Talk Elections

[Labour just confirmed they're voting for it, so it is on.  I'll change the date once it's worked out today.  Could be either the 9th or 12th.

Here is a link to the BBC article. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-50221856

Edit, since it looks like its set _{save drama in the lords}.

Hmmmmmmm..a hastily called election where early polls indicate the Conservatives will win in a landslide and have a shot at getting over 400 seats.  Never seen this play before.

It's actually a United Kingdom General Election, as Northern Ireland will also participate and we don't call them parliamentary elections. Otherwise spot on.

So.

Tories will start off with the 10 point lead or so. Johnson will start bumbling his way around the country. He’ll find himself on the walkabout in Peterborough/Canterbury/Lincoln/Somesuch Place. A large concerned citizen will then waddle up to him and ask whether he’s ever had to clean up his own mother’s piss. He’ll mumble and stumble on camera which will be all over the news/social media. Labour will then pull even as the Tory vote erodes and Labour consolidates some of the anti-Tory vote.

Result: Labour minority

How likely Tories get rinsed in Cornwall, Norfolk, London, and Scotland? Enough to lose any chance of a majority despite 10 point lead?

unlikely, remote, possible, possible

I wish gambling was legal or possible through this site.

You are out of your mind if you think Labour is winning a minority government.

A hung parliament is the absolute best anyone can hope for.

I’m an American so I don’t have a dog in the fight but if I was a Brit, I’d be a moderate Labour voter (think Blair) but one who supports leave. I think Corbyn is horrific. But then again I think the Tories Brexit deal is awful as well, so it’s a lose lose all around.

I think you’re looking at a result approximately:

Conservative 340
Labour 200
Liberal Democrat 50
Brexit 5
Independent 16

Put me down for Burlington Bertie 100/30 on a Labour minority ;)

On a serious note, granted, if the current polls are correct (and note there is some variation between the polling companies, with the Tory lead bouncing around between 3-15 points) a Labour minority is unlikely. However, my somewhat facetious post above was a synecdoche for that fact that polls can easily change in the campaign, as of course they did in 2017, when the Tories blew a 20 point lead over Labour (which was considered even less of a threat back then than it is now). Whilst I’m sure Johnson, Swinson, the Media punditry class and galaxy brain psephologists would love for the election to polarize around the issue of leaving the EU, there are other issues out there, and most of those are not favourable  to the Tories.

The Tories have several big issues which I think will harm them significantly in the campaign. Firstly, they continue to be weighed down by the baggage of ‘austerity’, and no matter how much money they promise to spend to reverse it, they will always be outbid by Labour, who did this very effectively in 2017. I think if Corbyn and Labour roll out a similar manifesto to the one they did last time, this will be helpful in consolidating the anti-Tory vote.

Secondly, whilst he’s not quite as bad as Theresa May (who had the wit and charisma of my left shoe), I do not think Johnson will perform well on the campaign trail and I think he will be liable to get embroiled in embarrassing imbroglios similar to the one I mentioned in my previous post. Whilst he had this reputation as this great, charismatic campaigner when he was Mayor of London, I think the crucial thing in his favour was that there was, relatively speaking, a lot of goodwill for him (which has since evaporated), and he was running for a Mickey Mouse position with comparatively little power. Nothing I have seen of him over the last couple of years makes me believe that he will be able to stand up to scrutiny in a general election campaign.

Thirdly, unlike in the last election when the Tories largely consolidated the pro-Brexit vote and had no significant opposition to their right, in this election the Brexit party will be a very real problem. They may not be polling at 20% anymore, but even if they get half of that that will cause serious problems for the Tories. I was looking at the Scottish polls, and I noted that if you put the Tories and the Brexit party together (and I assume the Brexit party vote has come largely from the Tories in Scotland) then the Tories would be in the same place votes wise as they were in 2017. Of course, they’d still probably lose seats, as the SNP have also risen in the polls, but vote splitting between the Tories and the Brexit party will make that situation much worse. This applies to all of the country, not just Scotland, although I picked that out because it shows how the Brexit party can negatively impact the Tories even in fairly remainy type areas.

I just don’t believe the polls will stay in their current position - I think the Tories will bleed support and that Labour will once again manage to consolidate some of the anti-Tory vote, although probably not to the same extent as in 2017, which potentially opens the possibility of a Labour minority, of the Tories lose a significant number of seats and Labour either tread water or make some modest gains.

There will be a few amendments that are in the works to lower the voting age, give voting rights to Uk residents who are eu citizens and to cap election spending. I think the former would have the most chance of passing, but it would be opposed by the government.

Sam Gyimah to stand in Kensington.

I really hope Farage gets a seat this time. He’ll be tempted to run in a Labour Leave constituency but that’s not the right move. I think he’s got conviction, believes in his cause and unlike his friend Trump - isn’t a fraud

LMAO

Will this help Labour or Tories?

No.

It does help the Lib Dems, who had previously selected a follower of Lutfur Rahman as their candidate there, but probably not enough to matter very much.

Could end up being neither as its possible that Kensington could turn into a 3 way race in this election.

It seems to me the key issue here are the size and nature of the LAB-LDEM-Green tactical voting versus CON-BXP tactical voting.  The way these tactial voting goes will determine if this is NOM or some CON majority of unknown size.   One thing to note is that due to the Brexit issue I believe LDEM would have a lot more financial resources this around versus previous elections.   

Hopefully we see a humiliating defeat for Comrade Corbyn and a return to Blairism for Labour.

This is my read, too. There's no doubt Labour is starting further behind and with more baggage than they had in 2017, but the same is true of the Tories and then some. Add to that the spoiler factor of the Brexit Party, the (high, I think) likelihood of tactical voting by non-Tory/Brexit parties, and the relative campaigning abilities of the respective party leaders and I think there is far more likelihood of a pro-Labour upset than a pro-Tory status quo.

I don't expect there to be much movement in the polls for a while, though. If an anti-Tory result is what comes about, it will only start to materialize in the final few weeks of the campaign. The first month or so will be a kind of unofficial 'primary' campaign for which party gets to be the primary opposition to the Tories; this is rather like how the NDP/Liberals fought it out in August/September of the 2015 GE.

This is very likely to be the most Brexit-focused election yet, perhaps even more then the EU election. Boris has been campaigning more or less since he entered govt, and the only thing the guy is actually good at is running a campaign/getting people to believe his lies and vote for him. He won in London after all as a Tory, and I know that was a different time  but...

So, lets engage in a little though experiment that I ran last night. Lets take the 2017 election results (a 'normal' party breakdown) and the 2019 elections results (a 'brexit' focused breakdown) by consistency into a spreadsheet. On one  side we will have the Tories, UKIP, and Brexit - this will be called the Leave block. On the  other side we will have Labour, Lib-Dems, SNP, Greens, PC, and CHUK - this will be referred to as the  opposition. Add up each of their vote shares in each constituency for each election. Ignore NI because there are no 2019 numbers for that and it's elections are weird. Lets be sure to apply some weight to the opposition numbers, say a multiplier of .85 on their result in each seat to account for the naturally inefficient vote splitting between SNP/Lab/Remain forces. Now, lets weight each result (2017 and 2019) by 50% and add them together to see what the seat breakdown is.

We get a total Leave Block seat count of around 345-350. This thought experiment does not predict seat outcomes, but I think it is a good indicator of a overall total. Boris has been chasing the metaphorical dragon of the leave-labour seats and even if he gets just a bit it will be more than enough to counter losses in Scotland, London, the London bedroom communities, and various urban regions throughout the country.

On each occasion (2008 and 2012) he actually performed a bit less well than polls predicted.

(and his personal popularity was greater, at the very least he was less toxic to non-Tories than now)

I'm not sure if under/overpreforming actually matters here. If you are a member of one party, and you are able to convince the stronghold of another party (less so during the period in question, but still applicable) to vote you in, you have already succeeded. You kinda confirmed my point there, Boris is great at crafting personas to appeal to whatever demographic he needs to win, be it more 'liberal' Londoners or Brexit-voting northerners. He's good at making you think he's appealing and on your side if you are the target, even though deep down he is still the same old rotting Boris Johnson.

And sorry, but this is a ridiculous statement.

Those elections were basically *nothing* but a glorified opinion poll on Brexit (this tendency being all the greater due to their essential meaninglessness)

Whatever happens in the coming GE, those hoping for that yet again are likely to be disappointed.

Especially as it seems Johnson's gamble that Remainer Tories would still back him and a Harder Brexit over Corbyn seems to have worked.

They'll be decimated in Scotland and emaciated in some of their London seats. That should be enough to make a majority very tight, although how well they do in Labour-Leave constituencies in the north will probably determine the election. I certainly don't think the Tories should be as eager for an election as they seem.

To the extent it helps either, presumably the Tories, because the ultra-Remainer typically Tory voters who voted Labour as a backlash against Victoria Borwick in 2017 will mostly vote for him, and Labour can't win Kensington without them. In extremis, maybe he could win the seat through the middle. I don't know enough about the Tory candidate to say; if she's a strong Leaver, Gyimah has a chance. She has apparently stumbled around totally unwinnable seats for the last couple of elections (South Down in 2015 and South Shields in 2017), so she may just be loyal footsoldier type.

Only tabled Amendments selected today for a commons vote concern the election date, no 16/17, no EU nationals, no future vote system changes, no mass postal ballots.

This isn't really true. Remainer Tories in Kensington were never going to vote Labour, because nobody in their family has done that since 1832. We are talking about a very posh, very wealthy and implacably anti-Labour demographic.

The reason they lost in 2017 was that a) some of those Remainer Tories voted Lib Dem (as was the case in a fair swathe of well-off west London); b) more of those Remainer Tories didn't vote; c) there are fewer of those Remainer Tories than there used to be, because they're being outcompeted in the property market by oligarchs and have to move to Chiswick instead and d) turnout in the Labour-voting estates went up, as has been the pattern for a little while now.

The following article takes a pretty solid go at putting forward the case for Gyimah, but it's notable that it only really addresses the posher half of the seat. Unless we start seeing active evidence that he's making inroads in the more down-at-heel bits of North Kensington, I struggle to see his path to victory.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/10/sam-gyimah-standing-kensington-can-he-win

It's kind of crazy to deny that a bunch of (obviously not all) Remainer Tories voted Labour in Kensington in 2017. The factors you cite happened, too, but turnout was up overall, and swings like that against the national grain don't just happen because of organization. Tory Remainers voting Labour was the only reason it was competitive in the first place: Borwick, as an ardent Leave campaigner, was a dreadful fit for the constituency, and many Tory Remainers who had only ever voted Tory before abandoned her - some, yes, for the Lib Dems, but a larger share for Labour. Obviously many Tory Remainers stuck with the Tories anyway in 2017 (if they hadn't, Borwick would have gotten around 20% of the vote instead of over 40% of the vote), but Tory Remainers who voted for Borwick are probably mostly going to vote for another Tory this time around, too, especially one who is less strongly associated with the Leave campaign than Borwick was (although apparently the new candidate writes for "BrexitCentral.com", so maybe she's not much of a shift from Borwick ideologically).

Befair markets for vote share seems to imply CON at around 37%, LAB around 25% and LDEM around 20%

()

All October polls conducted before the vote tonight.

()

Scotland.

I was looking up UK election odds on betting sites and found 'Nigel Farage Specials'.

Worst. Ska band. Ever.

Conservative Party restores whip to ten of the rebel MPs who were kicked out earlier.

Ken Clarke is not one of them.  Good.  One good thing about this election is he is now out for good one way or another.

Ugh. We can but hope that Al, and presumably the Lib Dems, are right and the Tory polling lead won't be enough to overcome their anemic overall vote share.

As I'm tired of the Brexit drama, I hope BoJo wins a mandate to get it done finally, even though I would vote for the Liberal Democrats. And hopefully Labor loses big, so that Corbyn is finally gone and they could (at least in theory) return to Blairism.

Blairism is dead, was dead before Corbyn and it does not hold a monopoly on the Labour Right. Indeed, you could argye that the struggle for the Right to find its identity after Blair is a big reason for its internal failure today.

Amendment vote:

Ayes: 295
Nos: 315

GE will be on December 12.

Scottish harmonization of registration dates (recognizing the banking holiday) is unanimous.

This.

Also, some people seriously need to get it out of their heads that the far-left genie is going back in the bottle when Corbyn goes. His replacement will just as, if not more, left-wing than he is. The inability of those on the centre and centre-left to just let go of Labour has been/is one of the most frustrating things to watch over the past few years.

Really hope Labour pulls through here, while Corbyn isn't great the LibDems and the Tories are both worse imo, and the LibDems still can't win in most constituencies so voting for them just helps get Boris back in. There is a lot of volatility so hope is not lost. However I am pessimistic about this and think Boris probably gets a majority.

Apparently Parliament will be dissolving on the 5th November.

And the election results will be reported the  morning of Friday 13th December.

God has certainly lost the plot for reality.

I'll be in Florida :/

438 to 20, the bill for the General Election passes. All that's left is the Lords.

He was also running against Ken Livingstone, who had reached his electoral sell-by date in 2008 and was even less inherently appealing when he ran again four years later.

I will probably be doing some on the ground activity for the first time in 8 years, even though I won't be here for the last week.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the House of Commons, just announced in the House that the dissolution will take place at 1 minute after midnight on 6th November.

Something important to be aware of: once the campaign period begins, strict rules about broadcast media coverage for political parties are imposed. Note that most people get their news from the broadcast media and pay much more attention to the political items during an election campaign than the rest of the time. So this matters a lot.

Anyway, broadcast media coverage over the past few months has recently focused very, very heavily on the government and on the Conservative Party. Once the campaign rules kick in, just about everyone (Labour, the LibDems, the Brexit Party...) will get more airtime. This will have an effect. Exactly how much always varies, but it matters.

Or to put things more bluntly: it will not be possible for the government to run a 'people vs. parliament' (absurd concept, whatever) campaign, because the broadcast regulations will not allow for the coverage shares that might allow it.

Blairism isn't in the Labour party anymore, the Lib Dems has inherited Blairism.

Right, can we all agree to behave as adults in this thread? It isn't a game for the entertainment of baboons: some of us have to live here.

Hopefully, Tories get a majority

Solution
Have a separate thread for the yanks and ban all Americans from the real thread.
Yes, I am including myself when I say all Americans. :)

Seconded. To use a very American saying, I'm willing to take one for the team.

I'd invite you to check the 2014 and 2018 local election results. In almost every ward, there's a notable lack of Lab-Con swing, with the only difference being slightly higher turnout in 2018 (primarily but not exclusive to Labour's benefit.) And that was after not just Brexit but the Grenfell Tower fire. We are talking about a remarkably inelastic electorate, on both sides of the divide.

Yes, of course there will be a few voters who switched directly from the Conservatives to Labour (and with a 20 vote majority, more or less any group can be crucial.) But they're a very small part of the picture and the sorts of voters who are most likely to switch don't live in Kensington in large numbers. Dent Coad won in 2017 because it's a seat where Labour can be competitive when we turn our vote out successfully and the Tories don't (had it existed in 1997 and 2001, we'd have won it then too). Direct switchers are very much a third-tier factor there.

Speaking of Americans, Michael gets to vote in his first GE. His mind is already blown with it just being an 'x' in a box.

I assume this election is still going with the 650 seat boundaries and not the proposed 600 seat boundaries.

Are you guys going to be voting early/absentee? How does that process work in the UK?

Yeah. We'll apply for postal votes sharpish. We'll get them once the 'notice of poll' with all the candidates has been published. Then vote and post.

I think a very sizable number will vote by post because there's a risk of adverse weather and there's only 7 hours daylight where I am at that time of year (which if overcast can end up being only 4 or 5 hours...)

Which is something pollsters will have to consider as in some seats we could be looking at close to 40% or 50% of votes being cast weeks before.

If you look at everything that has happened in the UK since 2010, this has been the most surreal decade in the UK since the war.

Why wouldn't it end with PM Jeremy Corbyn 

Because Jo Swinson getting the keys to number 10 would be more surreal, if that's the criteria :P

Owen Smith (remember him?) is standing down in Pontypridd, as is Heidi Allen.

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1189312756635389952

??? ??? ???

He resigned from the whip to vote for the deal and the expectation was that this is what he'd do - he remained close with the Lib Dems and the deal was basically "let us know when you want to come back".

I mean the Lib-Dems these days are going to be winning seats based on them being the party with full ownership of the Hard Remain column. Breaking the party line on this most crucial issue, frequently, and then returning to said party even though your views are against their number one selling point is awkward.

Dude Nigel Farage is one of the biggest frauds in UK politics.

The man made a small fortune in the City yet claims to be a Common Man who understands the Real British. He's married to a German woman but made his political fortunes around demonizing foreigners and anyone who wasn't just like him and his cronies in UKIP. Getting brexit delivered is second to ensuring his own political fortunes and the attention he gets

He's a shameless far-right hack, just like Trump. He's got no "conviction" aside from believing in himself

https://twitter.com/AlexSelbyB/status/1189316997294804992

I think this not paywalled poll tracker needed to be pinned to the thread, since it makes the geographic and demographic breakdowns (and their change) in each poll nice and visible, in addition to the fluctuation in the topline.

All I can say is thank God the will-they-won't-they hold an election storyline is finally over. The most tedious week in the history of British politics.

In Northern Ireland, the UUP claim that they don't want any pacts with the DUP (which in fairness were not the greatest deals in the world for the former) potentially damaging Nigel Dodds in N Belfast, Emma Little Pengelly in S. Belfast and reducing chances of picking up Fermanagh and South Tyrone (one would hope that the DUP being completely craven bastards would also imperil them, but this is nothing new).

Other questions will be whether Collum Eastwood stands in Foyle, Naomi Long stands in W Belfast and whether Lady Hermon stands again in N Down.

So the union for Royal Mail has already voted for industrial action by 97% of voting members. The union general secretary is keeping open the threat of a postal strike during the election.

https://twitter.com/DaveWardGS/status/1189281162633580551?s=20

The 650 seat boundaries are still in force and will be unchanged since the 2017 election.

Neither Theresa May nor Boris Johnson have demonstrated any interest in implementing the 600 seat boundary proposals. In formal terms all that was necessary was to produce a draft Order in Council and getting Parliament to vote for it. This would then lead to the reorganization of constituency party structures and a game of musical chairs amongst the MPs scrambling for a reduced number of candidacies.

It was suggested, when the boundary commission reports were issued, that Theresa May was not confident that she could get a majority for the revised boundaries. Parliament was told that it would take some time for the Order in Council to be drafted and somehow it has never since been produced.

Which MPs are those?

Ok I found the list, it appears in this article:

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/29/tories-restore-party-whip-to-10-mps-who-sought-to-block-no-deal-brexit

Even if the LibDems collapse over the course of the campaign, the distribution of their vote could be much less uniform than is usually the case, confounding our expectations and resulting in an outcome that none of us anticipate. In the event that the LibDems actually receive over 20% of the vote, I'd expect that result to be very distinct from past elections where LibDems received a similar vote share. Thus, this election is kind of a "black box" for long-time followers of British politics - you can punch the vote shares for each party into a seat calculator and the seat count could be wildly off!

I don't want to overempashize this because the present government is extremely unpopular, granting the possibility that the LibDems could very well appeal to their traditional electorate, which is far from being uniformly "eurosceptic" anyways, but even the possibility of a strategically-distributed LibDem electorate emerging strikes me as being very consequential

Can The Queen stay up that late?

FPP is always evil, of course, but it is particularly comically ill-suited for an area like Northern Ireland.

Well its not *finally* over until the election bill passes the Lords and becomes law......

Yes, the proper take until the campaign seriously kick into high gear is that this election will be a black box. You mention the nature of the vote splits, but that is only one part of the equation. Looking at the tracker I posted, the tories are even with labour in the north, which mind you includes Labour strongholds like Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool, while the Tories are only outpacing the opposition by 20 points in their usually (30ish pts) lock-step south. It's very possible that there are  far less damaging vote splits  between the LDs and Lab, because  they appeal as parties to two different sides of the electorate. Or the Tories will waltz down the middle. We don't know. The only thing that can be said for certain in my eyes is that many seats will be changing hands in many directions, and a good deal of those seats may be ones that come as a shock to prognosticators used to the old party strongholds.

For example, the first constituencies to usually announce, the Sunderlands, shouldn't be anything but safe labour under normal circumstances. But this election is a black box, and a community that returned some of the strongest results for Leave in 2016 and the Brexit Party in 2019 can't be ignored as potential targets depending on polling data. We don't know, the only thing the black box is willing to tell us is that near every seat could be competitive this cycle, and the calculators are worse then useless.  The only people who have any sort of grasp on the data right now are sitting in party war rooms right now, we just have to wait for things to kick into high gear.

What would happen if the Tories fell around 10 seats short of a majority as they are now? So an effective majority is probably around 320 seats, and the Tories need at least 310 seats to be able to have the confidence of the House even if the DUP supports them. How would the UK move forward with Brexit if it's a bit of a status quo result, so like 315 Conservative MPs. In such a scenario Labour probably loses around 30 seats if not more.

The Tories probably can't count on the DUP anymore, not after selling them out to get a new Brexit deal.

Perhaps, but the DUP still loathes Corbyn, I doubt they back him. Though perhaps Corbyn could be forced to resign and the minor parties prop up a non-Corbyn Labour government and pass a second referendum before having another election, but there might not be the numbers for a second referendum in such a parliament either.

They would have largely purged the Remainer rebels, so a similar result to 2017 is still probably a success for Johnson.

The only thing with any guarantee of occurring in such a scenario would be more gridlock. The opposition could form a govt, but realistically it would be just like the present opposition - glued together solely by opposition to Tories. According to news pieces, nobody wants the status quo to return to Westminster.

The other likely thing that can't be ignored is that no matter what happens after this election, the Tories are going to be far more  in tune with Brexit. Boris's purges, various retirements and new  nominations, and their expectation to gain Brexit-voting seats  and lose remain voting ones all point to a Conservative party more united around the PM and Brexit as an issue. No more  backbench revolts and '5th columnists' for them.  

I’m sorry to bring it up again, but it seems to have been lost in the shuffle.

Assuming the Conservatives hit ~295, Labour hits well below that, but SNP and the Lib Dems could get them to a majority, will either Corbyn or Johnson ever give in to Swinson’s demands on the EU in Johnson’s case and Corbyn as PM in Labour’s case?

While we do not get many polls outside of Northern Ireland very often, the most recent polling that I can find has the Alliance Party making gains while the other parties are remaining stagnant. That may put Belfast East and Belfast North in play. Also, while I wouldn't bet on it, can the UUP or SDLP steal a constituency away from the DUP or SF respectively? An SDLP MP would raise the threshold for a majority while a UUP MP would be a bit of a wildcard on how they would vote when it comes to Brexit.

Is there any discussion about electoral pacts, stand down agreements etc?

The Lib Dems are allegedly in talks with Plaid Cymru, the SNP, and Greens about selected stand downs in a handful of seats. The Tories have categorically ruled out any cooperation with the Brexit Party. I don't think the Brexit Party has responded in kind, but the inexorable logic of the situation is that they will attempt to stand a full slate of candidates.

It is extremely unlikely that Labour and pretty unlikely that the Conservatives will not have a candidate in every seat in Great Britain, except possibly the constituency of a new Speaker if one gets elected on Monday.

The Liberal Democrats may be prepared to stand down in a limited number of cases. For example in 2017 they did not contest Brighton Pavilion, held by Caroline Lucas of the Green Party (although I see from the Wikipedia article that there is a Lib Dem prospective parliamentary candidate for the seat now). It may be more a case of a "gentleman's agreement" not to run a strong campaign in non target seats, where the campaign will largely consist of the one free postal delivery leaflet (postal strikes permitting). I know that in recent general election campaigns attempts have been made to persuade activists in non target seats to devote their major efforts to nearby target seats, as an attempt to replicate by-election levels of activity in a limited number of constituencies. I am not sure what level of resources are going to be available to the Lib Dems in this election.

I would be surprised if the SNP would be willing not to contest any seats in Scotland. I suspect they would quite like to win every seat in Scotland, which would not be entirely impossible except perhaps for Orkney and Shetland.

I do not think any widespread electoral pacts are likely. There are four major or major minor GB wide parties, none of which particularly like or trust the others, plus the SNP which has a similar status in Scotland. The position is more like the recent Canadian federal elections where just about every riding had a candidate from just about all the competing parties.

Brilliant. Now the massive SNP and Plaid Cymru vote in London can be united behind the LibDems.

Ironically, Farage and the Brexit Party doing well are the remainers' best hope in this election.

I presume this is a typo for East Belfast - hard to see anything making West Belfast even vaguely interesting.

Interestingly for South Belfast, the SDLP candidate abandoned the party whip over their link-up with FF, whilst the Alliance candidate was formerly the UUP/Conservative candidate in 2010.

Listening to the news breaks on popular radio stations (whether BBC or commercial) gives a useful impression of what information is reaching most voters.

Just as the LibDems and Greens taking lots of previous Labour votes is the best hope for Brexiteers.

That's how it works.

Of course a lot of those voters in 2017 were not normal voters for either party: that was a very strange election in that all the smaller parties basically collapsed at the start of the campaign (the LibDem vote share only held up at all because the outward flow of solidly pro-EU voters from the Conservatives was so strong). A lot of the odder voting patterns that resulted have not shown up in subsequent rounds of local elections, with a couple of exceptions: General Elections are not applied local elections, but this is interesting. All of this is a major complicating factor for anyone trying to make predictions or projections.

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1189529254717018114

Further proof that UKIP are a zombie party. Similarly, the Sinners had November leadership challenge that now would coincide with the campaign period, so it may get shelved.  

Whoever made the decision to approve the election on Labour is absolutely crazy.

I mean this could approach 97’ or ‘01 in reverse.

Which would make 2024 a tall task, albeit more likely with Corbin gone.

The rise of the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party member influence over Tory is one of the weirdest and least talked about aspects of recent events. Their election manifesto is being drawn up by a communist. Ironic when they accuse Corbyn of being an IRA sympathiser

Labour had no choice but to go along with an election soon once Swinson in particular decided to support it for their own short-termist and narrow party political considerations.

But maybe some in the party think they can defy the odds again? Crazy thought, I know.

It would be actually crazy if the Tories weren't led by a carnival-barking ideological jellyfish who has chosen to stand with the most grotesque and unpopular wing of his party in an attempt to ram through a Brexit policy that a consistent majority of Britons really don't like.

I suppose Jezza thinks that a cogent and credible case against a Brexiteer government can be made and can beat the Tories. Of course he's right, but the question is whether this case will be made. Obviously it would be easier to have, say, Keir Starmer doing this rather than Corbyn's weird British Guevarrista-in-tweed cosplay. But at the end of the day it's easier to oppose than defend a sitting government, which is why Labour's silliness about Brexit probably matters less than people realize.

I wonder when UKIP will dissolve.

The most recent polling on Boris Deal vs Remain that I could find.
https://mobile.twitter.com/britainelects/status/1186263787109785602

Granted, it will be further scrutinized during the election but anything remotely close to that is enough for him. Added that he is polling a quite consistent ~15-20% of the 2016 Remain vote as well.

If there is a 2nd referendum and Remain wins 52-48 I wonder if the Remainers will say there should be another referendum on that because the vote was too close.

No Remainer has called for there to be another referendum on the basis that the last one was too close, & disingenuousness aside, I think you know that.

If Remain wisn a 2nd referendum , Brexiters will have all the rights in the world to expect a third one.


In 2016 I was a Remainer(though not solidly just leaned towards it) , now I am a complete and total Brexiter  . So my rankings for the parties for this election would be


1. Tories
2. Brexit(In districts where they have a better chance of winning than the Tories)
3. Lib Dems
4. Labour

In no way whatsoever is any of what you just said a logical response to what I said.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/76e74c38-fb22-11e9-98fd-4d6c20050229

Brexit party considers pulling out of hundreds of seats to boost Tories

Not sure this helps CON that much.  Lots of BXP voter are people that will never vote CON regardless of Brexit stance.

What I am saying is Remainers did everything in their power to make sure the people's will was not followed so if they succeed in forcing an winning a second referendum , the Brexiters will be 100% justified in doing the same to force a third referendum.

If this was the case, then a majority of the nearly 500 MP's who voted to trigger Article 50 wouldn't have done so.

They should have not obstructed May's deal, and obstructed her ability to make any good deal.

You do realize that it was literally BoJo & the arch-Brexiteers who did exactly that, right?

https://www.sportingindex.com/spread-betting/politics/british/group_b.6b9db4dc-d1df-4c9d-b9ab-c9a136a91f1e/uk-general-election-seats-markets

Sportingindex market medium

CON     324
LAB      206
SNP       49.5
LDEM     47.5
BXP         3.5

Which with SF not taking their seats gives CON a bare de facto majority

Nicky Morgan is retiring and will not stand in December. First off, her seat should still keep to it's history even in a Brexit focused election, voting near 50-50 between remain and leave. It's a rather unique seat in that regard since it's located in the Brexit-loving East/Northeast. However, fear of loss probably wasn't the motivator - she's a remainer, backed Gove for leadership, and was opposed to Boris's brexit maneuvers. People like her are no longer a natural fit for the Conservative party.

For those who want precise Westminster constituency boundaries, this is for you:

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/election-maps/gb/ (https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/election-maps/gb/)


Also, a friend and I would like to travel to Britain for the last week of the campaign, and we have a couple of questions:

(a) How often do party leaders hold big rallies?  Is it easy to attend them?
(b) If we wanted to attend an election announcement early in the morning, how easy are those to go to?  Perhaps, Uxbridge and South Ruislip?

(b) Election counts are nearly always in large sports centres. I don't think any of the locations have been announced for where they will be, but your best bet is to ask the relevant local council for more information.

A.) Rare; Tories will be members only and Labour will be hard to track down; unless you’re happy tl go wherever the rally is in the UK.

B.) you need a pass to get into the actual counts iirc- esp for a PM one.

Worth remembering that Labour held that seat from 1955-1979 and 1997-2010. It's not a safe Tory seat.

Morgan had a majority of 4,269 votes (7.9% in 2017), in 2017 she suffered a 5.3% swing against her. While she did well in 2015, she also had a relatively close majority (3,744 votes, 7.1%) in 2010. This seat seems like it could flip, though tbf it probably doesn't.

Well this didn’t age well.

If the reports are true that he’s even considering only running a handful of candidates in Labour Leave areas and that he himself may not even stand - That’s just pathetic. After all that to just fade away and give up on his cause? Embarrassing

Loughborough has voted for the winning party nationally at every election since February 1974. We'll see if it keeps that streak.

Thats what I meant by History. If we get a old fashioned election,a brexit election, or something in between, Loughborough still will likely be a marginal.

If true, it's also tactically inept. Labour Leave seats are precisely the places where the Tories *don't* want the BXP to run. With BXP on the ballot (in, say, Hartlepool) they'll just repeat the results of 2015 (where Lab won that seat with a 35/30/20 split). For all the hype about Labour being wracked by division over Brexit, virtually every poll, interview, and study of Labour Leave areas has shown Labour Leavers are far more Labour - and hostile to the Tories - than they are Leavers, and the committed Leavers in Labour Leave seats are not typically Labour voters.

If it wasn't apparent already, it's worth adding there aren't really that many seats where the BXP will do more damage to the Tories than Labour in the first place. If the BXP really wanted to help the Tories they would simply fold, but I think Farage has a bit too much ego to contemplate that.

Not to mention that if the BxP only run a token number of candidates they will lose their right to PPBs and to participate in any debates that might be set up during the campaign.

Either run in most seats or not at all seem to be the only two credible options for them.

You know that Labour has maintained the position that they will follow the referendum result (albeit with a final deal put to the people) while Lib Dems have been full-on anti-Brexit, right?

Some of you will already be aware of the notoriously misleading bar charts which have sometimes been produced by the Lib Dems, but this really takes the cake (just read the small print).

https://twitter.com/bathnesld/status/1189648562080112640

The only way JRM loses his seat is if the 600 reappointment goes into effect (it merges the two bath seats), or a different reappointment carves the city in two and has bath north/south rather than inner/outer. There are a good number of LDs in JRMs seat, but they will always be outgunned by the Tories without reinforcements from the city.

For the benefit of those who understandably can't read the tiny text:


And the 2017 result, for reference:

Con 53.6%
Lab 34.7%
Lib Dem 8.3%
Grn 2.3%
Ind 1.1%

We have had the first national polls since the election was called.

Survation: Con 34, Lab 26, LDem 19, BP 12, Greens 1, Others 4
YouGov: Con 36, Lab 21, LDem 18, BP 13, Greens 6, SNP 4, Others 1

The former would be a swing of 3.0 and the latter a swing of 6.5. Under our stupid electoral system, these would produce very different results.

Also published is the first Ipsos-MORI poll for a while, though it was conducted over the weekend, and so before the election was called. Included for completeness:

Ipsos-MORI: Con 41, Lab 24, LDem 20, BP 7, Greens 3, SNP 3, Others 2

UKIP were averaging about the same as Brexit is now going into 2017. Greens too. What is curious is that the Tories ended about the same at the end as at the start and Labour cannibalised everyone including a chunk of UKIP voters.

Labour with its worst result since 1933, Tories doing better than 1987. Boris gets a thumping majority? It feels wrong. It doesn't sit right.

A reminder that Survation were the most accurate pollster in 2017 (that is not including YouGov's constituency based modelling that is separate from their normal polling) Would have been in 2015 as well, if they hadn't got cold feet.

Talking of YouGov, I see their latest manages to have Labour down 2 whilst the Tories and LibDems are unchanged. Hmmm.

On the other hand Survation were the least accurate pollster in the European Elections with Ipsos-MORI and YouGov the most accurate.

I know but Jermey Corbyn cannot be PM under any circumstances.

Well I suppose that "wrong for meaningless elections, accurate for the ones that matter" isn't such a bad claim :p

Hopefully one thing this coming election will do is dump all the extravagant claims made on the back of that joke exercise into the dustbin. Forever.

What seats do you guys reckon Labour are likeliest to pick up even on a bad night? Putney? Hastings? Southampton Itchen?

jErEmY cOrByN cAnNoT bE pM uNdEr AnY cIrCuMsTaNcEs

Note that the only significant difference between these two polls are the Labour and Green scores - which, in both, add up to exactly 27%. So if that pattern holds, it looks like it's a matter of how many votes the Greens will spoil for Labour.

(Of course, a lot more than that could change in a month and a half.)

It's pretty much inevitable that FPP will produce many horrific distortions of the popular will in this election.

For example, if the Tory + Brexit vote is say 45%, but that vote is less split than the Remain vote then the Tories probably get a majority and the idiotic media will proclaim it as a mandate for a hard Brexit.

Are there any methodological differences that can explain why the Green score varies so much?

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-corbyn-would-take-uk-to-bad-places-2019-10

"Trump backs 'fantastic' Boris Johnson and says Jeremy Corbyn would take UK to 'bad places'"

Trump says this to Nigel Farage and encouraged that Nigel Farage's BXP and Johnson's CON should join forces.

Because the Green Party is newer, less well established, and highly responsive to the media environment of the moment (i.e. if there are climate change issues in the news on any given week), their numbers tend to fluctuate. A similar phenomenon occurs in Canada: the Greens will poll at nearly double the rate they end up getting on election day, except for periods when non-environmentalist issues dominate the news.

How likely is it for the Greens to have 2 seats or more following this election?

Highly unlikely.

If the greens get a deal with Libs, Lab, or  both to stand aside  in some of the areas their strong in, or be the de facto remain choice on the ballot then they could easily get as many seats where the above holds true. But barring that, it's an unlikely prospect.

Also if the Conservatives get a substantial majority (350-370) do you think they'll be able to hang on until 2023 or will UK have snap elections again?

Corbyn should just surreptitiously bait Trump every day for the next seven weeks to comment on British elections. Labour will have 400 seats at this rate.

2024 would be the date you’re thinking of (Canada and US do 4 years, UK does 5)

If they get a substantial majority and Labour is way behind in the polls then the Conservatives will likely take advantage of that around 2022, but no sooner then that.

If the Conservatives get a substantial majority, they will almost certainly repeal the Fixed Term Parliaments Act.

Frankly, I think any govt should ammend the act when it comes back up for renewal. The last few months have shown that any govt that has sigifcantly lost it's majority and expired it's term has to be given the rights of burial and can't just be allowed to sit there and do nothing. The opposition shouldn't be able to Ted Cruz the whole thing if polling isn't great for them at that moment. Hell, I can imagine the situation could easily be reversed, where the govt controls more than enough to avoid the 2/3s rule, not every opposition wants to go to an election preventing a straight VONC, the govt doesn't want to go to the polls do to bad numbers, but said govt can't get enough votes to do anything in the commons.

As explained before, they can repeal it but will have to replace it with something. Even if that is just a bill saying power to call an election should be solely the preserve of the sitting PM again.

FTPA manages to be the worst of both worlds (there is a case for actual fixed terms and there is a case for the traditional Westminster approach, but this halfway house is appalling) and should certainly be replaced.

Apparently Antoinette Sandbach (Ind, former Con; Eddisbury) has defected to the Lib Dems and will stand for re-election under that label. I'll be charitable and say she has 'no chance' rather than 'pffffttttt not a f!cking chance in hell'

Whilst it probably wasn’t an option for her given the timing of her defection, I’ll give props to her for re-contesting Eddisbury, as opposed to joining the other defecting poultry in the chicken run to London.

I know that Boris Johnson returning to No. 10 may very well lead to the dissolution of the United Kingdom so I would argue that Johnson should not remain as PM under any circumstances.

I am no fan of Jeremy Corbyn and I despise the SNP, but if I were a British voter, the integrity of the union should be the first priority. A hard Brexit (something that the public certainly did not vote for) would threaten the very existence of the United Kingdom—if we have to stomach Corbyn in No. 10 with the support of the SNP to remain or get a soft Brexit, then so be it. The union would then be (somewhat) safe. It's deliciously ironic that the SNP joining the government or giving confidence to a Labour-led government may very well end up preserving the union that they so foolishly hate.

There are I believe zero seats that are Conservative-held where the Greens are in second place, though, so there's nowhere really where the Greens could really get a free run. Maybe the LDs will stand aside for them on the Isle of Wight, probably the Greens' best chance at a gain from the Conservatives, but they're still fighting from third place, and in a Leave seat.

good. It's foreign to the Westminster system and it's common law. And 2/3 of the house is a high bar, the house should be sovereign to dissolve with a simple majority

Another part of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, that needs further thought, is the provision about motions of no confidence. I would suggest adopting the idea that a motion of no confidence must specify the member of the House of Commons who would replace the existing Prime Minister if the motion is carried. I would also clarify who can move a motion of no confidence and when. It seems absurd that the government itself should control when it can be challenged and usually give time only to the votes moved by the Leader of the Opposition, even if some other member might have a reasonable chance of winning a majority.

I would also include a provision that certain votes, such as that in response to the Queen's speech or on the budget must be votes of no confidence, so they pass unless the House votes for another member to be named as Prime Minister.

The parties, interested members of the public and academic experts should probably be encouraged to gameplay the proposed rules before they are adopted into law to see if anyone can come up with unintended consequences or ways where the rules might break down in a time of crisis.

Wouldn't Bristol West be a better target for the Greens?

It probably has the most *potential* for them outside of Brighton Pavilion given the 2015 result. Norwich South would also be a contender. However, their best bet would really need to be somewhere where parties other than the incumbent have some strength too. Back in 2010 this was the case in Brighton Pavilion but is not the case right now for either Bristol West or Norwich South.

When it comes to Bristol West I think that the 2015 result for Labour (35.7%) was probably their 'floor' and the 2017 result (65.9%) their 'ceiling' for now, so i don't see the seat changing hands even in what is likely to be one crazy-ass election nationally.

Bristol West is held by Labour; Isle of Wight is their top target held by the Conservatives. Labour-held seats are very unlikely to be relevant to a ”Remain Alliance”, and in any event I have a tough time seeing the Greens peeling off a lot of votes from Corbyn Labour other than strategic votes.

Nigel Farage throwing a lifeline to the remainers by announcing that they are going to stand in all constituencies.

They almost certainly won't do that, but this scotches the idea they were going to contest a few dozen Labour seats only (though that "rumour" emerged from Seb Payne, the biggest Tory shill at the FT, so was never reliable)

Not 100% sure about that.  For sure BXP running everywhere will eat into CON Brexi votes but could also eat into LAB Brext voters that otherwise would never vote CON anyway.  The main problem with a de facto CON-BXP alliance is that it will trigger an even greater defection rate of CON Remain vote as well as trigger LAB-LDEM-Green tactical voting in response.

The most recent Yougov poll on a cross section of 2017 and 2016 vote is fairly instructive:

Voting intention among 2016 REMAIN voters
Lib Dem - 34%
Labour - 33%
Con - 16%
Green - 9%

Voting intention among 2016 LEAVE voters
Con - 58%
Brexit Party - 24%
Labour - 10%

LEAVE voters only
Voting intention among CON+LEAVE voters
Con - 77%
Brexit Party - 19%

Voting intention among LAB+LEAVE voters
Labour - 43%
Brexit Party - 25%
Con - 19%
()


REMAIN voters only
Voting intention among CON+REMAIN voters
Con - 61%
Lib Dem - 31%

Voting intention among LAB+REMAIN voters
Labour - 58%
Lib Dem - 27%
Green - 9%
()


There are almost no CON REMAIN vote that will defect to LAB and all such defection will go to LDEM.
The some LAB LEAVE vote will defect to CON but an even larger chunk will go to BXP.  That is the bloc of LAB LEAVE voters that will most likely never vote CON anyway and BXP running will keep those votes away from LAB.  Of course there is a bloc of CON LEAVE voters that will go to BXP but like in 2015 CON can hope for tactical voting.

Maybe this explains the differences:

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1189942220482367489

Edit:
    Worth noting about this poll:

    > Greens are not prompted.
    > 50% of the sample DO see the Brexit Party prompted, 50% do not. https://t.co/64ns9IQQSf
    — Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 31, 2019

Here's some potential high profile incumbent shock defeats (note: not a prediction)

Conservative

Boris himself - Uxbridge isn't out of the realm of possibility and it isn't too dissimilar to middle-class seats that have swung away from Tories elsewhere.

Zac Goldsmith - tbh unless it's a dismal night for the Lib Dems, he's probably going down

Iain Duncan Smith - another London seat, and one Labour basically has to win to call it a remotely good night (and they could even win it on a pretty lousy score as well.

Jacob Rees Mogg - bit more remote, and could probably suffer from divided opposition given the old Labourist tradition around the Somerset coalfields and the Lib Dem renewed strength in the West Country. Still, Lib Dems won Bath and NE Somerset last locals, even excluding Bath constituency.

Steve Baker - another Hard Brexiter sitting in the not hugely Brexit friendly commuter town of Wycombe

Labour

Not sure how many likely Lab>Lib pick-ups there will be (it says something about how badly that faction of swing voters took the clegg years that there is only dead certain Lib Dem pick-up, and that's the seat of the soon to be missed Mr O'Mara). Maybe if Labour do catasrophically with Remain voters you could see them come back from the dead in places like Emily Thornberry's Islington and Finsbury seat.

Much more potential Labour weaknesses to Tories though, obviously: Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, Sarah Champion, Dennis Skinner, Caroline Flint and so on. In the event of Boris getting the much vaunted 100 seat super majority expect all sorts of people up in the hinterlands of Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham etc to fall.

Lib Dems

aside from the likes of Ummuna and Gyimah, who don't count, the only vulnerable Lib Dem MP is probably their own leader, given Scotland's unpredictability.

SNP

Likewise, the SNP are doing so well at the moment the only potential for a fall is probably their own Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, who the Lib Dems are definitely gunning for after his pretty gross campaign against Charles Kennedy (there's also the Western Islands, but Christ knows what goes on politically there). As the SNP drifts into becoming an urban party, I expect the Liberal tradition to reassert itself in the region.

Eh, I think you've maybe been reading too many newspapers. The Tories only managed to poll 26% in the Rotherham constituency (for example) in 2017, a number smaller than the Labour majority there and a full seventeen percentage points lower than their national score.

Regarding the Brexit Party presumably running everywhere it can: though the exact effects are hard to predict with much certainty (like every other detail of this election, actually), it certainly isn't good news for a Conservative strategy that aims to repeat what they tried last time. At least so long as the Brexit Party is able to maintain some sort of polling viability. People do need to remember that most people do not have firm partisan attachments these days, even if they have views and preferences...

yeah, but if it does happen I can bump that post without context and claim I'm a genius

Brake and Lloyd (if he counts) are definitely more likely to lose than Swinson. Probably Farron as well. I think people are overestimating how vulnerable she is.

Brake? Long-time Lib Dem MP who survived both 2015 and 2017 in an seat that only narrowly voted for Brexit who seems relatively untouched by scandal to my knowledge?

Fair enough about Farron though.

I'd also add Dominic Raab to your list of potential big name Tory losers. His constituency, Esher & Walton, voted heavily for remain, the Lib Dems did really well in the local elections in May, and their candidate has managed to convince the central party to make E&W a target seat. It's more of a long shot than Uxbridge or IDS's seat, but if the Tories are having a bad night then it could be the evening's Portillo moment (assuming Johnson doesn't lose as well).

I'm not saying Brake is particularly vulnerable (he isn't), just that he's more likely to lose than Swinson.

The only thing I hope is that we don't return to Blairism or that Lib Dems do well. Hopefully it's a SNP + Labour victory. Tories winning is okay to me as well.

E&W definitely needs to be on the list. That entire slice of London from the city & Westminster to already LD Twickenham should be going Orange, and E&W is just a greater extension of the slice. Especially since all their Tory rebel flips are fleeing here to stand on the LD ticket. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the wealthy mansion strips in Houston and Dallas that now are represented by Dems.  I mean yeah, Raab has a large majority, but how the Lib Dems work is they either get ziltch or a reasonable percentage depending on if they are seriously targeting the seat. Their voter base is more white collar, more educated, and older then the electorate, so on average your LD voter is going to be more in tune with electoral information. If the LDs lack serious opportunity in a seat, their voters scatter to the big two depending on personal views. It's why they regularly underperform FPTP polls.

Now while many names on the list I could see losing their seats even on good night's for the party, Boris requires the Tories to have a known loss incoming. In part this is because he sits on a healthy leave base in addition to the Tory base, aplifying the headwinds. The main problem though will be inflexible remainers: this is London and this is Boris, so you know there will be a bunch of radicals who share the stage with him like Buckethead did with May. LDs will also want a good showing here to stick it to the Man, as it were.

It would be amusing if Raab lost, but I would caution that he polled 59% two years ago. And for obvious reasons if one was still voting Conservative in 2017, one was not #fbpe. Of course as recently as 2005 the LibDems managed to poll a shade under 30% there (still not enough to come close: 16pts behind) which is, sure, an indicator of potential of a sort, but...

That first sentence doesn't really fit together logically.

Way overestimating. East Dumbartonshire one of the most strongly anti-independence areas in Scotland outside of the borders and the islands, and the SNP is not going to sop up Remain votes in the LD-held seats. Swinson is very safe.

E&W has an odd profile in some ways. The Tories win by a clear margin, but not by the landslide margins you get in more rural seats (or northern Labour ones). The Lab/Lib totals are pretty even around 20% apiece, with some variation factored in due to national swings. This is because the constituency includes loads of leafy Surrey surburbs (McMansions, really) alongside small but dense pockets of social housing and new builds in places like Walton. Give it another 10 years and it'll be like the Essex London suburbs that used to be super conservative but are now full of 'young professionals' that can't stand the Tories.

A non-Tory win in E&W isn't exactly a long shot, but it requires two things to happen independently: Raab needs to get super cocky and not put any effort into campaigning, AND one of the parties (*ahem* Labour) needs to tactically throw its voters toward the other party.

The tweet's gone. What did it say?

Dunno about Farron either - he has been working his constituency *hard* since the 2017 scare.

The LDs also gained seats in the local council in 2019 and really have  stranglehold on local politics. I know that's not definitive, but South Lakeland is an odd one where the local council strength is strongly tied to Farron personally.

FWIW, I expect Scottish Labour to hold onto a few seats even if they tank. The local by election in Thorniewood makes me think they will hold onto Coatbridge. Same with Midlothian and East Lothian. I think the Tories will also hold fairly firm in 6 or 7 seats. Stirling and Angus and Ochil are likely SNP pickups but the Grampian Tory gains in 2017 will either all fall fast or hold.

Yes the importance of Scottish leave voters has been ignored; I’m sure I’m as guilty as most but there’s a trend to treat Scotland as one universal set of seats rather than the 4-5 different clusters you have

    Worth noting about this poll:

    > Greens are not prompted.
    > 50% of the sample DO see the Brexit Party prompted, 50% do not. https://t.co/64ns9IQQSf
    — Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 31, 2019

Workington which is in NE England Survation poll

CON  45(+3)
LAB   34(-17)
BXP   13 (new)
LDEM   3(-2)
Green.  2(new)

LDEM fall is a surprise
CON has never won this seat before

Not surprising. I ran a simple regional swing calculation yesterday, using some of the numbers from the Economst's poll tracker, which includes a tracker for geographic regions (actually somewhat accurate on account of volume). However, I applied weights for Brexit results. That entire part of the northwest was blue, except for the LD seat of course. And this is with a weighted swing calculation, something that is by nature, inaccurate. LDs are going to fall in any hard Brexit seat they don't currently hold.

I've had a look at the internals. Put bluntly, they don't pass the smell test. Even ignoring some of those issues (we shouldn't) the starting sample size was small and by the time they reached the effective sample size, tiny.

I note (wearily) that just as all those splendid recent constituency polls for the LibDems were commissioned by them, so this poll seems to have been to-order for an article in the Daily Mail. Survation's record as a nationwide pollster isn't bad, but they have had (and ever since they emerged) a bad habit of doing this sort of thing alongside...

No they won't. If they end up polling anything like where they currently are in the national polls, they will see their percentages soar in pretty much every constituency that they do not presently hold (and will do so in most of those as well).

I suspect their vote is going to correlate very well with their targets, as usual, but outside of that it's going to be mainly going up in remain and urban areas. Swinson is unambiguously campaigning as the remain candidate, everything else is a secondary clause you would use to withhold your vote from the LDs if you are a remainer - say tuition fees. So why would anyone who supports brexit cast a ballot for remain? Lets go back to the yougov polling posted on the last page - LD's are under 5% with leavers!

You are trying to Yanksplain to us how elections work in this country. OK.......

For what it is worth Electoral Calculus model which has CON at 363 seats overall has Workington at
 
CON   34.9 (-6.8  )
LAB    32.1 (-19.0)
BXP     16.1 (New)
LDM    11.8 (+9.1)
Green   2.7 (New)

keep in mind the... spotty history of constituency polling in the UK.  Wasn't a whole lot done in the last election but in 2015 there were masses of the things to try and unpick an election somewhat similar to this one: a massive shift in the dynamics of the vote with the collapse of the Lib Dems and the rise of UKIP.  What those polls revealed was an apparently strong personal vote for incumbent Lib Dem MPs; the general voting intention had most Liberal seats falling while when they threw in candidate names the Lib Dems held a lot more of their seats.  This was the reason behind the very high Lib Dem projections in 2015: some people saying that even on 8% of the vote they'd hold onto 30 seats because of this personal vote.

What happened?  The outcomes were closest to the general voting intention questions in those seats; the vast majority of Lib Dem MPs lost their seats and they ended up with 8.

I think people are underestimating the number of Labours to the Brexit Party. I heard many Labour Leave voters are seeing a vote for the Tories are step too far, but voting for the Brexit Party is easier for them. Many people are assuming too fast that the Brexit Party is a threat to only the Conservatives, while I think its also a big threat as for Labour as well in these Leave Labour seats

A Labour- Tory marginal seat in the Midlands that voted 52-48 leave is still a million times different to a 52-48 leave voting Lib-Tory marginal in the South West. Equally a 24 year old single mum who voted leave in the first seat is a lot different to a 57 year old professional who voted leave in the second seat.

We’re talking about groups respectively of 17 and 16 million people; and any voter between the age of 18-21 couldn’t vote in 2016 by my maths.

We know seats that ‘voted leave’ can still easily vote for the Lib Dem’s- we already have examples of this when the Lib Dem’s won before- Carshalton, Westmoreland, Brecon and Radnorshire and Eastbourne to give four.

The Lib Dem’s even now are not just a stop Brexit Party; they’re actually a cash rich, Uber local, and activist led party with a strong local base. They have a history of winning seats they shouldn’t by getting local people to run on bin collections who win as a council, then run the council, then win the seat etc. They also have regions of historic strength that did well for them at the local elections.

Any Scottish leave voter is simply an SNP voter. There is virtually zero leave-unionist piece of the electoral pie big enough to swing a seat.

If people are underestimating Lab>Bxp voters, there's good reason for it. Study after study looking into these voters has shown they are far more motivated by non-Brexit issues (NHS, education, income inequality, etc.) than Brexit itself. It's not that Brexit isn't a factor, it's just that if asked to choose between a single issue party and their longstanding political leanings, they opt for their longstanding political leanings.

One of the things that concerns me most is that this is Boris Johnson's Conservative Party, not Theresa May's. In 2017, a lot of heavy Remain seats (particularly in London) swung hard to Labour. However, looking at the maps, Labour still holds a lot of Leave seats. Over 400 constituencies voted Leave in 2016. With the Tories running as a far more Brexit-centric than under May, that's sure to lead to some significant divergence from past elections.

With the Lib Dems running as the unabashed Remain party, is there any chance they could make inroads into heavy remain Labour areas like London?

Inroads, maybe, but not a breakthrough. Keep in mind, London Labour's support is deep, their electoral machine is superb, and they've got candidates who are pretty well aligned to their constituents' priorities (Katy Hoey aside). It's also worth remembering Sadiq Khan is running for reelection in 6 months, so there's a well trained and primed activist base across the city prepared to turn its attention to a GE.

On the broader point of how Johnson will fare vis a vis 2017: Thanks to Brexit, precisely no one believes Johnson, and the party beneath him, is appreciably more liberal than May. The Tories will struggle to hold scores of seats in the SE and SW, not so much due to vote switching but because a sizeable portion of their core vote will just stay home in protest. On the other side, with the Brexit Party lining up to run virtually everywhere, the Tories will struggle to pick up the votes they need to win Leave heavy Labour seats in the midlands and north. If the Brexit Party rises high enough (anything above 15% or so) the Tories will also struggle to hold marginal seats everywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if the overall result is pretty much the same as 2017.... or indeed the situation as this Parliament comes to an end. More deadlock.

All good points. If we're looking at a strong Brexit Party, we should instead be looking more to the 2015 election. However, that doesn't work due to the complete decimation of the Lib Dems and the SNP at their virtual maximum seat count. Am I the only thinking this election is going to be very difficult to figure out until the votes are actually counted? And of course, as Theresa May found out the hard way, campaigns do actually matter. I'd feel a lot better about Labour if it wasn't Corbyn leading the party. His approvals are astronomically bad right now when they were roughly net neutral in 2017.


I've been thinking the same actually. It was only a marginal difference from 2015 though. Would the Tory Majority from 2015 realistically have been able to pass anything (under either May or Johnson)? It seems unlikely to me.

On that note, is the London mayor race anything other than safe Labour? I definitely can't see the Tories winning it, and the even the Lib Dems seems like a stretch.

Conservatives have won the seat once -- in a 1976 by-election

Haven't seen any polling in a while but my take is that Khan will be reelected comfortably. The only news of note lately is Rory Stewart - a centrist Tory from Cumbria and the Beto O'Rourke of the last leadership election - inexplicably threw his hat into the ring as an independent.

Fairly sure Westmorland & Lonsdale voted Remain.

But otherwise yes, I mostly agree with this. Remain-Leave is going to be a divide in this election (and people who claim that its not going to be important and other issues will take over are kidding themselves) but it will be far from the only issue and the ones that have ruled British politics for decades are not going to magically disappear.

And by the way, even if it was, you guys understand there are Remain voters even in Leave seats right? So even if the Lib Dems were only improving among Remainers, their vote share would still go up in Brexity seats if it goes up nationwide by the amount currently predicted.

errr, this is very wrong.  The chunk of the Scottish population that voted leave is probably likely to vote Tory more than the national average; the trends in the 2017 election in the North East indicates that: although some of that might just be areas of natural Tory strength returning home after spending 30 years with the SNP.

  Do wwe have any polling evidence of what the 2nd choice of Brexit Party voters would be?  For that matter the 2nd choice of other party voters as well?

Brexit Party got 15% of the Scottish vote in the European Parliament election.

Even if we are to take the Yougov estimates as given, it's hard to see how the Brexit Party focusing on "Labour heartland" seats benefits them. Let's do a little exercise. Assume that all Tory voters and UKIP voters in 2017 backed Leave (dubious and favorable to Labour but more close to being accurate than not in "Labour heartland" seats), that all LibDem/Green voters backed Remain, and use this to estimate the Remain/Leave share of the Labour vote. We can then applying these vote share estimates. I simply add the old LibDem and UKIP vote shares to the YouGov-based vote transfers for LAB/COn.

Doing this in Redcar (~68% Leave):
Labour - 55.5% -> Labour Leave 30%, Labour Remain 25.6%
Conservative - 33.2% -> Tory Leave 33.2%
LibDem - 6.7%
UKIP - 4.6%

Vote Estimates with Brexit Party (no tactical squeeze, just YouGov):
Conservative 31.2%
Labour 27.7%
Brexit 18.3%
LibDem 13.6%

However, let's assume a tactical "squeeze" among Labour remain voters, giving Labour ~90% of these voters but no tactical squeeze to benefit Tories because Brexit resources ensure voter confusion:
Labour 35.9%
Conservative 31.2%
Brexit 18.4%
LibDem 8%

Now, all of this is very "problematic", resting on a bunch of absurd assumptions but the idea is to illustrate the problem of the Brexit Party strategy. Even in Leave-heavy Labour heartland seats, something like ~40% of Labour 2017 voters backed remain - vast majority will back Labour again, even if they are annoyed, because they'll be squeezed. However, intervention of Brexit Party makes the same "squeeze" strategy for the Tories difficult - it'll be unclear which party is best positioned to win.

Let's assume that there is an accidental squeeze to Brexit that's more concentrated among Labour leave voters than Tory voters (we give 35% among Labour Leavers, reducing Tory share to 9% with this group and 25% among Tory leavers and 75% to Tories), holding all else constant:
Labour 35.9%
Conservative 27.6%
Brexit 23.3%
LibDem 8%

Such an accidental squeeze is possible (perhaps likely and seeing as it as a squeeze may be a mistake when one remembers how many "Tory Leave" types in Redcar or Rother Valley are just UKIPers who loaned their vote to the Tories last time!) in many of these seas and notice what it does - it produces a much larger Labour majority! Perversely, insofar as Brexit Party wants to coordinate with the Tories, its best strategy might be to abolish itself. Insofar as it wants to be independent and does not care about the Tories, it should probably target as many marginal Labour/Tory seats, as "Labour heartland" seats!

How many seats is the Brexit Party likely to win?

Well in a seat like North Norfolk the Lib Dem share in 2017 is extremely artificially high. If Lamb had stepped down in 2015 the Tories would've won it easily and it would've had a further swing towards them in 2017 to the extent that it would now look like a safe Tory seat with the Lib Dems a long way behind. Thus given the nature of this election I reckon North Norfolk is a likely Tory gain.

One or two at most.

They aren't "likely" to win any, and have non-negligible chances in maybe half a dozen.

Comfortably at that. South Lakeland council (of which Westmoreland and Lonsdale is the vast majority) was 53% Remain. On top of that the bit of South Lakeland not in the Westmoreland and Lonsdale constituency, principally the town of Ulverston, would've been solidly Leave. This would mean the Remain vote in Westmoreland and Lonsdale was approximately 54%-55%.

More polls, and I'm sure they will bring clarit... oh...

Opinium: Con 42, Lab 26, LDem 16, Brexit 9, SNP 4, Greens 2, Others 2
ORB: Con 36, Lab 28, LDem 14, Brexit 12 (no further details)

Also, there was a Panelbase yesterday - was it reported here? Can't recall. If not...

Panelbase: Con 40, Lab 29, LDem 14, BP 9, Greens 3, SNP 3, Others 2

It's giving some indication that the Tories are polling back at 2010-2017 levels which has given us two hung parliaments and one slender majority. In some polls they are drifting back to their 2017-early 2019 average. Labour are obviously not and Brexit are clearly still a presence even with the Tory drift upwards. The Lib Dems seem to be slipping back down to the mid teens which is not great going into the two party echo chamber.

This was always going to happen. I knew not to underestimate the probability of the "Corbyn may be an incompetent foolish Hard-Brexiteering fool with no real solutions apart from regressive 70s socialism and who is at best apathetic about antisemitism BUT I DON'T WANT TO LET THE TORIES IN" voters going back to the fold quickly and polling seems to show that has happened. However, the Lib Dems will still make significant gains at 16-19% of the vote (that's basically triple what they got last time) and the real (and achievable) goal is to maintain that level into the election.

It's important for everyone to be aware that, per some unfathomable tradition, polling firms in the UK do not report toplines with undecided voters, as they do in the US. This creates the impression of the Tories having a substantial lead when, in fact, they do not.

As an example, on October 25th, Opinium released a poll showing: Con 40%, Labour 24%, LibDem 15%, Brexit 10%. With "Don't Knows" included, we have: Con 31%, Labour 21%, Don't Know 16% LibDem 12%, Brexit 9%.

Here are the share of "Don't Knows" by 2017/2016 voting history:
Conservative Remainers - Don't Know 22%
Conservative Leavers - Don't Know 9%
Labour Remainers - Don't Know 14%
Labour Leavers - Don't Know 18%

Backing this out, the Don't Knows in this opinion poll voted the following way in 2017 and 2016:
EU Party Referendum Groups - Labour Remain 32%, Conservative Remain 25%, Conservative Leave 24%, Labour Leave 19%
2017 GE - Labour 49%, Conservative 43%, LibDem 4%
2016 EU Referendum - Remain 53%, Leave 47% (Remain 42%, Leave 38%, Didn't Vote 19%)
Remain voters by party - Labour 53%, Conservative 41%
Leave voters by party - Conservative 53%, Labour 43%

Here's what the "Don't Knows" think about the leaders:
Preferred Prime Minister - None/Don't Know 65%, Boris Johnson 31%, Corbyn 3%,
Boris Johnson (excluding people without a view) - Disapprove 61%, Approve 39%
Jeremy Corbyn - Approve 25%, Disapprove 75%
Jo Swinson - Approve 42%, Disapprove 58%

Is performing this sort of analysis on the disgusting entrails of a polling sausage a bit misguided? Sure but I hope it's a reminder of certain facts: polls can whiff in dramatic ways when "undecided" voters are left unreported, there are many undecided voters and those undecided voters have a clear lean. If I had to guess, the undecided voters will gravitate towards Labour/LibDems throughout the campaign.

There doesn't seem to be any reason to think that constituency polling will be any better than it was in 2015, is there? I followed it quite closely that time and was badly burned.

Constituency polling is always terrible and nobody should be taking it seriously. Unfortunately, people will but that's par for the course.

  US house race polling seemed to be pretty good last few cycles, maybe UK pollsters could learn from accross the Atlantic.

The polls with low labour levels have had a stupidly high Green vote (at 5-7%) and a high Lib Dem vote.


I don’t think it’s that easy...

Well, one has to hope that if you are exerting the effort to get a representative poll with a respectable sample from a small population, you are also willing to exert the effort so that your data can stand scrutiny. That's arguably why the nyt had their polls run live rather than be conducted all in-house and secret.

Because "Don't know" is not an option on the ballot paper on election day.

US House seats are like 10 times the size (typical population of like 700,000 people) of a UK Parliament constituency (typical population of like 70,000 people). They are correspondingly much easier to poll.

Neither is "undecided" but it's typical for American pollsters to report this information because it gives a sense of the actual size of a lead. We all should have known that Hillary Clinton's lead was tenuous in 2016 because there are more undecideds and third party voters than usual. If you simply removed undecideds, she would have had an even larger lead in polls!

Yeah, it's depressing, but not in the least bit surprising. I guess that's what happens when you have a broken political system that strongly encourages two major parties, at the expense of everybody else.

Like in 2017, I'm probably going to end up voting Lib Dem, not because I like them very much (I don't really like any of the main parties), but because I hate two-party politics more than I hate any specific one of those parties.

There's more, because, you know, the Sunday papers...

Deltapoll: Con 40, Lab 28, LDem 14, BP 11, SNP 3, Greens 2, Others 2
YouGov: Con 39, Lab 27, LDem 16, BP 7, Others ?
ComRes: Con 36, Lab 28, LDem 17, BP 10, SNP 4, Greens 3, Others 1

It's easier to poll 2 way races.

Labour up six points with YouGov in a matter of days, actually down with ComRes - very much against the trend (though they have consistently been the least favourable pollster for the Tories recently)

Well British constituencies are drawn based on registered electorate not on population so they will all in reality have populations significantly larger than their registered electorate of ~75,000. However the point does stand, constituency polling is atrocious in the UK. Lord Ashcroft invested a lot of money doing them for the 2015 election but they were all way wide of the mark (in this case they tended to massively underestimate the Tories and massively overestimate the Lib Dems).

I get a kick out of the lefties posting here who say the 2019 British election will run along basically on the same track as 2017.. 

Will the 2020 US election run along the same track as 2016?

Probably if they are over 10% nationally they'd win 1 or 2 seats I guess. Their importance right now is how many votes will they take from the Conservatives, right?

I’m embarrassed FOR Nigel Farage. He’s literally “leading a party” and not standing in the election.

Pathetic

https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1190916214161379328

Bu-bu-but I thought Labour was a Remain party! It's all a fake news media conspiracy to suggest they might in fact support Brexit! YOU'RE MAKING BREXIT MORE LIKELY BY NOT VOTING LABOUR!

(And no prizes for guessing whether this is going to be reported on. Better clear news space for the next time Jo Swinson forgets to say bless you after someone sneezes I suppose)

I thought the LAB position is that when then come to power they will negotiate a new deal with the EU and then have a referendum where they will campaign against the deal they just negotiated? 

The Labour position on Brexit can best be summarized as confusion. This could be a problem if the election becomes a single-issue focused campaign, and they are forced to take a side that will either anger London or the North.

In other news, Farage right now is not going to stand for a Westminster seat in December. I guess he sees the trendlines and recognizes that brexit won't be winning any seats, even with his star power? Who knows, especially in the context of last weeks debate on the party standing candidates.

Labour will have another referendum with a remain option within months, if it wins.

Almost certainly, people in the party will be allowed to campaign for either side (as with Wilson in '75) This may not satisfy Remainiac purists, but might actually go down OK with many voters.

If they campaign on Leave, the Lib Dems will make sure that the people will never forget that.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/lib-dems-greens-and-plaid-cymru-in-remain-pact-to-repeat-brecon-win-clrnch62m

"Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid Cymru in ‘remain pact’ to repeat Brecon win"

Looks like a LDEM-PC-Green alliance in Wales.  While I am sure this will hurt CON in a few seats as well LAB in a few as well I suspect this might trigger BXP->CON tactical voting in response.

Does that mean Mark Williams won't stand in Ceredigion? I can't see the Libs wanting to surrender one of their few potential gains in Wales, but that seat is potentially vulnerable to both Labour and the Tories in the right conditions.

Edit: ceredigion is exempt, williams is standing again. Quite likely a Lib gain then, plaid vote here is pretty inflexible and we'll expect a lot of Lab to Lib movement.

Perhaps, but any such move will face the considerable headwind of both Tory and Brexit Party leaders and candidates explicitly disavowing such behaviour.

Beyond that, the unspoken premise of such a move-countermove dynamic is that Brexit is going to be the primary motivator of peoples' votes. You can make a case for why it might be, but I think the opposite case is much easier to make - and more convincing.

You could be right. I am just going off my view that attempts at identity based consolidation works like jujitsu or second mover advantage where the side that makes an open attempt at consolidating votes usually does not get as much out of it as it thinks and counter-consolidation in response tend to be stronger.  This is why I think any sort of CON-BXP deal would be disastrous for CON and that CON-BXP tactical voting work best in response to an external threat (Remainder alliance, Corbyn coming in with LDEM-SNP support, SNP holding the balance of power to trigger English nationalism tactical voting etc etc) and not any explicit attempt to reach such a deal. 

No polls out of Scotland, but for fun here's the average of all the subsamples since the campaign period.

SNP 45
CON 20
LAB 15
LIB 11
BRX 6
GRN 3

I mean Plaid standing down in some heavily Anglophone constituencies where they are a fringe party in exchange for the LibDems standing down in some heavily Welsh-speaking constituencies where they've not polled well since the 1960s has... what effect, exactly?

It could make a difference in the marginal seats. Plaid won in Arfon by just 94 votes in 2017.

It is pretty inconceivable that most in the party will campaign to leave whatever happens.

Latest Yougov poll (change from same poll from a couple of days ago)

CON    39 (+3)
LAB     27 (+6)
LDEM   16 (-2)
BXP       7 (-6)
Green    4 (-2)

Leavers
CON    66  (+9)
LAB     10  (+3)
LDEM    3  (-2)
BXP     15 (-11)
Green    1 (-1)

Remainders
CON   17  (--)
LAB    41 (+9)
LDEM  28 (-6)
Green   6 (-2)

Leavers consolidating around CON and Remainders shifting to LAB but CON stronger with Remainders than LAB is with Leaves with LDEM losing ground.

Edit: fixed typo on LAB change

That's the one I referred to above, Labour are up 6 points not 3.

Opps .. typo ...

Well, we're getting Hard Brexit then. If Remainers are going to vote Labour after everything they've done to scupper Remain, then there's no chance of stopping it. I wish I could look forward to the surprise and outrage when they and the Tories work together to deliver it and saying I told you so, but I can't even do that...

Labour are never going to work with the Tories to deliver a version of Brexit that they haven't written.

We will certainly get hard Brexit if large number of "remainers" waste their votes on the LibDems or Greens in seats that they could not possibly win, but Labour might.

Labour isn't going to win Hornchurch and Upminster or Romford, so I can happily vote my conscience there.

It doesn't matter so much whether Labour is definitively for Remain no matter what in this election, because either a soft Brexit or Remain are much better than Boris' hard Brexit, and not voting for Labour in most seats effectively makes a hard Brexit more likely.

A vote for Labour is a vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Hard Brexit. For him, worker's rights, human rights, jobs created by intra-EU trade, industry and communities supported by it, the threat of companies leaving the UK and the threat of the NHS being sold off to American big pharma are all unimportant because the EU once said something nasty and capitalist. On Brexit terms, there's no difference between Labour and the Tories and its Corbyn Labour's one great skill that they have managed to convince millions this isn't the case.

A vote for genuine Remain representation in Parliament is much better than that. Unfortunately, a large number of Remainers will see it your way and there will be 500+ MPs committed to Hard Brexit in the next parliament. Because of that, I'd be ecstatic with 20 Lib Dem MPs.

TLDR; "I'm voting Labour because I don't prioritise Brexit and I agree with them on the issues" is a stance I'm perfectly fine with. I don't agree with it but it's a reasonable one. "I'm voting Labour because they'll prevent Hard Brexit" is ridiculous and counterproductive to the Remain cause.

And before anyone points it out, yes I'm bitter and my distaste of the whole situation is bringing emotion into my judgement, which is obviously not ideal.

You're not being "bitter" or "emotional", you're making sh**t up out of whole cloth.

If you want to criticize Corbyn's position on the EU that's more than fine with me, but you're obviously not interested in engaging with reality at all, so there's no point in arguing with you at all.

Can we please not derail this thread with such banal and inaccurate comments?

If you want to stop Brexit you need a second referendum. If you want a second referendum you need to work out how to get Lab+LD+Green+PC+SNP to get to 325. Look at your seat & work out who that candidate is... it's not that hard

The comment about voting Labour for a 'hard brexit' ignores the fact that there's a chunk of 50-100 members of the PLP who've spend the last two years organizing, pushing and fighting for Labour to take a much more pro-remains stance... and it's worked. And ignores the fact it was the Benn Bill that blocked no-deal & Labour votes which got the various wrecking amendments to Brexit through the HOC.

Why throw those MPs out just to get a Tory MP (the reality if you don't vote Labour in a Lib-Dem Tory marginal)

Indeed. I'd go further and argue Labour's position on Brexit at the moment (yes, it took them *way* too long to get there) is the most sensible and responsible one on offer. If there's one thing both sides agree on it's that they don't want to keep talking about Brexit anymore. Both the Tories and the Lib Dems are offering, in essence, an all-or-nothing resolution: either a Tory Brexit (in name only?) happens, or no Brexit ever happens. This is certainly appealing to the diehards, but neither option will provide any kind of actual conclusion to the Brexit debate.

If there's a Tory Brexit, everyone who's not a Tory - including a good chunk of diehard leavers - will decry the result. What's more, for the next decade any bad economic news or diplomatic failure will get ascribed to Brexit, rightly or not. It's a recipe for endless agony. On the other hand, a straight revocation of Article 50, with neither a referendum nor any other kind of mechanism to obtain loser's consent from leavers, is a recipe for endless resentment and acrimony. All the Brexiteers' nonsense rhetoric about 'betrayal' really will have a grain of truth about it.

Labour offers a compromise: A Brexit deal that is *much* closer to what was promised by the Leave campaign in 2016 (and doesn't screw NI) OR remaining, but only after securing a mandate for that in a referendum. It's not where I would like to be - Brexit is a terrible idea and always was - but as a way to draw a line under an acrimonious and agonizing debate foisted on the country by the Tories, a new deal+referendum is a pretty statesmanlike way to go about it.

Only if you assume the EU is willing to offer the UK yet another deal.

If there is a change of government, they will go along with that (even if not too enthusiastically)

And only if you assume Labour won't go back on its second referendum pledge. Which I don't.

In other (much less angry and confrontational news) Rick Wakeman's 'Arthur' is apparently back as the BBC's Election Theme. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that this is the best news we've had all election.

It needs to be mentioned that Hilary Benn is very different from his father in worldview.

it all sounds good whene put like that, but lets remember that this is FPTP, which loves to push things towards a 1v1 dichotomy based on clear partisan lines. Holding the middle ground is a smart thing to do both in the long term, and in the short term when considering labours voter divide and leadership vs backbench on the issue. Unless you are one of the 30-40% who have prior affiliations with labour, it's easy to look at a issue and gravitate towards the simplest most  polarizing message. Their 30-40% is certainly not immune to the 'all-or-nothing' messaging, it's just going to take a bit more effort to convert them. This was one of Clintons problem: rightly had a lot of details, but that made her programs harder to markets when compared to Trump's catchy one-liners. The Tories and the LDs are going to keep pestering Corbyn because Labour is weak on this issue that so many people  care about, 'which side are you on' statements may work wonders. It's labours job to navigate and have a appropriate counterargument for these upcoming attacks.

The the other thing to note is that there likely will be some sort of LD 'moment' because of Labour weakness on this issue. I would be seriously surprised if the LDs just had a slow decline in polls and didn't have a point where they recover upwards before falling back down. The tories also are going to be throwing tons of softballs towards Swinson because like Harper's Canadian Conservatives, they want to see the third party carve up the opposition. Now the moment may just be that, a moment, and it is not limited any specific period of the campaign. It's labour's job to be ready for the LD bump when it happens and be willing to adjust their platform, talking points, or campaign approach to push the LDs back down to their prior position.

Some good news for Labour: Woodcock is to stand down at Barrow & Furness. He and his partner (liberal journalist Isabel Hardman, whose employment by the increasingly hard-right Spectator is, of course, a source of continued bafflement to all) are having a baby and he seems to have decided to move forward with his life. Had he run again I doubt he would have won, but he'd have knocked the seat right of contention. As it is, well, once again it will depend on how that peculiar collection of peculiar towns responds to whatever the hell the national environment is by December.

Labours Lindsay Hoyle looks likely to be elected the next speaker in one of the upcoming ballots. I have a feeling the Tories and the LDs won't even think of contesting the seat, since the decision to hold a speaker vote before the poll was a decision made to temper uncertainty.

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1191404112249860096

All told, this is fairly good news for everyone. The Tories are still in the lead and gained more than Labour. Labour's also gained and is within spitting distance of the lead in a way they aren't in other polls. The Lib Dems and Brexit Party only dropped by small amounts, so easily dismissed as statistical noise.

Elsewhere, the Brexit Party PPC (prospective parliamentary candidate, for those not in the UK) dropped out and switched to the Tories. This is good news for the Tories, as the seat in question, Dudley South, is just the kind of place where a strong Brexit Party presence could cost the Tories a seat they cannot afford to lose.

Seems as if it is 2017 all over again. Which is expected, but disappointing, in my personal opinion, as it shows voters are willing to ignore the problems of the two main parties as long as they keep their opponent out of Westminster. Which just makes it easier for weak or unpopular leaders, like Corbyn, to stay in power and not be held accountable.

More developments in NI: UUP reverse their "stand everywhere" policy, standing down in Belfast North in aid of the DUP's Nigel Dodds, in exchange for the UUP given free reign in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

SDLP will not stand in three seats - Belfast East (where they will back Naomi Long of Alliance), Belfast North (where they will back Sinn Fein against Nigel Dodds) and North Down (where they back Lady Hermon.

In exchange Sinn Fein will not stand in three Northern Irish seats: in Belfast South (where they will back the SDLP's Claire Hanna), in Belfast East (where they will also back Long) and North Down (also for Hermon).

Is the SDLP favored anywhere?

Belfast South (especially if the UUP stand separate from the DUP) and perhaps Foyle, where their leader is standing (Foyle is an extremely marginal SF/SDLP which is basically Derry - for obvious reasons it is not named after the city it covers).

What do you think Long's chances are in Belfast East? 

Not OP but I suspect Long is going back to Westminster. The Alliance is the only NI party with any sense of 'momentun:' the Sinners and DUP are down from their 2017 high and the SDLP/UUP are trading a consistent and long-term stable vote share for actual seats. But beyond her the Alliance's prospects lower, even with their momentum. For more  check out this (now outdated) analysis I snagged from a Northern Irishman (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=342118.msg7035627#msg7035627) from another forum.

Here's a basic 'paint' map for you to colour in

()

afleitch, your post reminded me.  Here is a map of MPs not standing or moving seats in the upcoming election.  I'll have a final map on the 14th when nominations close and appeals are done.

()

Also, I used the party the MP was elected with instead of what they currently hold.

I don't know tbh. First off, the abstention by SF and sdlp won't matter - I don't think the nationalist vote combined has ever even come close to breaking the 5% desosit threshold. The issue is that the current MP has a pretty thumping lead and is not surrounded by scandal (which was the reason Long won back in 2010) - in a place as inflexible as NI it could be insurmountable, and if he is defeated it would indicate a serious issue with rhe DUP as a brand. I honestly think, even with alliance doing well, he is the safest DUP MP in Belfast.

I do agree with this; I think the Alliance has a better shot in Belfast South, where they could win on a close split between the Unionist and Nationalist parties, than in Belfast East.

SF standing down in N Down is a bit odd, as whilst it saves them £500 it doesn't help Hermon win and it probably increases their chances of shedding votes to a dissident candidate in Foyle and hence letting the SDLP back in.

As for Belfast East and South, I think it both were entirely within the city limits then the Alliance would take them both, but in East they'll probably trail enough from Dundonald that they won't be able to catch up in Belfast itself. South is probably their best prospect, but candidate quality probably gives the SDLP an advantage. A lot also depends on how much the Green vote does or doesn't get squeezed.

Though the changes in this poll are compared to a previous one nearly a month ago - the Tories gained between then and late October in most polling.

ICM now work for Reuters, having been fired from The Grauniad after an openly acknowledged decision to 'adjust everything to make it at least 3pts more Tory' backfired embarrassingly at the 2017 GE. And one presumes they have dropped the above approach.

One of the likelier independent gains of the night will be in Ashfield, where Gloria De Piero is standing down and longtime local council leader Jason Zadrozny is standing for his Ashfield Independents. Zadrozny was probably going to win back in 2010 for the Lib Dems, till his sudden arrest for child abuse allegations. Since then, he's been expelled from the party, tried to run for PCC, been re-elected as an independent, been acquitted of all charges and then swept in the recent locals with his new pet party.

In other independent news Claire Wright is standing for a third time in East Devon, except this time not against the slightly dodgy Hugo Swire, who is retiring. Sadly for her she doesn't seem to have the goodwill of the Remain/Prog Alliance with a Lib Dem on the ballot.

I am reading some of the coverage of the 2017 election.  A Vox article:

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/9/15767522/uk-election-results-hung-parliament

states May did not agree to participate in leadership debates. The article states this empathized her arrogance.  I do not have an independent recollection of this.  Is it correct.

I would suggest that both Johnson and Corbyn change course and call for or agree to permit Swinson in every debate.  If they do not I think they may cause a backlash in her favor.

I'm assuming this is about the BBC debate: both major party leaders initially said they'd not be attending but on the day of the thing Corbyn suddenly announced he would in something that I think was probably planned to make May and the Tories look bad and it worked; the "why didn't the Prime Minister show up???" line was easy for everyone to use and they all did.

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1191412011311288320

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1191696726140293122

First poll I have seen in a while of any sort that is so favorable to potential PM BoJo. This is probably why the Northern Wales seats are all on the Tory target list at the moment.

Oh and here's another constituency poll I picked up while at the Britain Elects twitter handle. This one certainly seems like the kind of consituency poll that is off because of the natural barriers to polling a single constituency.

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1191341879599734784

EDIT: and here is one that seems more reasonable:

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1191704005451427841

Yougov london poll

LAB    39
CON   29
LDEM 19
BXP      6
Green.  5

Swinson says she will never let Corbyn become PM.  She knows she has to get the votes of Conservative Remainers. She knows this is the only possible way.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10272085/general-election-live-latest-news/

Will this not make Labour less willing to tactically vote for a Lib Dem?

Is also possible she might get caught making some deals with Labour?

I know I’ve talked about how predictable this is election is going to be but even so it’s shaping up to be pretty disappointing and by that I mean I expected this election to have a lot of twists and turns and lead to a hung parliament, marginals switching all over the place, 4 way races but it already looks like for political junkies this is going to be a major let down

• Farage isn’t standing, major let down. Farage in the commons at PMQ’s would be terrific entertainment for years to come - no matter who is PM.

• It appears like voters are drifting toward Tories and Labour - meaning the chances of marginals flipping all over and four way races are shrinking.

• It appears as if the Lib Dems aren’t going to win a boatload of seats from remainers on both sides, as it first seemed. It also seems as if BrExit might not win ANY seats which means you won’t see the Tories being forced make serious choices and  to stop riding the self serving fence they’ve been on for three years

Revising my prediction in a big way:

Conservative - 360
Labour - 200
Lib Dem20
SNP - 45

Parliament hasn't even been dissolved yet, kid.

Electoral Calculus sets out the London vote in 2017 as follows:
            Labour got 54.5% and the Liberals 8.8 for a total of 63.3%
            Conservatives got 33.1% and UKIP 1.3% for a      
It predicts the current vote at Labor 34.2%,
                                                    Conservatives 29.5                                        
                                                    Liberal Dems 21.2
                                                    Brexit 7.5%
                                                    UKIP  .3%
                                                    Green 5.5%
                                                    Other 1.8%

On this swing it finds the Conservatives gain 6 seats from Labour: Etham, Battersea, Enfield Southgate, Croydon Central, Kensington, and Dagenham and Rainhem

The Liberals gain Richmond Park from the Tories and Bermonbsey and Old Southwark from Labour

Swinson better not be caught trying to make any deals with Labour.

One thing about the London poll is that 52% of Remainers are backing Labour with only 26% backing the Lib Dems. That's worse than the 30% of backers they have in the most recent GB wide YouGov. Lib Dems underperforming, relatively, with BME voters accounts for this.

The Daily Mail touts a new You Gov poll showing that Brexit gained 4% to 11% after Farage said he would contest 600 seats.  The Tories were down to 38, Labour down 2 to 25% and the Lib Dems unchanged at 16. 

The Daily Mail endorsed the Tories in 2015 and 2017.  Do not know why they are encouraging Farage.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

Philip Hammond is standing down in Runnymead and Weybridge, will not run in 2019.

In reading today’s Daily Mail I think I come up with the reason that Corbyn will not recover this year as in 2017.  It is the Anti-Semitism that has been propagated by several Labourites. I that is also the reason his satisfaction level is -60.

In today’s Mail there is article covering Tony Blair’s attack on Corbyn for allowing Labour to be tainted with anti-Semitism and not dealing with in a proper manner. He spoke before a Board of Deputies of British Jews.  They gave him a standing ovation.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7651683/Tony-Blair-says-anti-Semitism-absolutely-killing-Labour-Party.html

In another article the Mail covered the apology of the Labour candidate running against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and Ruislip seat for deeply inappropriate anti-Semitic tweets.

It is an issue that keeps coming up.

wow didn't think we'd get the editor of the daily mail posting on these forums

perhaps you should consider your own anti-semitism before attacking others; let he who has not sinned etc

I knew someone would attack me like this.

I would suggest you talk to Tony Blair.  He is the one going around making speeches.

Unlikely: Grieg is a better writer than that.

Main story on BBC News site right now (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-50302172), probably not a super one for the government, on balance.

At least it's better for them than what's trending on Twitter

https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1191772096915001344

....

What annoys me is that deep down I know that JRM has not a clue what the inside of a densely packed tower block looks like. Even without smoke and raging fire.

Your daily reminder that Tories are sociopaths. :)

I'm thinking of doing a weekly 5 minute audio podcast from a Scottish perspective for this forum if anyone is up for that. I prefer talking to writing :)

Also 'Arthur' is back for the BBC Election Theme, vastly different from Rick Wakeman's prog rock perfection but welcome!

https://twitter.com/BBCNewsPR/status/1191309283134230528

So Corbyn is now claiming that a trade deal with the US could cost the NHS £500m a week in higher drug prices. Tbh this seems like a great move, given how well the £350m claim worked.

I suspect they'll get their act together, but man are the Conservatives making Theresa May look like a competent campaigner at the moment.

(Fantastic to see the Arthur theme back!)

Tonight's/tomorrow's front page for the Borisograph - bizarre really isn't strong enough.

Holding up US drug, food, safety standards and having to deal with Trump as an immanent, amorphous danger as Boris attempts a Trumpian style disinformation campaign, might be a good move by Labour actually.

Because the Tories can't deny it would absolutely not happen. Even if on paper it probably wouldn't be as bad.

Alun Cairns, Welsh Secretary resigns as an MP for his role in squashing a rape trial.

His seat, the Vale of Glamorgen, is a bellwether that contains the working-class industrial resort town of Barry as well as more Tory inclined villages.

Williamson, Hepburn and Godsiff all rejected as candidates by the NEC.

I believe he's only resigned as Welsh Secretary and still intends to stand in the election.

He wasn’t involved in collapsing the rape trial - he’s resigned because he wasn’t clear regarding how soon he knew about the individual in question’s involvement in collapsing the rape trial.

As I expected though, the avalanche of embarrassing trivia that will likely bury the Tories chances of winning a majority has begun.

Excellent news :)

Of course the first named will attract the usual cranks in his support - its actually a very good way of telling who on the Labour left is actually serious about getting and using power, and who aren't.

Apparently Nick Brown was extremely insistent on Godsiff getting the heave-ho, and, well, it's hard not to respond to that detail with a cackle.

Bad news: Lady Sylvia Hermon is retiring.

Perhaps she thinks she won't win after the DUP gave her a close scare last time around. Any chance for someone other than the DUP (maybe the Alliance if they can get the Greens to stand down, or vice versa?) to win the seat?

She may have had enough: it's been eighteen years and the political atmosphere is increasingly ghoulish. As for the constituency... it is the most singular constituency in Northern Ireland, so who knows.

There was rumors today that Upper Bann would be vacated by the expected Carla Lockhart, and replaced with DUP leader Arlene Foster. With North  Down now open and a 'gimmi' pickup for the DUP, at least on paper, Foster probably goes there if those rumors  had any leg to them.

The sun is out and so am I.

Looks like Tom Watson is not running...

CON gains West Bromwich East ?

Highly unlikely. Tories didn't even win when the SD split the vote near perfectly in 1983.

Electoral Calculus
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/cgi-bin/seatdetails.py?seat=Cambridgeshire%20South
Predicts the following for this seat.

2017
Votes   2017
Share                         Predicted 2019
Votes
CON   33,631   51.8%   42.5%
LAB   17,679   27.2%   16.2%
LIB   12,102   18.6%   29.6%
Green   1,512   2.3%   3.5%
Brexit   0   0.0%   6.8%
UKIP   0   0.0%   0.1%
OTH   0   0.0%   1.3%
CON Majority   15,952   24.6%   Pred Maj 12.9%

This seat voted 39% leave.  In 17 this not effect the votE.   We shall have to see.

Tom Watson will continue as deputy leader during the campaign. Who do you think will replace him?

The post is actually very weak 99% of the time (basically only becomes relevant when the Leader resigns) and serves little practical purpose, other than giving the holder a seat on the NEC. Historically it was an honorific, one that often went to defeated leadership contenders.

Two questions for the Labour supporters: what is your reaction to Swinson’s declaration she will never make Corbyn PM.

We know she and the other remain parties will not make Boris PM.

Then assume a hung Parliament and that the hat the Tories have the most seats and there not enough DUP or Independents to makeBoris PM

Will the nation have to await a Labour leadership election to discover who will be PM.

Chris Williamson has stated he will run as an Independent Socialist in Derby North, which should benefit the Tories.

Note also that despite all the bluster it wasn't even arguably close two years ago: majority of 20% on a vote share of 58%. As Watson polled 50% two years earlier that is probably a relatively 'hard' 58%, so to speak. Labour also won every ward in the constituency in May.

Watson was at least gracious enough to time his announcement to overshadow Johnson's set-piece campaign launch in the evening, rather than Corbyn's big speech earlier today.

No I have never particularly liked or trusted him, and think the Leech business was very very bad. But he will still be a hard act to follow for his "wing" of the party.

I have to say, Watson was a good leader for his wing of Labour, and it’s sad to see him go.

https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1192175698431090692?ref_src=twsrc%5Et...

:(

Otherwise  known as the 2017/18 GOP 'strategy.'

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1192350770156507136

Consistent with my big post here  (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=342118.msg7038735#msg7038735)on how the best place for Swinson's Lib-Dems in not just London but perhaps the entire country this cycle could be the wealthiest and whitest slice of london, a slice that extends outwards into Raab's seat.

Yay a poll from my constituency! Totally agree that E&W falls into 'slice' territory. So far I've received only Lib Dem literature. Truth be told, the Lib Dems will have to get lucky if they want to take the seat: a Tory implosion AND mass tactical voting by Lab. Not impossible, but will need a lot of work to make happen.

are you gonna vote Lib Dem?

There is no actual evidence this is planned, its a totally unsourced rumour.

And even if it was going to happen, it wouldn't make the tiniest bit of difference to the result

Also, the Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid have entered into a Remain alliance, which involves standing down in a number of seats. And of course, one of the seats the Lib Dems have chosen to stand down in is mine. Terrific. I'm not huge on voting Green but I can at least stomach it unlike everyone else so that's what I'll be doing.

I doubt this alliance will shift a single seat in the end.

Quick tally up of the constituency polls.  Tories are down 12, Labour down 15, Lib Dems up 15, Brexit at 8 and Greens at 2.

In terms of % rise and fall based on 2017 this gives C35 L26 LD19 B9 G7, so it's not actually far off the national polls.

What it suggests is that there's a some reassortment underway which could disproportionately help the Lib Dems. Or these polls might just be sh!t.

For some of the seats it actually benefits Labour- for example in Exeter the Lib Dems aren't running & in Bermondsey the Greens aren't running.

If I was a Labour MP I'd be worried about losing remainy votes to the Lib Dems & low info/anti-politics votes to the Green- if you remove one of the two they're just as likely to float back to Labour as one of the rivals.

Why are the Greens standing Molly Scott Cato, one of their bigger names, in Stroud? Grudge against Drew?

She is local to that area, isn't she?

But also Stroud saw one of the earliest ever "Green surges" (three decades ago now) and remains something of an iconic place in the party's mindset even though they have never really done well there in GEs.

Possibly. I'll see how the polls are looking closer to the day. If the Lib Dems are clearly in third and there's no local evidence that the Tories are flailing, I'll vote Labour. If there's a chance of knocking off Raab, tho, of course I'll take it.

[broken images]

Here's the full list of 'electoral pact' seats negotiated between the remain alliance.

()

Full map of the Remain Alliance. I suspect it contains a lot of the LDs main defense and top targets, Notable missing seats:

-St Albans
-Cities of London and Westminster
-Putney
-Kingston and Surbiton
-Cambridge
-Carshalton and Wallington
-Ceredigion still remains a LD/PC grudge match

-Eastbourne remains a peculiar seat for both the LDs and 'their' incumbent.

Other than Cambridge (and Ceredigion), I find it strange that the Greens weren't willing to stand aside in any of these. I understand Cambridge because it should be a relatively strong seat for them.

Lib Dems and Plaid stepping down in the Vale of Glamorgen will probably be a lot more beneficial to Lavour than the Greens. Scrap what I said about Stroud, that truly is the weirdest part of this alliance - the Greens got less than 1% of the vote last election! I guess the Welsh Greens wanted a token run, and it's not like there are many great targets for them, but still very funny.

I imagine some of the obvious omissions are due to Eurosceptic candidates e.g. St Ives, Eastbourne or friendly incumbents (Norwich South? Sheffield Central?). Or for that matter obstinate local parties, but you'd have to be on the ground to find out what's going on there.

That's the problem when the Greens are only relevant in maybe 5 seats nationwide but want to be seen as an equal partner in the alliance.

True. Another issue is a lot of the Green "surge" was based around a Lib Dem collapse amongst certain sections of the population - students and bobos - that they had cultivated in the Blair years. This means a lot of seats that have seemingly healthy Green vote-shares have Lib Dem histories and latent Lib Dem local machinery and ambitious personnel who don't feel like standing down because central office has made a deal with Caroline Lucas. (Remember, a key part of the Lib Dem appeal is they are the LOCAL party, whose branches theoretically act as autonomous representatives). The only seats the with prior LD history that  have effectively been ceded to Greens, at first glance, are the Isle of Wight (where the local Green is a notable) and Bristol West. Other seats where the Greens have scored highly in 2015 or had good local results since - Sheffield Central, Norwich South, Solihull, Oxford East etc - all are not included in the alliance, and not coincidentally have had good LD results in the past.

The journalist Lewis Goodall just did a good twitter thread (https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1192475588734390272) on this.

tl;dr without Labour involved, Remain Alliance strategic voting is a lot trickier.

It seems to me a clever tactic for the LD's might be to stand down 'for the Greens' in English seats where the Labour candidate is obviously better positioned to win. With the Green's lack of ground game, money, or incumbency, there's a decent chance many of the erstwhile Lib Dem voters would end up voting Labour anyway.

The purpose of this alliance isn't really to win seats (aside from Brighton and some of the Tory-LD contests) - its to prevent Lib Dem activists and money from being funnelled into unwinnable seats and to make sure the Greens keep as many deposits as possible. You'll notice there hasn't been any stand-downs in Lab-LD contests, probably because they're well aware that a large number of Green voters next choice is Labour.

Godsiff to stand as an independent at Hall Green doubtless on a Save Sparkbrook From Sodomy ticket, because we live in Hell.

Whats his chances? Respect got 25% there back in 2005...

He isn't personally popular at all (he's a bloody awful lazy MP from absolutely any way you look at it: does no work in the House, does no work in his constituency...) so it would be nice to say 'none whatsoever', but that issue is extremely toxic. So first thing to do will be to see who the Labour candidate is before speculating further. Of course the issue is not 'live' in parts of the constituency, important not to ignore that.

He will be motivated to cross the 5% line as he's a mercenary toad - one of those retired trade unionists who treat being an MP as part of their pension package - and five hundred quid is five hundred quid.

https://twitter.com/sima_kotecha/status/1192452762958729221

y i k e s

Speaking of which, what's Salma Yaqoob up to these days? Is she going to run somewhere?

Not in this election, no. She's been shortlisted for the Labour nomination for West Midlands mayor.

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1192534158574280705

I guess survation is releasing one  of these every day.

Was this one commissioned by anybody?

Because election spending restrictions have now kicked in, and polls cost a bit of money......

The Economist.

YouGov regional polls.  (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/08/regional-voting-intentions-show-both-main-parties-?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=ge2019_regional_VI)I'm not sure if these are usual subsample breakdowns or individual polls for each region. In general, the trend is Tories up in North, Lib dems up in South.

They are aggregates from subsamples of pre-campaign polling - in other words, worthless.

https://order-order.com/2019/11/08/yougov-poll-11500-voters-puts-tories-14-ahead-labour/

()

Latest yougov poll with massive 11K plus respondents has a shift from LAB to LDEM

CON   36 (-)
LAB    22 (-3)
LDEM 19 (+2)
BXP   12 (+1)

Its not their "latest" poll, as mentioned above most of the data is literally weeks old.

(and why are you using Staines as a source anyway?)

We do, however, now have an actual new poll. From Panelbase. And it reads thus: Con 40, Lab 30, LDem 15, BP 8, Greens 3

This, for the record, would equate to a 4pt swing from 2017.

Ah .. thanks for pointing that out.  My mistake

Basically static with what they found the previous week, too. Overall not great news for anyone but the Tories. Lab in the 30s is too low to prevent a good number of losses. LD at 15 won't make much progress on what they have now. BP taking only 8% is about half of what they ought to expect.

I do wonder if the Brexit Party is deliberately holding its fire until Farage's self-imposed deadline for a pact with Johnson (next Friday) expires, though. If so, and Farage spends the subsequent 4 weeks training both barrels on Johnson, there's the potential to shift the numbers quite significantly.



No need to apologize. Journos who should know better and every Russian pornbot twitter account is spreading the poll like mad. Rather unfortunate testament to people's media savvy these days.

Labour and LibDems up 1 since a week ago, BxP down 1.

I am wondering why the CON want to block the LDEM from being in the debates.  I would think the CON strategy should be to lower the LAB vote no matter how and what.  Even if the LAB vote does not go CON but goes to LDEM or BXP that is fine because if the LAB vote is down and down a lot, seats will show up for the CON.

Yep, Con strategy should be to be throwing as many softballs and Swinson as possible. Sure, they may lose seats in the south when the oranges pick up steam, but it will more than pay off in the north. Basically the Harper strategy back when the NDP was a serious possibility: force Lib voters to pick NDP or Con, and more seats will pick Con. Swinson is no way as radical as the NDP except in the Brexit issue, so it's in the Tories interest to construct a dichotomy between their leave and the LD Remain, in an attempt to force Lab voters to pick a side.

Such a strategy is fine, as long as it works. But there is certainly potential for it to misfire.

The Tories don't have many young voters and will be in trouble when the boomers die off. So establishing the LibDems as a credible alternative for centre-right voters would presumably be quite risky. A post-boomer two party system with Labour and the LibDems as the main parties and the Tories stuck in 3rd place with 20-23% of the vote must be their ultimate nightmare scenario.

I remember there was a debate about this point back in 2015 after the Tories won. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that at least in Britain people do generally become more conservative as they age. And considering that the UK is a aging society, perhaps the future is not so gloomy for the Conservatives..

https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-do-we-become-more-conservative-with-age-47910

The thing is though, every seat lost to the Lib Dems means that the Tories need to gain another seat from somewhere else to make up for it. At the moment, the Tories need to gain six seats  over their 2017 performance if they’re to get a working majority of just one seat (if we exclude the Speaker and a minimum of five abstentionist Shinners from the total Parliamentary tally), and that’s if they hold on to every single seat they currently possess, which seems unlikely. If we assume the Conservatives will lose a minimum of six seats, which may be being generous, in Scotland to the SNP, they’ll need twelve gains. There are plenty of Tory seats that are currently fairly vulnerable to the Lib Dems: Richmond Park, Brecon and Radnorshire (ignoring the change of allegiance resulting from the by election), Cheltenham and St Ives are some examples of seats where the Lib Dems were competitive in the last election. Moreover, whilst constituency polling should always be treated with a Carthaginian field full of salt, if those polls from Wokingham, Esher and South Cambridgeshire are on the money then there clearly previously safe Tory seats that the Lib Dems have a chance of snatching as well as their traditional marginals.

So, say the Tories lose ten to fifteen seats  to the Lib Dems (net of a potential Tory gain in North Norfolk), they’re going to have to find around twenty five gains from Labour (because they’re not making gains from the SNP, Plaid or the Greens at this election) in order to win a majority of one. Now I know there’s a meme about how the Tories are going to win scores of ‘northern’ (which under this particular definition seems to be any Labour seat north of Oxford and west of Bristol) seats from Labour as hardy white workin’ class battlers defect to the party in droves over Labour’s supposed perfidy re the EU referendum; the thing is, I’ll believe it when I see it. Media pundits and psephologists have been predicting this for years, either in the form of Tory or, earlier on, UKIP gains, and thus far it has barely transpired. The Tories did get enormous swings in many traditionally Labour constituencies last time round, but even then, in the election where they won more votes than in any since 1983, they still came up short, often by comfortable margins (as I understand it they only made six gains from Labour, at least two of which were partially helped by extremely lacklustre Labour incumbents).

Now, if the current state of the polls does hold and Labour do lose 10% of the vote nationwide, whilst the Tories hold at about 40%, then the psephologists dream of realigning British politics along American lines might, finally, come true. But that cannot be counted upon, and I think even in that scenario a lot of traditional Welsh, Midland and Northern Labour seats might prove stickier than one would imagine. This of course ignores the possibility that the Tories might lose additional seats to Labour (Chingford for instance), even if the result ends up being Tories at 40, Labour at 30. Therefore, if the Tories want to win a majority, it’s vital that they minimise their losses to the Lib Dems, in order to make a majority less reliant upon uncertain gains in Labour heartlands. This can best be done by a mixture of denying Swinson publicity and kicking the crap out of her and her party every time her tin-whistle of a voice box does manage to break through.

:D

But at present the Tories are *unusually* reliant on older voters, and there are at least some reasons to think the present extreme pro-Tory lean of "boomers" is actually down to specific non-replicable factors which won't be entirely matched in the future simply by the next generations becoming more right wing as they age.

For a start the print media in this country (massively pro-Tory) likely has a limited shelf life in its present form.

It is pretty clear that unless they change something major and fairly soon* that we will start to see, and maybe this will even occur soon as in a decade, a major structural fall in Conservative support; something akin to the declines suffered by the Cold War People's Parties in German-speaking countries. Or, for that matter, similar to the decline in turnouts seen here as the Wartime Generation started to depart in the 1990s.

It is true that people become more conservative as they grow older, but this does not mean that they will automatically become more likely to vote for the Conservative Party. This was not the case with earlier generations, particularly. It has been with older people recently for very specific material factors which cannot and will not be replicated: teachers will not be retiring to golden handshakes and final salary pensions, for instance. That's before we consider the property issues.

Of course this will play no role in the present election.

_{*Which can hardly be ruled out: this is British politics.}

Rude.


Maaaaybe. The material reasons you allude to - fraying social services, inability to get out of (student) debt or to save or get on the property ladder - are already weighing pretty heavily on most every voter under 40. For those who have an elderly parent to care for, the Tories' NHS policy for the past 10 years has been a double whammy. I can see the Tories coming up conspicuously, and fatally, short on election day not because of any one major factor but because of a widespread anemia in their <40 vote. Sort of like the generational equivalent of the Dems 2016 white/rural vote in the Midwest.   

There will always be a political left and a political right, if one tent on one side of the gap vanishes another takes it's place. That is the law of competitive politics. People have been predicting since the 70s that left-leaning strength with the youth with transform into a permanent advantage in 'X' country. Well, turns out old people are a renewable resource.

But how are old people a renewable resource? Two ways. The first is turnout, when you are younger you are more likely to vote if you are an activist. The self-constructed barriers to entry are higher when one is 18 than when one is 60. This leads to a predictable turnout curve in every non-mandatory election anywhere, the youth will always vote less then the eldarly, and the sample of the youth that is voting are those with a higher political interest. As one gets older, the barriers lower and the 'quiet' voters enter the pool, allowing parties to survive with only minimal reference to the activist part. The second way is that ideologies and issues change, and parties follow their voters. If the general electorate has reached a consensus on a issue, then parties ride or die. New issues rise up, the parties battle over them, and when victory occurs the other convert. When one 'greys' the issues that you fought for in your youth will no longer drive the great battles of govt, and new issues that you always held opinions on may align said voter to another party.

For example, one can make the argument that Brexit is this type of issue. Tories can't win long term on stuff like the NHS, May got eviscerated when she tried that platform last time. But the EU and Brexit have been long term issues and those entering the 'grey-zone' are happy to fight for it. I'll make a  bet now that Boris's tory platform will be relatively moderate compared to those  past, except the most frequent keyword will be Brexit. In part this is because  of his ideological flexibility, in part because the 'greys' he wants to win from post-industrial labour would be put off if he did anything other than carry the brexit flag. In 20 years, theres a good chance  Brexit won't be the big issue, something new will come up for the voters to fight over. That's life.

What sort of result for Labour would force Corbyn out? Or is his support too solid at this point among party loyalists to be harmed by one poor election?

2017 wasn't a win, but it wasn't a bad election for Labour (as far as not winning it goes): they gained seats and votes, they severely hampered their principal opponents, defied expectations all around.

A 2019 loss would be something much more unambiguous. Corbyn would likely not be able to last until the subsequent election. The flip side of this, of course, is that anything but a total loss (i.e. Tory majority) likely makes him PM.

Corbyn is 70; he's probably gone by 2024 regardless. Whether he becomes PM in a hung Parliament remains to be seen - convention is that the incumbent PM stays on until he resigns or is ousted via losing a confidence vote.

Tough call on the bold. If the Tories are larger than Labour+SNP, and even if they're smaller than Labour+SNP but Labour+SNP are far short of a majority, I think another election in early 2020 is at least as likely as, or maybe more likely than, PM Corbyn.

Fair point. There's a narrow window where the Tories are not a majority, but also so much larger than Labour that Labour can't form a majority (my guess is 310-320 seats). In that case, yes another election is likely. If Lab+SNP+LD is >330 then I think it'll be a *very shaky* minority government for 9 months or so in order to hold a referendum.

Great post!

Whilst it at present looks likely the Tories will win this election (of course that could change) sooner or later they will lose power for the simple reason that the electorate will be sick of them after a decade+ in power and that's before we even consider any economic downturns that may be on the horizon. When they do lose I believe it will likely usher in a significant period of left rule, probably led by someone more competent and likeable than Corbyn, in which the Tories are confined to an infighting irrelevance whilst the left push through transformational change (e.g. how Labour was in the 80s when the right was in its ascendancy).

Eventually the Tories will have to come up with a way to appeal to Millennial and Gen Z voters (and indeed ethnic minority voters) and if they do they will eventually return to power when Labour has run its course, probably led by a Blair-esque centrist looking person. If they fail to do this however they risk a party like the Lib Dems eclipsing them as the major party of the centre-right (the Lib Dems do appear to be moving in the direction of becoming the party of centre-right metropolitans with their newfound strength in Wimbledon, Putney, Chelsea, Wokingham, Esher etc.)

Of course we could get Proportional Representation by then which would completely realign the political landscape in ways that would be very difficult to predict.

Not sure why you felt the need to write these platitudes as no one argued the left would dominate permanently.

The point is that the main centre-right party in the UK doesn't have to be particularly right wing or even Conservative, plenty of European countries have a fairly centrist party as their main centre-right party, and that generational change could undermine the Tories and either open the door for the LibDems or a situation where different centre-right parties dominate in different regions. If they become the third largest party they would struggle to get back. It will probably be hard for the Tories to rebrand enough (and fast enough) to appeal to younger generations in the post-boomer era.

Just a thought that I had this afternoon:

In the recent Canadian election in Newfoundland, the Liberals lost something like 20%, and only lost one (of seven) seats. The Tories gained most of that, with the NDP gaining only two percent or so. However, the NDP gained the one seat that the Liberals lost. Could we see something like that in some places here? Ie, Labour loses a lot in the popular vote, but not many seats?

That's a good question! It's certainly plausible, both for the Tory and Labour vote. There's a lot of huge majorities for Labour up north and in central London. The Tories get huge majorities in the rural and suburban south and east, too. Either of these areas could see huge drops in votes for the dominant party but very few seats change hands, and which seats did flip would depend on the differential as much as the drop, i.e. did the Tories' vote drop more than Labour's did, or vice versa.

If there was a big drop for one of the parties in their heartland, however, it would probably correlate to a drop in scores of marginal seats, too. The result would likely be a landslide for the Tories or an unexpected majority for Labour.

YouGov Scotland poll is dire for Labour, now fourth behind the Nats Tories and LibDem. oh how the mighty have fallen

My understanding is that it was a subsample ergo it has less significance than a Yougov poll for Scotland

Subsamples mostly from weeks ago.

It was a full poll. But yes it's old.

Let's just say that today was the first time I and probably many other people have heard of Dan Carden, so he didn't exactly make a good first impression.

Macron in France can be viewed as a test case for such "post-boomer middle" dynamics.

Then it's just more of the same old neoliberal right.

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1193258215494078465

Guess it's time for the regularly scheduled  weekend poll drop. Overall, Opinium's numbers and changes match the general trend from last week: Lab up a bit, Lib-Dems down a bit, but everyone's overall rather stable except Brexit. Brexit keeps falling and I wouldn't be surprised if they wind up a zombie party.

I'd hold off on that last prediction for another couple of weeks. If we are to believe Farage is genuinely trying to broker a Tory/BP pact, he has deliberately held his fire for the time being. Once the registration deadline, and the possibility of a formal pact, passes next Friday the Brexit Party may start to register much more.

No it isn't; it's the *new* neoliberal right!  If you get my drift.  (Also cf Justin Trudeau)

France is a bit different in that its party system is weaker to begin with - ie formerly major players like the Radicals, UDF or even SFIO could dissapear off the face of the earth. In the UK, the Liberals have been almost dead on a couple of occasions, but always slithered back into existence. In that respect, no matter what, I think a future period of opposition; adjustment to new, ehm, realities; the old governing instruments and a degree of the electorate's short memories will mean the Tories will come back and win future elections. The bigger structural worry for the Conservative party is probably the ageing and declining activist base; coupled with the risk it gets tken over by hard right entryists.

The closing line of a certain song by the Who comes to mind...

"Oh tell me who are you, you, you, ah you?"

What has been alleged very likely didn't happen.

The age distribution isn't simply young vs old though, Conservatives are winning voters from around the age of 45 onward, someone who is 45 will be voting for another 40 years on average, 50 year olds are on average voting pretty Conservative and they will be voting for around 35 more years. Conservatives can rely on voters in their 40's and 50's for decades to come.

Yes but its a much narrower Tory lead in the 45-65 age bracket, and one that is subject to change - this group (my age group as it happens) is also much more "swingy" than the boomers.

On the one hand there are reasons to raise eyebrows at the source and other people on the trip have denied the story. On the other, the MPs in question are known lushes. The denials from them are funny: they clearly can't remember a thing about the journey.

It's also worth noting that the Labour gains in Scotland were completely unheralded in 2017 - eg some of the media seriously tried to portray Glasgow East as a Tory vs. SNP duel. It's not yet clear whether this was simply a more extreme example of having missed the Labour surge, or whether there's a specific issue with Scottish polling.

Scottish polling at the time showed Labour rising to 25% or even above, it's just the narrative was set by the polls right after the election call that showed Labour in the teens so nobody really picked up on it at the time, and all the polling very much overestimated the SNP.

Keith Vaz has just lost the Keith Vaz game.

Scotland post-indyref has seen an unusual level of tactical voting between the Unionists, which produces the massive 20% swings that have become normal if the geographic territory in question was last contested in 2015/16. Now the tactical voting is not absolute, but it's more then what goes on to the south. Since the SNP are pushing IndyRef2 this time much harder, perhaps tactical voting will be even more  strategic. Likely won't benefit the tories, their still losing seats, but maybe the others will do decently.

Low teens, they actually doubled their score from that on the day.

Farage Says He Won't Contest 317 CON seats.  Not sure if this is good news for CON as a lot of BXP votes might flow to LAB.

Agreed, but not for the reason you state. The sorts of votes the BXP draws in seats already held by Labour are votes that wouldn't have voted for Labour in the first place. Meanwhile, the sorts of votes the BXP draws in seats already held by Tories are votes that are not crucial to the swing that the Lib Dems/SNP/PC or even Lab would need to take them.

If nothing else this definitively shows what a mendacious empty vessel Farage is and always has been.

A rather strange decision.

Might this work in Labour's favour? Spilt the leave vote in seats they need to keep

It might have a beneficial effect to the LibDems in parts of the West Country as well, oddly.

good move in my opinion:

-if conservatives won in 2017, the should win again in 2019.
-in lab constituencies, the goal is to impeach some leave voters to vote for labour and so conservatives can win the seat due to the weaked labour result.

It gives credence to the line that BxP is simply a Tory party reserve squad.

BXP support has been on a pretty clear downward trend anyway and it's likely they'd have been below 5% by polling day anyway. This may increase the chance that they become totally irrelevant in all but a handful of seats, as was the case in 2017.

They might plausibly have seen the campaign as a chance to change that. But it appears not.

Could this actually cause a few more UKIP candidates to appear in Tory held seats?

or just a party wich wants a brexit.

Until literally days ago, its line was that Johnson wasn't really offering that.

Not how things actually work, though...

Yes, there's the possibility that the main effect of this will just be self-sabotage.

Farage is famously not actually particularly good at the hard graft of electioneering, he's very much a front man. On the rare occasions UKIP ran a competent campaign, it wasn't down to him. So his absolute authority over BXP is unlikely to make it as effective as it could be.

I think this is where this will hurt CON.  It will most likely encourage Remain tactical voting.  Ideally BXP run dummy candidates in Remain areas so Leave voters know who to vote for and run strong candidates on LAB Leave districts to eat into the LAB Leave vote.

It also seems some BxP people due to stand in Tory seats had no knowledge of this decision and are not happy about it. A few might well take the UKIP label or stand as some sort of Indy.

we will see but it's clear for me that it's a good news for conservatives in the conservative seats.

https://www.sportingindex.com/spread-betting/politics/british/group_b.6b9db4dc-d1df-4c9d-b9ab-c9a136a91f1e/uk-general-election-seats-markets

Sporting Index market for seats saw an increase of around 15 seats for CON on the Farage/BXP news.

Indeed. To quote the (former) Brexit Party Candidate in Crawley:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Wayne_BayIey/status/1193868199361753088?ref_src=twsrc...

The sort of knee jerk reaction I expected.

Already seen takes like "Tories will hold all their Scottish seats now" even though (just like UKIP in their heyday) BxP always polled much less well in Scotland than England/Wales anyway.

Technically, of course, there's no reason why such an aggrieved provisional candidate cannot run as an independent, if they choose.

The Brexit Party logo is so graphic...

Good!  The Brexit stand down should take a lot of the pressure of Tories in the southeast and southwest.

Sorry folks there is not going to be a hung Parliament. 

The antisemitic charges will put a damper on any Corbyn recovery this time. 

New poll from ComRes:

Tory: 36%
Labour: 29%
Lib Dem: 17%
Brexit: 11%

Given today's events, I think this tweet is helpful for interpretation:

https://twitter.com/benwansell/status/1193930170274590720

A straight factoring in on that ratio would give something like 40/31/17. To be clear: doing this would be extremely simplistic and any conclusions you would like to draw from such a calculation would be faulty.

As a political anomaly - a center left person who would be a Anti-Corbyn/Pro-Blair Labour/Leave voter in the UK and one who would have SUPPORTED Farage. I now find him to be a fraud. Not standing AND not contesting the whole nation is weak. How are you going to accomplish “Change Politics for Good” when you only send a message to half the establishment. He could’ve done great things for the UK by putting both the Torres and Labour on notice - instead he chickened out.

I think Nigel Farage is largely in politics for the craic and to keep himself in beer these days, so I wouldn’t have placed much faith in him to begin with. On the other hand, deciding to stand down against the Tories is probably among the more principled acts Farage has committed in recent years, given that it doesn’t do much for his career but nonetheless helps the Tories a bit in the election, making it more likely the UK will leave the EU in one form or another (which is supposed to be Farage’s main aim in politics).

Yeah, Farage has probably sunk his party's chance of having any relevance in the future. Good riddance.

This probably marginally helps Tories, but I can see it triggering consolidation of the Remain vote toward Labour (which we're already seeing some evidence for) so let's see where things go from there.

Why do you think this? Labour, despite what Corbynites would have us believe, still don't have any credibility on Brexit. The Lib Dem polling slide after the calling of the election was only a few points, was always inevitable once a campaign began and has since stalled.

For what feels like the 400th time, Labour are not a remain party

Besides, the Lib Dems will happily use this in every election leaflet and broadcast from now until December 12th in order to bring Tory remainers over to their side, so if anything, their share of the remainer vote will go up because of it.

Fwiw, I don't think this will change much except at the margins in a few Brexity & Lab held marginals where the Lib Dems were already mostly irrelevant.

Anyone who's paying attention can see that, in most constituencies, a vote for Labour is their best bet to stop Brexit. That doesn't mean that's how they'll vote, of course. This is the last election I'd ever hazard a prediction for at this point. But I'm at least hoping they will.

Best way to have stopped Brexit would have been to vote Labour in 2015. That was the most important election of our times, everything else just follows the ghastly course it set. Oh well.

Remember it's £500 a seat just on the deposit.

For what its worth, I think people seriously underestimate how badly Labour have pissed off much of their remainer voting bloc from 2017 and to assume that they will flock back between now and election day at the sight of Boris is a dubious assumption. The problem for the Lib Dems of course is that these people are, electorally speaking, mainly irrelevant, being concentrated in safe Labour seats where the majorities will no doubt fall by a decent amount but nothing like enough to put the seats in danger (a good example is my own seat), but Labour thinking that the same arguments they used in 2017 are going to work this time after the last 2 and a half years has the potential to end badly for them.

Having said that,


This is the correct answer

Labour is offering a second referendum though. With Labour you get either a soft Brexit or no Brexit at all, both are clearly superior to if Boris wins a majority which would guarantee a hard Brexit. Labour isn't perfect but they're clearly better than the Tories on Brexit (and overall too).

I can't speak for anyone else but I don't trust that Labour will give the second referendum that they offer and even if I did, its too little too late. I also don't believe a Corbyn Brexit would be any softer than a Boris one. Again, this is just me and I'd probably advise against extrapolating this to a wider voting bloc - I imagine there are a near-infinite range of opinions on this among remainer voters.

I did. I campaigned on the doorstep too, on a trip in Thurrock where the TV actor Shaun Dooley was one of the people bussed in to the marginal seat.

Labour came third. Then Ed Miliband decided to throw open the leadership ballot to every Johnny and Jenny come lately that could pony up a sum less than what I spent on my lunch today instead of limiting it to actual members.

So we got Corbyn. Who managed to make multiple unforced errors in week one. Since then Labour supporters have spent a huge amount of time moaning about media coverage and very little working out a viable way of dealing with it.

Then there's been antisemitism. I quit partly because it was taking longer than a murder case from arrest to conviction does to deal with Ken Livingstone and things have gotten worse since then.

A Conservative majority is a realistic possibility here and to be honest, a heavy loss might be what Labour needs to bring some sense back into its politics. I'd rather have five more years of Tory rule if it gets us ten of Labour after that than vice versa.

I think this entire Leave/Remain issue is more about identity than what is the technical definition of Leave and Remain. This is why Farage seems to have failed in his attack on Johnson's deal as "Not real Brexit" since very few is really that interested in that dictionary definition.  By the same token I think the LAB position which is of course very vague could end up collecting a lot of Remain voters by the same logic. 

What I want to know about Labour's position is which passport control queue I'll end up in if I land at Vienna airport.