UK General Election, June 8th 2017

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The LibDems have just nominated an unrepentant racist at Bradford East.

Is that the same guy who use to be their MP?

The one and the only.

Ugh, why are European parties terrible

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Panelbase/Scotland
SNP - 44%
Con - 33%
Lab - 13%
Lib - 5%

This poll might be off but does fit into my thinking about all this talk about LIB revival in Scotland.  I always figured that the idea of LIB making gains in Scotland was most likely fiction.  If LIB were to go after the Remain vote it seems that vote should go SNP, if anything to stop CON.  If LIB were to go after the Unionist vote then that same vote most likely voted for Brexit and would go CON anyway.  I always figured that it will be a SNP vs CON battle this time in Scotland even if it will be an uneven battle.

I don't know about being "most likely fiction" -- Orkney and Shetland looks nailed-on, Lib Dems have another very likely pickup in East Dunbartonshire, and are probably likelier than not to gain Edinburgh West and Fife North East (though at Conservatives over 30 Scotland-wide, both of those seats become likelier to go Conservative than Lib Dem).

They're not going back to pre-2015 numbers anywhere, but it looks like there'll be small sustained gains in every part of the country.

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Lib Dem leader Tim Farron has kicked former MP, noted anti-Semite, and current nominee in Bradford East David Ward out of the party, so the Lib Dems will be picking a different candidate in that constituency. Good decision.

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Are terrible inaccurate constituency polls not going to be a feature of this race? I really enjoyed them in 2015 as they allowed me to talk about individual constituencies and pretend I had a clue as to what was going on there

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How good are Paul Nuttall's chances of winning in the Boston constituency?

(I'm guessing next to none, but I want to know what you guys say)

The fact that UKIP seems to have lost about half their support from 2015 directly to the Conservatives (if not more), and that in 2015 they were 10 points behind here, suggests that it's unlikely. It's as good a place as any to make a last stand, though -- at 76% Leave, it is the most Leave constituency in the nation.

I don't think UKIP is necessary dead politically; there'll always be an audience for a right-wing protest party and they'll probably surge again if a Breenter government ever comes to power, which is what I suspect will happen once the Conservatives lose (once Labor does lose their heavily-Leave northern seats it'd be illogical for them not to adopt that plank unless they continue to be led by Corbynistas, and the Lib Dems are pretty much already there). But they're going to take a beating this time around because everything they've spent the last decade calling for has been adopted by a popular Conservative government, several of their most prominent names have abandoned them, and they're leader isn't as well-known or effective as Farage was.

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So is John Stevens planning an independent ("Stop Brexit") candidacy in Kensington and releasing polling hoping that other parties stand aside for him, or hoping to get their voters to vote tactically? The Liberal Democrats are apparently not great fans of his since he left their party in 2010 to become an independent.

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I don't think it would be accurate at all to say that Iraq has faded from American political discourse; the distinction between Hillary's AYE vote and Bernie's NAY vote (and Obama's activism against the decision) was a key part of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic primary campaigns. There is perhaps a different perspective since in the US Hillary thumped Bernie pretty decisively while Corbyn won easily in the UK.

The right has to a large extent moved on (it certainly didn't help Jeb, but it seems hard to say that it was what sunk him, since most of the candidates were on record having either supported it in that era or simply hadn't entered politics yet), and this seems to be the case in the UK as well as the US: I didn't see the Iraq war being a factor in May v. Leadsom, or in Trump v. Cruz.

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It seems at the rate we are going UKIP's vote share in 2017 might be barely larger than 2010 even though that is more of a function of  running a lot less candidates in 2017 than 2010.

Will be interesting if the collapse is across-the-board or if UKIP can establish a LibDem-style niche, holding up their vote in a few stronghold seats (their three most obvious targets being Thurrock, Hartlepool, and Boston & Skegness).

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The thing is, though, those Lib Dem areas are, in many cases, areas which had extended support for the Liberals stretching back to the 19th century. Voting Liberal is really rather generational, just like paying homage to the household gods.

This is true for Orkney & Shetland and Ceredigion, but most of the other seats the Lib Dems held in 2015 weren't ancestral seats so much as strong incumbents. Tim Farron, who holds Westmorland & Lonsdale (the strongest Liberal Democrat seat in Great Britain in 2015, both in terms of margin over nearest competitor and percentage of the vote attained), gained his seat from the Conservatives in 2005, who had held the entire area covered by the seat since the election of 1924 and most of it since 1910. One of the amazing things about the 2015 defeat was how traditional Liberal heartlands, like the Scottish Highlands and rural Wales, indeed mainly abandoned them, with the exception of those two seats.

UKIP, of course, has no strong incumbents going for them. Their only winner from 2015 is stepping down.

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Bring back David Cameron imo