Yes, yes, it's all still too early to say and there's everything from a Lab majority to a Tory majority to play for.
That said, I'm highly pessimistic about Labour's chances the next time out. They are still structurally disadvantaged by the electoral system, particularly with most of Scotland likely out of reach. The party is still quite divided about what direction it wants to go in, even if those cleavages are muted at the moment due to the pandemic, and Starmer's not really developed much of a leadership profile besides being an unthreatening man in a suit.
Also, I'm baffled at the apparently conventional wisdom that Johnson will step down or is somehow an electoral liability. Despite our fervent wishes, his shtick shows no sign of getting old; by some measures he's actually *more* approved of now than he was on the eve of the 2019 election. He's clearly got political capital and goodwill to spend with the EU transition period over and the COVID vaccine underway. Unless his party sees a staggering blow to its standing (remember, Theresa May wasn't given the boot until the devastating 2019 EU election results) I don't see him going anywhere.
Bluntly, if the Tories weren't turfed out of office in 2017 for austerity and Brexit with a weak leader facing an unexpectedly popular insurgent opposition leader, they're pretty likely to survive with a stronger leader facing a dud with those two acrimonious policies put behind them.
See, I think Labour would have won that election if they had had a leader like Starmer, because the Tory campaign was so awful. Corbyn’s performance was only perceived as strong because he outperformed expectations so much; in absolute terms, it wasn’t that impressive.
I doubt it. Corbyn's overperformance of expectations was directly tied to how unlike every other Labour leader before him. Particularly when you consider who ran against Corbyn in the 2015 race and the 2016 coup attempt, it's pretty difficult to avoid the conclusion that Corbyn was one of a kind and, improbably, people really responded to him once they got an unmediated look. He also managed to get more votes and a greater percentage of the vote than anyone since Blair in 2001. Weirdly, it was the fact that the admittedly abysmal Tory campaign that year *over*performed that saved them.
I'm just gonna hop in and note that this is only one of the two major takes from 2017, and that it shouldn't be opposed to the other. They aren't tried to ideological positions after all. The fact that some (not all obviously) still defend your position as if its the absolute truth and refuse to accept the others is part of the reason why Labour is in its present position and having to focus in steering the ship rather than firing her cannons at the enemy.
The first take, as you described, is that Corbyn was the reason for the shock of 2017. Corbyn was the antithesis to the drab May, which made him the man for the moment. The data here is as you said, high turnout and how Corbyn started to climb and narrow VS May in the preferred PM polls.
The second take is that Corbyn had some effect, but he was only a surfer riding a wave. This argument goes that the large Tory leads in polling up until the last two weeks were why the election went the way that it did. Everyone, including Labour, expected Labour to lose the election, which therefore meant the election became a Tory affair. As May bungled the campaign, a 'midterm' environment emerged where voters could vote Labour to check the expected Tory govt, and there was no danger because May should still win and Labour would still lose. The arguers also then point to 2019, and how when Corbyn actively campaigned for the PM seat and forced voters to weigh a potential Labour govt vs the Tory one, the polling barely shifted. This point of view looks at how the same polls that had Labour narrowing the gap with the Conservatives in 2017 had May's approval plummeting.
Neither view is 100% correct, but some are committed to one position solely because it rose tints/undermines the one successful thing that happened to Labour under Corbyn's watch.
