was UKIP? (As in, they have more people with + signs in their block than the sum of people that flowed to them from elsewhere)