UK local elections, 2 May 2019

[Bacon King]

Correct me if I'm wrong but outside of a few local government reorganizations here and there, all the council seats up yesterday are the same cohort that was last elected during the general election in 2015, no?

If so couldn't most of the Lib Dem surge be categorized as a reversion to the mean from their painfully terrible 2015 outcome? I'm sure the seats they're gaining now are mostly different from the seats they lost back then, but some quick math tells me that within this cohort they only won about 80 seats more than they held on the day before the Cleggtastrophe

[Bacon King]

Now it’s looking like Con 29% to Corbyn’s Labour on 28%.

So this means Tories are down 6 points from 2015 while Labor are down 1, assuming I have any idea what I'm talking about

[Bacon King]

Ultimately my take on this election as a poorly-informed American is this:

1. Liberal Democrats regaining support from their 2015 defeat
2. Tories and Labour are both incredibly unpopular so protest parties across the board did very well
3. As the traditional "protest vote party" the Lib Dems benefited massively from the unpopularity of the big two
4. The Lib Dems may have actually underperformed compared to historical norms because a lot of the anti-everything protest vote they traditionally would have won was instead directed towards the Greens and others who were better in some places at finding names to put on the ballots
5. This was a low turnout affair and most elections were actually determined by local concerns more than anything; anyone trying to produce a narrative about Brexit in either direction here is just cherrypicking evidence to match what they already decided to believe.

[Bacon King]

So the Tories lost 1300 seats and Labour lost 80, but this is being spun as equally bad for both parties? I get that expectations matter, but this is ridiculous.

It appears that the press decided on the "BOTH PARTIES LOSE" narrative very early on, back when the results were looking like this