UK General Election - May 7th 2015 (The Official Election Day & Results Thread)

[rob in cal]

With the emergence of UKIP and the Greens, plus the still significant residual vote for the LD's, it was almost inevitable for a huge amount of wasted votes and disproportionality.  Reminds me a little about the Polish election of 1993 or 1994 where a huge bunch of parties missed the threshold.

[YL]

All the below are by change in percentage vote share.  Errors possible.

Best Tory results

Bromsgrove +10.2
Hampstead & Kilburn +9.6
Yeovil +9.6
Hexham +9.5
Brent Central +9.2
City of Durham +9.0
Watford +8.5
North East Somerset +8.5
Richmond Park +8.5
Somerton & Frome +8.5

Best Labour results

Birmingham Hall Green +26.9
Brent Central +20.9
Sheffield Hallam +19.7
Poplar & Limehouse +18.6
Bethnal Green & Bow +18.3
Birmingham Ladywood +18.0
Walthamstow +17.0
Manchester Gorton +17.0
Hornsey & Wood Green +16.9
Birmingham Hodge Hill +16.4

Best Lib Dem results

Buckingham no change (!)
East Dunbartonshire -2.4
Edinburgh West -2.8
Gordon -3.3
Argyll & Bute -3.7
Bradford East -4.2
Glasgow East -4.3
Cambridge -4.3
Na h-Eileanan an Iar -4.6
Ynys Môn -5.4

Worst Tory results

Clacton -16.4
Bradford West -15.9
Bradford East -15.5
Richmond (Yorks) -11.4
Edinburgh West -10.9
Dagenham & Rainham -10.0
Sheffield Hallam -9.9
Cambridge -9.9
South Thanet -9.9
Argyll & Bute -9.1

Worst Labour results

Glasgow North East -34.7
Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill -32.7
Glenrothes -31.7
Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath -31.2
West Dunbartonshire -30.0
Glasgow South West -29.7
Motherwell and Wishaw -29.2
Glasgow East -29.2
Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East -27.2
Inverclyde -25.6

Worst Labour results excluding Scotland

Clacton -10.6
Chatham & Aylesford -8.7
Rochester & Strood -8.7
South Thanet -7.6
Hartlepool -6.9
North East Somerset -6.8
Tamworth -6.6
South Dorset -6.1
Brigg & Goole -5.9
Wellingborough -5.9

Worst Lib Dem results

Brent Central -35.8
Sheffield Central -31.2
Dunfermline & West Fife -31.1
Hereford & South Herefordshire -30.5
Edinburgh South -30.3
Edinburgh North & Leith -29.3
Bristol West -29.2
Weston super Mud Mare -28.8
Glasgow North -28.6
Manchester Gorton -28.4

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some very obvious tactical voting for LibDem incumbents wherever they faced Labour challenges.

[Donerail]

Best Lib Dem results

Buckingham no change (!)

It really says a lot about the state of a party if their best result is not dropping into negative votes.

The official results for Buckingham: Speaker John Bercow, 34,617 votes; David Fowler, UKIP, 11,675 votes; Alan Francis, Green Party, 7,400 votes. Additionally, 23,000 voters just wrote 'not the Lib Dems' on their ballots. These will be assessed as negative votes for the Lib Dems.

[Хahar 🤔]

Buckingham is the Speaker's seat and of course the Liberal Democrats did not have a candidate in either 2010 or 2015.

[jaichind]

Manchester Gorton in interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Gorton_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

LAB is +17 while Green is +7 while LD is -28.  Looks like most of LD vote sent to LAB or Green while LAB leaked very little votes to UKIP.  Other than LAB everyone else is in single digits. 

[Torie]

Manchester Gorton in interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Gorton_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

LAB is +17 while Green is +7 while LD is -28.  Looks like most of LD vote sent to LAB or Green while LAB leaked very little votes to UKIP.  Other than LAB everyone else is in single digits. 

The UKIP was generally weak in larger inner cities is my impression. Outside that zone, I suspect the leak from LAB to UKIP was substantially greater.

[Phony Moderate]

Well it wasn't the Longest Suicide Note in History in Manchester Gorton was it.

[jaichind]

It is also interesting to see in the North East some signs of CON attempt at tactical voting in favor of LD.  Namely

Bradford East
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_East_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

Leeds North West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_North_West_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

Sheffield Hallam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Hallam_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

It work in Sheffield Hallam (saving Clegg) and Leeds North West but it was not enough in Bradford East.  LD should thank their luck stars that these types of tactical votes took place or else the result would have been even worse.  I suspect that was what Clegg was trying to do toward the end of the campaign when he made noises that he might join CON again in a coalition.  The fact that it was a very bad night for LD should not disguise the fact that this tactic worked in some localized areas and saved a couple of seats for LD.

[Vosem]

Bradford East
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_East_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

David Ward is disgusting, and I may have tactically voted Labour at this constituency instead. Anyone but him, really.

[jaichind]

Another interesting fact about CON->LD tactical voting is that out the 12 seats LD lost to LAB, CON lost votes, and for most them them in a significant way in 9 of them.  In the 3 where CON gained votes, 2 of them the LD incumbent did not run taking away the incentive to tactically vote since without incumbency LD was most likely going to lose anyway so the CON's just voted CONs.  Only in 1 of the 12 seats where LAB gained from LD did the CON vote go up when the LD incumbent is running and that is only by 0.6%.  So in LAB-LIB marginals the CON did try to say LIB seats but in most cases the LIB leak to LAB was so large it was not enough.

[jaichind]

And looking at the inverse where it was CON vs LIB, there seems to be no sign of LAB tactical voting for LIB.  Of course for most of these seats, LAB is so weak that there are no votes to tactical vote with.  But still the LAB vote went up across the board in all those seats from their very low base. 

So in this election, UKIP and CON were motivated and smart voters that had a particular result they wanted to avoid whereas LAB voters were not driven to vote smartly to avoid certain results.  Smarter tactical voting by LAB could have saved 4-5 LD seats from going CON.  But it seems mostly the LAB voters did not even try.

[Phony Moderate]

Yeah, I suspect that there was much more to Ward's relatively strong performance than that...sadly. Any reasonable Lib Dem would have hoped for a bigger defeat for him.

[Phony Moderate]

Anthony Wells calculates that Labour need a popular vote win of 13% to win an overall majority next time...and that is on the current boundaries. To put that into context, their popular vote margin was 12.5% in 1997.

Of course Scotland could shift etc.

[Peter]

Something that needs to be asked is: Has FPTP ever had a more epic failure? 1983 is nothing in comparison to this.

One of the least proportional outcomes in UK history. Around the same level as 1983 and 1931

How is your proportionality score calculated?

[Diouf]

Something that needs to be asked is: Has FPTP ever had a more epic failure? 1983 is nothing in comparison to this.

One of the least proportional outcomes in UK history. Around the same level as 1983 and 1931

How is your proportionality score calculated?

"To calculate the proportionality of election outcomes, we use a standard measure that takes the absolute difference between seat and vote shares for each party, sums them, divides by two, and then subtracts the resulting number from 100."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/06/what-would-britain-look-like-under-proportional-representation/

The article is from before the election, but the figure is an update posted on twitter by one of the academics after the election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anthony Wells calculates that Labour need a popular vote win of 13% to win an overall majority next time...and that is on the current boundaries. To put that into context, their popular vote margin was 12.5% in 1997.

Of course Scotland could shift etc.

Well, yes, Scotland is a big reason for that (to the extent of making such calculations kind of pointless). Elsewhere it isn't unknown for swing seats to occasionally have deceptively large majorities; they tend to fall like ninepins when a swing is actually on.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The UKIP was generally weak in larger inner cities is my impression. Outside that zone, I suspect the leak from LAB to UKIP was substantially greater.

No one writes 'The UKIP'.

Anyway, outside of Kent and Essex there doesn't appear to have been substantial leakage of 2010 Labour support to the Kippers.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, I suspect that there was much more to Ward's relatively strong performance than that...sadly. Any reasonable Lib Dem would have hoped for a bigger defeat for him.

But look on the bright side he was apparently so shocked to have lost that he didn't turn up to the declaration.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Manchester Gorton in interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Gorton_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

LAB is +17 while Green is +7 while LD is -28.  Looks like most of LD vote sent to LAB or Green while LAB leaked very little votes to UKIP.  Other than LAB everyone else is in single digits. 

Gorton is an inner city constituency with a large Asian (mostly Pakistani) population and a decent number of students.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Best Tory results

Bromsgrove +10.2
Hampstead & Kilburn +9.6
Yeovil +9.6
Hexham +9.5
Brent Central +9.2
City of Durham +9.0
Watford +8.5
North East Somerset +8.5
Richmond Park +8.5
Somerton & Frome +8.5

Most of these are clearly linked to the LibDem collapse, although there's an additional explanation for the first constituency. Bromsgrove was held before the 2010 election by one of the more notorious parliamentary expenses abusers and the swing there was thus very poor for a seat of its type. Normal service has resumed.

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Mostly this shows a return of Pakistani and Bangladeshi voting patterns to pre-Iraq norms: it's taken a while. And also the usual LibDem collapse story.

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Incumbents who benefited from tactical voting, plus constituencies where they had the least to fall.

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An interesting set. The Conservative incumbent was the UKIP candidate in Clacton (of course), and massive loss of support in that direction is also clear in Dagenham & Rainham and in South Thanet. Most of the rest shows the usual tactical voting patterns, except for Richmond where William Hague evidently had a large personal vote.

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I suspect that all of these bar Inverclyde vote Yes, and Inverclyde was very narrow.

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Also an interesting set. In some of them incumbents with personal votes were defeated in 2010 but did not run again (Stroud would also be here had David Drew not given it another go). There are also the two seats with UKIP MPs defending (I presume the votes lost were mostly lost in their direction), a seat where the Labour candidate was convicted of fraud halfway through the campaign (Wellingborough), and Monkeytown were there were a bunch of independents (one strong enough to hold his deposit) as well as a strong UKIP showing; the Tories dropped 7pts in the town as well.

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These are all seats where the LibDems polled well in 2010 but did not win, plus Brent Central (the partial heir to the once very safe Labour seat of Brent East) where the LibDem MP retired, and Bristol 'West' which is a hybrid between a university constituency and an inner city one. Dunfermline and Hereford also had LibDem MPs up until 2010 (Dunfermline's was from a by-election in 2006 admittedly). The result in Hereford is really shocking given the long Liberal history of the city.

[Vega]

The UKIP was generally weak in larger inner cities is my impression. Outside that zone, I suspect the leak from LAB to UKIP was substantially greater.

No one writes 'The UKIP'.

Anyway, outside of Kent and Essex there doesn't appear to have been substantial leakage of 2010 Labour support to the Kippers.

Normally only outsiders to British politics.

And I blame that mainly on how well UKIP has picked up ex-blue collar Labour voters.

[King of Kensington]

The middle class vote for Labour has held up, while its support among the working class has declined over three elections.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/it-was-working-class-not-middle-class-sunk-labour

[YL]

And looking at the inverse where it was CON vs LIB, there seems to be no sign of LAB tactical voting for LIB.  Of course for most of these seats, LAB is so weak that there are no votes to tactical vote with.  But still the LAB vote went up across the board in all those seats from their very low base. 

So in this election, UKIP and CON were motivated and smart voters that had a particular result they wanted to avoid whereas LAB voters were not driven to vote smartly to avoid certain results.  Smarter tactical voting by LAB could have saved 4-5 LD seats from going CON.  But it seems mostly the LAB voters did not even try.

No doubt there was tactical voting by Labour supporters in those seats, just not as much as in 2010, for obvious reasons.

There will be other features related to tactical voting in the lists.  For example, I assume that in City of Durham, targeted by the Lib Dems in 2010, there was a large Tory tactical vote for them, and that went back to the Tories this time.

[minionofmidas]

Richmond where William Hague evidently had a large personal vote.

And the new Tory candidate is not White British (Nor British at all, really*), never mind local, and a local councillor who stood in protest of the selection held his deposit.

*Actually, he's British born. But this still feels like a revival of the relationship between the Tory Party and the Native Princes.