Local election uncertainty as early results show heavy Tory losses

Good morning. People have spoken, but it is still not entirely clear what they said. Most votes in local elections are still counted and we still only have a partial picture. What we can say is that the evening was very bad for the Conservative Party. What is less clear is what this means for everyone. Some more thoughts on this in today’s note.

Something’s going on but we don’t know what it is

When Greg Hands took office as chairman of the Conservative Party, the election he told aides they should be thinking about was 2015: a narrow majority, won in defiance of the polls.

Part of that was simply a matter of good stewardship: Tory triumphs in 1992 and 2015 are part of the party’s internal mythos and they lift Tory morale whenever things look bleak.

But one important commonality between these elections is that while they were surprising given the state of the opinion polls, they weren’t so surprising given the state of the parties in the local elections that took place last month. last year. In 1991 Neil Kinnock’s Labor Party was only three points ahead of John Major’s Conservatives. In 2014, that of Ed Miliband was only two points ahead.

Although there are many, many, a lot results yet to come, one thing we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the Conservative Party is doing much worse than it was in 1991 or 2014.

The Conservatives’ performance so far is not what a ruling party had hoped for in a surprise election victory a year from now. But Labor’s performance is not what an opposition party hoping to win an election hopes either.

Both sides can expect to do better than that in absolute terms. The party in power, whatever the circumstances, tends to recover some of the ground lost in the run-up to a general election. This is one of the strongest conclusions in political science, although we don’t know as much why we’d like.

And Labor tends to do better in general elections than in local elections, while the Liberal Democrats tend to do slightly worse. I think there is a fairly obvious explanation for this: Labour, the largest party, is the challenger to the Conservatives in many other seats in the first-past-the-post system at Westminster and, as a result, snatches more tactical votes to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats do the same, but they are the Conservative challenger in far fewer seats.

Looking at the results we have so far, if the Green Party vote behaves much the same as the Liberal Democrat vote, it has been a very good run of elections for the Labor Party. But I don’t know if Green Party voters will behave the same as Liberal Democrat voters: none of us do!

From traveling across the country talking to people and asking for election leaflets everywhere I go (and the many leaflets that Inside politics readers have helpfully emailed me), it’s pretty clear that the Green Party is borrowing heavily from the Liberal Democrats’ playbook in terms of on-the-ground campaign materials. Meeting these voters I would say they are a lot overall, with the important caveat that the more committed Liberal Democrat voters I have met tend to have a negative view of Jeremy Corbyn and Green voters a positive view. .

But in the air war on TV and radio, Liberal Democrat politicians seem much friendlier to Labor (and vice versa) than Green politicians to Labor (and again, vice versa). This will surely have an effect on the behavior of voters.

What we can say from these results so far is that the Conservative Party is not where it would like to be to win a 1992-style victory, and the Labor Party is not where it would like to be as far as the question of winning a parliamentary majority is concerned.

My feeling, just looking at the results we have so far, is that we are headed for a result that looks a bit like the 2010 general election.

But I’ll have a lot more to say about that next week, when we should know a lot more about those results than this morning.

Now or never?

A brief methodological note. As I’ve said before, the numbers that really matter in understanding this election are the ones that will be spewed out by the political scientists at the BBC and Sky: those that simulate what the results would have been like if the vote had taken place across all the countries.

The BBC team produces the PNS – Projected National Share – while for Sky and the Sunday Times we have the NEV – National Equivalent Vote. Now, these metrics generate slightly different numbers from each other, although none have been consistently better or worse. As of this writing, they produce quite different scores.

What is the reason for the discrepancy? Well, because neither team’s calculations are based on the 8,000 seats up for grabs. They sample them, and sometimes it produces quite different results.

Since both numbers are perfectly reasonable, my advice to readers post-election is to pick the one that makes you happiest and have the best weekend possible.

Now try this

I spent the early morning hours at the BBC as part of its radio coverage of the election. (Apologies to those of you who were listening, for whom much of this email will cover similar ground.)

Before that, I had a lovely evening listening to the Attacca Quartet at Kings Place yesterday. They played a wonderfully eclectic ensemble of old and new music: string quartets by Maurice Ravel and John Adams, a wonderful composition by Caroline Shaw and pieces from their CD Real life. Kings Square “Sound Unwrapped” program is really very wonderful. The quartet’s music is available to try wherever you stream or listen.

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