UK General Election, 2017 - Election Day and Results Thread

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Not likely to be posting much on the night if at all and perhaps not even after (explain why here), but here's something to keep in mind for you all...

Contrary to popular belief - and guess who is responsible for maintaining this! - the people running the campaigns in each constituency (and therefore the national campaigns) don't really know (and never do) exactly what is going on. The necessary data is is not collected - canvassing data is a much weirder thing than is widely assumed - and would be impossible to collate anyway. What they have are general impressions, and while these can be accurate they can also be extremely wrong. At the last GE I helped out in a seat that was lost by what turned out to be a rather large margin and on a much worse swing than the national average; on the day the people running the campaign very clearly believed they were slightly ahead. One issue is that local campaigns are very much based on a GOTV principle but in a General Election most of the people voting do so totally independently of the exhortations of rosette-festooned activists.

Or to cut an overlong post short: even the parties themselves won't know what has happened until 10pm, same as everyone else. Because it is also not the case that private polling for parties is any more accurate than published polling for newspapers.

A related point is that early rumours from the various counts are very often wrong. Often they start spreading around even before boxes are opened...

Finally, the implied the swings from all the pollsters...

BMG: -3.0
ICM: -2.5
ComRes: -1.5
Ipsos-MORI: -0.5
Panelbase: -0.5
YouGov: 0.0
Opinium: 0.0
Kantar: +0.5
SurveyMonkey: +1.5
Survation: +3.0
Qriously: +5.0

_{Qriously may be voodoo thus italics.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Fake polls strike again!

You can't say that on the basis of two constituencies , for goodness sake!

Particularly as it would indicate that the polls were broadly accurate. Extrapolating from both those seats (error probably) would be a tiny swing from 2015.

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As a wise man once said: aaaaaaayyyy lmao

But basically: in most of the country a standard sh!t election (but even that is way better than what was expected! The number of Labour candidates who hadn't bothered to write victory speeches and who won...) with a deffo Brexit backlash in London... and... unprecedented involvement of the young in the political process. The results in studenty areas are *extraordinary*. It is a good thing that attention will have to be paid to young people.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I hadn't realized so many constituencies had flipped from Labour to the Tories. Anything particular about these places?

All things considered there weren't many. But you'll note a certain concentration of them in the Midlands, which is where this culture war bullsh!t was aimed at and where it was most successful (in fact in the Midlands outside e.g. Birmingham the Tories in general did well; classic swing votes stuck with the Tories this time). Additionally, demographic change in some seats (N.E. Derbyshire) and poor candidates in others (Mansfield would surely have been held with a better candidate than its useless incumbent). Some were also seats in which UKIP strategically stood down. But we'll get them back without much difficulty I suspect.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As for the future, who knows? But there will be a serious fear of calling a further election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Just noticed LD were wiped out in Wales. When was the last time there was no LibDem/Liberals/Whig MP in Wales? 17th century?

I think the answer is since there were parties...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some of the swings in the south are... unreal.  Like we've all talked about Canterbury - but there's a bunch of other seats with similar increases.  Hove - Tory from until time began most likely until 1997, they regained it from Labour in 2010 before it went back to Labour in 2015) now has a 20,000 majority with a 15% swing from the Conservatives to Labour.  Brighton Kemptown, Tory since 2010 and before 1997 it was only Labour between 1964 and 1970: 10,000 Labour majority, swing of over 10% to Labour.  Portsmouth South - never Labour, Liberal Democrat from 1997 to 2015, Labour's share of the vote is up 20% and there's a 10% swing to Labour there as well.  Its not even just "metropolitan" areas where this is the case but even the rock-solid safe Labour seats - Labour got 17,000 votes of the Isle of bloody Wight - collectively, they and the Greens were only 10,000 votes behind the Tories (in a place that voted quite heavily to leave the EU).  That's the real interesting part of this election in my eyes...

Well in all the really extreme cases these are university constituencies. And for the first time ever really the student vote was mobilised to its actual potential. Which immediately - through sheer weight of numbers - renders the entire previous political history of such places completely irrelevant.

Other than that I think what you saw in many cases was a return from Labour to the sort of performances that it 'ought' to have; recent Labour GE campaigns have really bombed horrifically (like historically bad performances) in much of the south of England. Though its interesting that this was the sort of campaign to crack that problem.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So many of Labour's fundamental problems remain - in particular the inability to win back support from the often volatile Lab/Con swing voters in the Midlands who are legion - but it isn't as if anyone expected them to be fixed for this election. It may be easier now to focus on what might be done to sort that out; particularly as now doing so would = power pretty much immediately.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Percentage majorities in the West Midlands.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I wanted to clarify this:

Is the new government going to be a minority government, or is DUP/will DUP be a part of the government?

Minority with DUP support. Note also that the SNP don't vote on a lot of English domestic legislation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Percentage majorities in Wales.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is anyone up to drawing a net swing map by constituency? I'd be very interested in unpacking the patterns there.

Swing not particularly meaningful this election given the UKIP collapse and the mobilisation of the student vote.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I know Brighton (though I think Hove is still slightly to the right of Brighton), question is where did this increase in voters come from

Student turnout being the same as turnout from everyone else for the first time ever. Same as in other very heavily Uni influenced constituencies.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One thing to note wrt comparing results to last time: you wouldn't think so from the media narrative but under Miliband Labour actually recovered decently in South Yorkshire and the North East, but did not in e.g. the industrial parts of Wales.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

East Midlands

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is anyone up to drawing a net swing map by constituency? I'd be very interested in unpacking the patterns there.

Swing not particularly meaningful this election given the UKIP collapse and the mobilisation of the student vote.

I know that that's likely what we would see in a swing map, but why isn't it interesting to see?

I didn't say it wouldn't be interesting, I said it wouldn't be useful. Different things!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The West Country. Labour were second in two of those close seats in Cornwall. And David Drew is back, somehow.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Champion indeed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, very different. Hastings these days is what might politely be described as a bit of a dive. Pretty clear that the hinterland (which is more your average prosperous Sussex countryside) pulled her over the line, just.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One thing that hardly anyone has noticed or noted anywhere but which I saw happening in my very own constituency* is that Labour has suddenly reclaimed all of those rural working class voters it had been shedding at a deeply alarming rate (and in all directions) these past fifteen years. Because of the electoral system it barely matters in practical terms (though has added a further boost to Labour's national PV total, do note) but it is an interesting development.

_{*Observed far more Labour posters than ones for other parties in the grimmer section of the market towns throughout the campaign. Which always used to be the case but had not been so for quite a while...}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Charles Kennedy's old seat gives the SNP its joint largest majority. Discuss. Also... erm... Coatbridge et al and Glasgow Provan/Springburn for Labour... did the CORBYN IRA CORBYN IRA thing end up having a slightly different effect to that intended?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

hey guys do you think something happened to piss people off in london?!?!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So unless I'm mistaken the bottom graph appears to indicate that Labour won roughly 2:1 vs the Tories among UKIP voters?

Or, was there a massive defection of Tory voters to Labour and the UKIP voters split roughly down the Middle in '17?

Any sense of what's going on there?

Option three: a lot of people who did not vote in 2015 voted in 2017 and voted Labour.

[Filuwaúrdjan]