UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Strangely, this by-election result is so humiliating, so devastating, so gutting that it seems like a fluke more than anything else, whereas a ten percentage point loss where Labour's vote share remained roughly unchanged from 2019 would seem worse, at least from my perspective.

There are clearly lessons to be learned from this debacle and the opposition ought to use this outcome to force reflection. As of late, Labour's messaging has been very uninspired and there have been some massive unforced errors to go along with this. For instance, I  have no idea why Labour would brand a tax increase on corporations as "austerity" - why was this decision made? While I doubt many voted based on this in Hartlepool, this is exactly the sort of nonsense that will alienate Labour voters. Overall, I don't think Labour has been presenting an alternative vision of how its government would operate and who it would serve that stands in contrast with the Tories. I think they need to do this.

At the same time, I find myself feeling very annoyed by cocky overconfidence from Tories. Boris Johnson doesn't command a vast ocean of support nor is his party doing particularly well in national polling. In fact, he's rather unpopular, even after everything has gone right for his government. It's pretty likely that merely being a "polarizing" figure is an upper-bound for him - hard to see how this is a good thing for the Conservative Party, which also appears as an uninspired, directionless mess at the moment!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Considering that Keir Starmer's image is basically, as someone else said, "meh" and about as many voters have no idea who he is as dislike him, I find it hard to believe that "Keir Starmer's leadership" was the reason that people voted for the Tories in Hartlepool - that sounds a lot like a canned response from someone who was never going to vote for Labour in the first place and who hates the party, which will be a plurality of Tory voters just about anywhere, even in Hartlepool.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

https://twitter.com/BruneElections/status/1682197530153558019

A better comparison: Labour winning Selby and Ainsty but losing Uxbridge and South Ruislip is the equivalent of the Bush-era Democrats winning a special election in a congressional district covering NE Indiana or NW Iowa, while losing a special election in a congressional district covering Staten Island. Would this actually be surprising? No, not at all.