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« on: May 19, 2020, 12:12:55 AM » |
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In such a Remain vs Leave election, a two-way race was always pretty likely and most people had one outcome they feared way more than the other. So it's not too surprising that the LibDems got squeezed. Swinson did run a bad campaign and worsened the effect, but the LibDem hype was always unrealistic. They also had so few seats in which they were actually within striking distance of flipping them going into the election. That makes the decision to support a general election a bit dumber, as they were on 21 MPs I think and it was hard for them to do much better or have more influence (due to the likelihood of a Tory majority). It is understandable though that they would have thought a pre-Brexit election was the least worst option though. No one party was solely responsible for giving Boris a general election on his terms, as both the SNP and Labour supported it too.
The thing that mystifies me is how they increased their share of the vote by 4% but actually lost a seat. It seems like the LibDem seat targeting went really wrong, with some pretty winnable seats being lost. The hubris about getting way over 40 seats must be part of that. For 2024 the LibDems probably need to slim down their target list, avoid hubris about getting 200 seats or even back to where they were in 2010 in one election, and then achieve their achievable goal (so getting up into the 20s seat wise should be achievable, but the swings needed to extend into the 30s are pretty daunting). A concern for them is that Starmer is a lot more appealing to their voters than Corbyn was, so maybe their vote just gets squeezed further.
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