English local elections, May 2014

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68 councils counting on the Thursday, 93 leaving it until the Friday. EU results come on the Sunday along with the rest of the continent.

Also, candidate nominations will be announced by councils this Friday.

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For anyone who doesn't know how much of a joke the Liverpool LibDems have become, here's the candidate numbers for the city.

Labour, Tory, continuity Liberals - 30 full slate
Green - 29
UKIP - 19
LibDems - 18
TUSC - 12

This is the party that ran the city for 12 years up to 2010 and is now the official opposition. The Greens or the old Liberal Party could well become the second largest party.

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Hardly surprising that they would wither in England's most culturally left-wing city and retrench to their strong areas. Could the Greens become the second-biggest party?

The Greens only really have strength in one ward (St Michael's), where they should gain their third seat this year, making them tied with the old Lib party which should hold 3 as well.

The LibDems should be left with about 3 as well, being generous. They should win 1 ward (Church) and have a fighting chance in another (Woolton), but beyond that, I'm stuck to see any areas of strength left for them.

The reasons for their death in the city go beyond the Coalition though. Their administration before 2010 had become toxic and they've done nothing but fight ever since.

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Hardly surprising that they would wither in England's most culturally left-wing city and retrench to their strong areas. Could the Greens become the second-biggest party?

as others have said, we should clear up the final st michaels seat, at the moment we're just too far behind even in the wards we're in second place in, and with Labour riding so high that's unlikely to change

I'd suggest Liverpool's too socially conservative for the Greens, except their pocket in St. Michael's.

The Greens are in with a shout of their first seat on the Wirral though.

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Survation poll for the London borough elections: Lab 42 Con 26 LD 14 UKIP 11 Green 4 Others 3

(link)

Probably not to be trusted, but what kind've seat count would this give us?

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UKIP have done well, but not sensationally, despite what the media's reporting.

They're down 5% on last year and still getting too many second places and not enough firsts. They've made zero progress in London and the large cities and they've made no progress in targets like Eastleigh.

They've basically just done well at hoovering up BNP voters, old LibDem protest votes, Labour voters who used to vote Lib at locals and a decent handful of Tories.

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I have some questions on how UK local elections work as I am still not clear about some items

1) Why is the vote count so slow for local elections relative to Westminster elections?  It has been more than 24 hours and it still seems to be going on with only 150 out of 161 councils done.  Is it because some councils have rules saying that counts cannot be done until the Sunday when the Euro elections results are counted?  If not why is this so slow.  Only place I know of that is slower than this is my home county of Westchester of NY state.  But vote counting in Westchester has to be the most incompetent in the whole world.

2) When I read the BBC indicating the vote share is Labour 31 Conservatives 29 UKIP 17 and LD 13, is this just the absolute aggregation of the votes across the places that voted yesterday? Or does it take into account the PVI (for the lack of a better word) of places that voted and tried to normalize into what the implied national vote share would be.  I hope for the latter but suspect the former.  In 2013 it seems to be  Labour 29 Conservatives 25 UKIP 23 and LD 14, which makes sense only if one takes into account that the places that voted are in the South and and non-urban areas that are friendly to UKIP.  These numbers tell me that these BBC numbers are not normalized which means I am not sure what to make of them and not sure what inferences I can draw from these numbers.

1. Most councils count the following day because it's cheaper than counting through the night.

2. It's a projected national share, so they take the results of a selection of 'key wards' and try and extrapolate it across the country.

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I'm a bit annoyed by the media coverage. No mention of the fact that UKIP have been rejected completely in Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, etc...

It just seems like they don't want to admit that their UKIP narrative started out well last night, but has been looking quite floored as the count has progressed. UKIP should really have done better on councils like Manchester, Knowsley and Barking where there is literally no opposition (and a lot of WWC).

Ed and Labour may not be connecting across the country, but they're certainly connecting (and then some!) in some areas where they lost out locally 2000-2010.

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Quick little Donny map:

EdM safe, no matter what Nigel's trying to stir up in Donny.

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Mike Smithson is the first 'journalist' to waste his time in making a fool of himself, going through ALL of Thursday's results to come to the conclusion that the Projected Share reported by the BBC is wrong.

And then Labour's Press Team re-tweets such silliness.

Obviously, anybody who'd even consider registering on a site such as this knows that there were no elections in Tory/UKIP/LibDem strongholds down south or in Scotland and Wales and that's why we need a PNS.



Rookie mistake.

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He didn't claim that the projection was wrong. It's a chart of actual votes in the elections that happened. Isn't there merit in having the figures?

He claims it's a "tad different from how it was reported on Thursday". Basically, he thinks the PNS is wrong.

There's not really much merit in having the numbers when trying to come to a conclusion about what it'd mean if Thursday had been a general election.

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But how much merit is there trying to work out the latter?

We get a poor-man's opinion poll and some nice fancy graphics of the House of Commons.

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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zg4Ab0JTTAWau40EtyeZtvE-oSX-r5CZfvQqfxoHx-Q/edit?pli=1#gid=0