United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[DL]

The map seems to show Labour winning the Isle of Wight...don't they usually get single digits there and its more of a Tory/Lib Dem marginal

[DL]

is it plausible to think the Tories would win even 6 seats in Scotland when there support is down as much as it is? I know that if you do a strict swing analysis there are some seats that were close SNP/Tory contests last time that would notionally go Tory now because the SNP vote is down even more than than the Tory vote compared to 2019 - but I wonder if that will happen in real life or whether SNP losses will be more in areas where Labour is competitive and they may hold their own in seats where they are the clear tactical anti-Tory choice?

[DL]

I'm a bit mystified at how the Tories still manage to do as well as they do among people 70 and over. Its not as if the Labour Party is some newfangled party that old people have never voted for. Briton who are 70+ are of a generation who likely would have voted in large numbers for Labour in the 70s and 80s and again in the big Blair landslides. So who are the people who consistently voted Labour in the 70s, 80s, 90s and to some extent in the 00s - who are now steadfastly sticking with the Tories under Sunak or else flirting with Reform UK?

[DL]

I'm a bit mystified at how the Tories still manage to do as well as they do among people 70 and over. Its not as if the Labour Party is some newfangled party that old people have never voted for. Briton who are 70+ are of a generation who likely would have voted in large numbers for Labour in the 70s and 80s and again in the big Blair landslides. So who are the people who consistently voted Labour in the 70s, 80s, 90s and to some extent in the 00s - who are now steadfastly sticking with the Tories under Sunak or else flirting with Reform UK?

The normal way to understand age gaps (beyond the classic argument of changing cultures and one party no longer appearing to a voter the same as it once was) is differential turnout. People who enter the electorate ASAP with passion and ideals tend to gravitate towards parties promising those ideals and change. That in many countries means the Left, but in many more with less glamour means the Right.  As the overall electorate ages though, more and more people enter the voter pool and progressively drown out the ideologically committed. And the later you enter the pool, more often the issues that will motivate you align with parties most in tune with your generation. Retired cohorts usually have the highest turnout, meaning new voters who care about retiree issues.


Then there is also the morbid theory that people who worked in the mines, factories, and other strenuous jobs from that time are going to die earlier. Not exactly young, but health complications are going to be more prevalent than commuting for a 9-5 from one's London suburb. Not sure how much weight one should assign to this over other explanations though.

FWIW we don't see quite the same pattern in other Anglo countries - in the US Biden tends to do better among those over 65 than he does among 45-64 year olds. Similarly in Canada about the only groups that still favours the Trudeau Liberals are women over 65!

[DL]

Its also notable that in 1945 Churchill had 81% approval!! then lost the election in a landslide

[DL]

Get your pinches of salt ready…

Constituency polls, carried out by Survation for Plaid Cymru

Ynys Môn

Plaid 39
Lab 27
Con 26
Reform 4
Lib Dem 1

Caerfyrddin

Plaid 30
Con 24
Lab 24
Ind Edwards 10
Lib Dem 4
Reform 4

How does that compare with the results in those seats in the 2019 GE?

[DL]

That is wat's known as a "dead cat bounce"

[DL]

Polling of Reform supporters has found that fewer than 4 in 10 would even consider voting Tory. Usual caveats apply, only more so, but it's not a group that looks like it's that susceptible to tactical squeeze.

Surely there is a core Reform UK vote that is totally racist and would never vote Tory as long as the party is led by a South Asian man...

[DL]

So who do Gen Zers in the UK who are from extremely wealthy aristocratic families who went to places like Eton and hang out in Sloan Square all vote for these days?

[DL]

I find it hard to believe that the Labour vote is down from the last election in Wales, and I’m not exactly convinced that Reform would get the same vote as the Tories if an election was held today either…

https://twitter.com/redfieldwilton/status/1783163993567150556?s=61&t=I1DE8_c...

They are down from the last poll not down from the 2019 election.

[DL]

No, 40% would actually be a (small) fall for Labour from their 2019 GE showing.

The same poll also shows not just Labour slightly improving its Senedd position (both in the direct and list votes) but Gething's personal rating markedly up on their previous survey.

Please make it make sense

What was the popular vote in Wales in the 2019 election?

[DL]

Needless to say if this poll were right and Labour were to win Wales by 22 points compared to winning it by 5 points in 2019 - they would still probably win almost every single seat the Tories currently hold in Wales.

[DL]

Elphicke's defection means the Tory majority is now officially under half what they got in the last GE.

Do we know if she plans to contest Dover as a Labour candidate in the next election? It was already looking to be an easy pickup for Labour and they may even already have a candidate nominated.

[DL]

Apparently there is some controversy within Labour on accepting a defector who was more of a rightwing pro-BoJo type - but if she is not running again - they only need to put up with her for a few months and in the meantime Labour gets the short term good news story about rats deserting the sinking Tory ship.

[DL]

A trio of Scottish polls have been released, each showing an SNP -> Labour swing. Norstat and Savanta both record their first lead for Scottish Labour:

• Savanta: 4% Lab lead
• Norstat: 5% Lab lead
• YouGov: 1% Lab lead

All polling was conducted between the coalition break-up and Swinney assuming office as First Minister, so he may steady the ship and recover a lead. It does appear in line with the medium-term, though:


See here for full details, and links to cross tabs.

Make that a quartet of polls - Redfield and Wilton just released a poll showing Labour leading the SNP 38-31 - needless to say this would give Labour a sh**t load of seats in Scotland and the SNP would lose dozens and dozens

[DL]

I don't know why someone in Scotland would vote for the SNP in the general election. Independence isn't going to happen and you are throwing away your votes to help one of the main parties form a majority. Its like voting third party in the US

I will bring in a Canadian perspective here. From 1993 to 2011, the Bloc Quebecois (sort of the Quebec equivalent of the SNP in Scotland) kept winning about 50 out of 75 Quebec seats in federal elections (there are always about 20 seats they can never win because they have too many non-Francophones in the them). But by 2011 people in Quebec became susceptible to the argument that electing do-nothing BQ MPs at the federal level was a waste - it was not advancing the cause of Quebec sovereignty and it was also disempowering Quebec in the federal government by having MPs that would be in perpetuel opposition - so in 2011 the BQ crashed from 52 seats to just 4 seats and they did almost as badly in 2015 when Trudeau swept Quebec and people wanted to get rid of the Tories.

All of which is to say that when people in Scotland vote in the national election this year and there is a wave of revulsion at the Tories and a desire for a change of government - I strongly suspect that a lot of Scots are going to want to jump on the Labour bandwagon and have seats at the table in the new government as opposed to electing a bunch of useless do-nothing SNP opposition backbenchers. If I was a Scot and supported independence, I'd happily vote SNP in Holyrood elections and I'd happily vote Yes in a referendum on independence - but in a Westminster election I think I'd vote Labour since that's who I want running the UK when the only other choice is the Tories.  Its not like there is no history of Scotland voting Labour - there was lots of support for independence in the 90s and 00s - but in 1997 when Scots had a chance to help dump the Tories, they elected almost nothing but Labour MPs. Why couldn't it happen again?

[DL]

If Labour were to beat the SNP by that big a margin in the popular vote I’m
Guessing they’d win the vast majority of seats in Scotland

[DL]

I wonder if there will come a point in the campaign where everyone knows Labour will win in a huge landslide and then the Tory "save the furniture" campaign boils down do "re-elect so and so in order to have a viable opposition at Westminster"...that might save a few Tories who might have some residual personal popularity

[DL]

When polling shows a huge landslide for any party - the final results almost always end up being a bit closer. I think that's because when (in this case) Tory support is that low you have a lot of traditional lifelong Tories who are parked in DK or with Reform and when push comes to shove some of them will go back to their traditional home when their "political DNA" reasserts itself. This won't change the outcome much but even in 1997 you may recall that the polls had the Tories doing even worse than their final vote share ended up being.  

I was actually looking back at the polling in 1997 - in the end Labour won the national popular vote by only 12 points but that was enough to get them 418 seats and a huge majority. The Labour vote did erode in the polls over the course of the campaign - but it was mostly lost to the Lib Dems not to the Tories. I suspect that many Labour voters in "blue wall" type seats voted tactically for the Lib Dems in the end

[DL]

This doesn't always happen (see Canada in 1993 and 2011, and BC in 2001!!!) -- the assumption that it will seems hard baked in the United Kingdom of Because Tradition and Supermarket Tabloids.

Funny you should mention BC in 2001. As I recall the NDP was polling in the mid teens during the campaign and the BC Liberals were over 60% - but when the votes were counted the BC Liberals beat the NDP 58% to 22% - a crushing defeat to be sure, but 22% is higher than the 17% the polls were predicting.

I don't want to overstate my theory. I suspect the polls will be largely accurate but if the "poll of polls" has the Tories getting 23% - look for them to get a "dead cat bounce" to 25%

[DL]

Another reason the Tories may do a bit better than the polls say is that they still will have hundreds of MPs running for reelection each with some semblance of a local organization to identify votes. Reform UK is non-existent on the ground

[DL]

Other news of the evening - Abbott has attended a small protest in her honour, and promised to be a candidate “no matter what”. Which feels like we’re edging towards the Labour rule book again…

Probably going to end up joining Corbyn in the left-and-long-serving independent's corner.

Who is more likely to win running as an independent? Corbyn or Abbott?