Greater London Assembly and Mayor elections - 5 May 2016

[vileplume]

Working on a % lead map atm; as always the more stressed I am the quicker you will see a map...

If you are planning on doing ward or constituency maps be aware that if you just take the ward results at face value you will be significantly overstating the Labour position and understate the Tory one because the ward results do not include postal votes which skew fairly decisively Tory nearly everywhere in London. If you want to create a far more accurate map you will have to redistribute the postal votes to the wards, however you have no way of knowing for sure exactly where they came from but you can make a very good guess.

The best way to do this is to assume that the postal votes are distributed at the same rate as the same day vote. For example if 10% of the total same day Labour vote in a given borough came from a ward you would assume that 10% of Labour's total postal votes in that borough came from that ward.

Or as an equation:

Postal vote in a ward (x) = (Same day vote in a ward (x))/(total same day votes in borough (y))*(total postal votes in borough (y))

Then add this figure to the total same day vote in the ward.

It's tedious work doing it and of course it will not be perfectly accurate (all though it will almost certainly be fairly close to the true figures) but it will be far, far more accurate than ignoring postal votes altogether.

Thanks for taking the time to do it as well .

[vileplume]

The Green vote seems to roughly map to Labour except for the Brent/Ealing/Hounslow area. Is that one of the less bobo areas?

The Green vote if anything folds neatly into parts of the city that once supported the Lib Dems/Brian Paddick.

The Greens typically do well anywhere where there is a substantial left leaning middle class, a large quantity of students, a lot of young professionals who work in the arts or where 'alternative' culture is commonplace. For example the Greens fairly decent performance in northern Tower Hamlets is almost certainly the results of spill over 'hipster' gentrification from Hackney, contrast this to their significantly poorer performance in and around the Isle of Dogs where there has also been gentrification but this is more driven by wealthy city workers who are pretty heavily inclined to vote Tory.

In contrast the Greens do dreadfully anywhere that has a lot of white working/lower middle class voters (Havering, Dagenham, Feltham in Hounslow etc.), suburban Conservatives (Barnet, Bromley etc.) or very wealthy metropolitan areas that vote heavily Tory (Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Barnes, Wimbledon Village etc.)

As to the Lib Dems I would like to comment on Richmond and Kingston because there has been significant demographic change down there but it often goes unnoticed. As can be seen from the map/recent election results the Lib Dems have held up far better in Kingston and Surbiton than they have in Richmond Park. Richmond was traditionally far better for the Lib Dems than the other to the parliamentary seat was very close even in the Thatcher landslides of the 80s for example. While Richmond has always been a 'nice middle class area' 30-40 years ago it had a large left leaning middle class while Kingston and Surbiton was largely full of suburban Tories (see Margot Leadbetter from the 70s sitcom the Good Life). But now due to rising property prices in Richmond those people are being priced out and replaced with a banker/corporate lawyer solidly Tory voting demographic. Whereas Kingston and Surbiton would fit the bill nowadays for having a left leaning middle class (not the whole borough as for example North Kingston, Coombe and Malden or even Chessington wouldn't fit this description) and the modern day equivalent of Margot Leadbetter would no longer live in Surbiton or even in London and instead would probably reside in a posh town in Surrey.