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

[jaichind]

UK punters lost a lot of money on this election.  Toward the end, especially on election day, a wall of money came in to bet on CON as largest party and Cameron as PM.  Most punters, it seems, had an opposite opinion and even as they shortened the odds, took these bets.  As a result most of them took a bath on the result.

[jaichind]

Popular vote totals:

Conservative......... 11,334,920 (36.9%)
Labour..................... 9,344,328 (30.4%)
UKIP........................ 3,881,129 (12.6%)
Liberal Democrats.... 2,415,888 (7.9%)
SNP.......................... 1,454,436 (4.7%)
Greens..................... 1,154,562 (3.8%)
Others..................... 1,106,417 (3.7%)
--------------------------------------------------
Totals.................... 30,691,680 (100.0%)


Change from 2010:

Conservative.............. +631,266
Labour........................ +737,811
UKIP........................ +2,961,658
Liberal Democrats.... -4,420,360
SNP............................ +963,050
Greens....................... +889,319
Others........................ +758,668

CON total number of vote is the highest of any party since Blair's LAB vote of 1997.

[jaichind]

I am very interested in the 10 seats LAB managed to win from CON because the #1 CON target on LAB's list was actually held by CON.  I took a look at them.  4 of them were in the North, 1 in Midlands, 4 in London and 1 in Southeast.  What is interesting is that in 8 out of the 10 seat the CON vote share actually went up only to have the LAB vote share go up even more.  Only in 2 of them (both in London where LAB did the best in all regions relative to 2010) did the CON vote share go down. One by 0.9% which is almost nothing and one by 3.1% which represented a real loss.  

I also noticed that in 9 out of the 10 seats, the UKIP vote share is either fairly low or low when compared to seats nearby.  This tells me there was an attempt in pretty much all 10 seats at UKIP tactical voting.  It just was not good enough.

[jaichind]

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

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

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

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

[jaichind]

At this point Labour, just like most of European Socialist/Social Democratic parties, should simply disband and start over.

Why?  CON were crushed in 1997 2001 and soundly defeated in 2005.  They did not have to disband and start over to come back to power.

[jaichind]

Does anybody have the vote share for London?

LAB           45      43.7%
CON          27      34.9%
LD              1         7.8%
UKIP           0         8.1%
Green         0         4.9%

[jaichind]

Does anybody have the vote share for London?

LAB           45      43.7%
CON          27      34.9%
LD              1         7.8%
UKIP           0         8.1%
Green         0         4.9%

Thanks!

Where did you find that from?

Lib Dem got the same vote share (less 0.1%) in London as their national result.

I found this site which I found to be very good.  It allows to review results by subregions.

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

[jaichind]

On question I always had about the election process in UK is: When the candidates get up on that podium do they know the results ahead of time?  It seems they do not other than possible leaks to them unofficially.   But then I hear about requests for recounts in case someone at the border to losing deposit or the results are very close.  So are those recounts automatic or do they ask the candidates?  If they ask the candidates then are they not disclosing the results to them before announcing them at the podium?

[jaichind]

On question I always had about the election process in UK is: When the candidates get up on that podium do they know the results ahead of time?  It seems they do not other than possible leaks to them unofficially.   But then I hear about requests for recounts in case someone at the border to losing deposit or the results are very close.  So are those recounts automatic or do they ask the candidates?  If they ask the candidates then are they not disclosing the results to them before announcing them at the podium?

Yes, all of the candidates are informed of the result before the declaration.

That takes all the fun of it.  What is great about the existing system is be able to see what the facial reaction of the candidates to the results as they hear it.  What you are saying takes the fun out of that. 

[jaichind]

Ukip gained a shock council poll victory today at Thanet, Kent - where former party leader Nigel Farage earlier failed to win a Westminster seat. With some results still to declared it has already returned 31 out of 56 councillors, taking control of the authority.

[jaichind]

Looks like the first poll after the election by Survation

CON     40
LAB      31
LD         6
UKIP    12
Green    4

[jaichind]

Manchester Gorton in interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Gorton_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

LAB is +17 while Green is +7 while LD is -28.  Looks like most of LD vote sent to LAB or Green while LAB leaked very little votes to UKIP.  Other than LAB everyone else is in single digits. 

[jaichind]

It is also interesting to see in the North East some signs of CON attempt at tactical voting in favor of LD.  Namely

Bradford East
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_East_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

Leeds North West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_North_West_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

Sheffield Hallam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Hallam_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

It work in Sheffield Hallam (saving Clegg) and Leeds North West but it was not enough in Bradford East.  LD should thank their luck stars that these types of tactical votes took place or else the result would have been even worse.  I suspect that was what Clegg was trying to do toward the end of the campaign when he made noises that he might join CON again in a coalition.  The fact that it was a very bad night for LD should not disguise the fact that this tactic worked in some localized areas and saved a couple of seats for LD.

[jaichind]

Another interesting fact about CON->LD tactical voting is that out the 12 seats LD lost to LAB, CON lost votes, and for most them them in a significant way in 9 of them.  In the 3 where CON gained votes, 2 of them the LD incumbent did not run taking away the incentive to tactically vote since without incumbency LD was most likely going to lose anyway so the CON's just voted CONs.  Only in 1 of the 12 seats where LAB gained from LD did the CON vote go up when the LD incumbent is running and that is only by 0.6%.  So in LAB-LIB marginals the CON did try to say LIB seats but in most cases the LIB leak to LAB was so large it was not enough.

[jaichind]

And looking at the inverse where it was CON vs LIB, there seems to be no sign of LAB tactical voting for LIB.  Of course for most of these seats, LAB is so weak that there are no votes to tactical vote with.  But still the LAB vote went up across the board in all those seats from their very low base. 

So in this election, UKIP and CON were motivated and smart voters that had a particular result they wanted to avoid whereas LAB voters were not driven to vote smartly to avoid certain results.  Smarter tactical voting by LAB could have saved 4-5 LD seats from going CON.  But it seems mostly the LAB voters did not even try.

[jaichind]

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

The 3 excess plusses is explained by:

"The UKIP group of 13 voters includes three voters who previously voted for other minor parties such as the BNP in 2010, but these voters are not shown on the diagram."

I think it is off by a bit less than one percent.  In 2010 UKIP+BNP+English Democrats+Christian seems to have captured 5.3%  The chart seems to imply that this cluster won 6%.  They are better off rounding to 5% instead of 6%.

[jaichind]

I think it is this poster that won it for CON

[jaichind]

I haven't been able to find a good 2015 UK Election results map where you could click on a district and it would tell you who won, by how much and who the opponents were, etc. Wikipedia has more info like that than the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph websites combined.

So I apologize for being late to the discussion but I just learned today that the Lib Dems were completely wiped out in their usual stronghold of Cornwall. Were there any reasons for that besides the nationwide drop in their support? They always did well there, even before 2010.

http://principalfish.co.uk/electionmaps/