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old_labour

First and a belated Happy Christmas!

rcs1000

Hats off to Opinium, they were absolutely spot on.

Fishing

Yes, the polling industry did reasonably well this time.

And a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Fishing

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

squareroot2

I am all for looking back at the GE, remembering that Corbyn and his ilk were absolutely thrashed, the memory of Corbyn walking from the HOC to the HOL looking like he was chewing tacks will reside for ever in my memory.
Looking forward, I hope that the likes of Jonathan can take back hold of the Labour party so we can have some sensible and much needed opposition to Boris.

Morris_Dancer

Good morning, everyone.

Aye, it was a strikingly good job by the pollsters.

isam

The polls during the GE campaign were accurate. The pre campaign polls underestimated the big two at the expense of the Lib Dems and Brexit Party. It seems the big beasts always firm up their vote during the campaign, happened in 2015 and 2017 too

Sandpit

Well done to the pollsters, and double thanks to all those who were on Betfair convinced they were wrong!

TOPPING

Where it was obvious that the polls were accurate this time was when you looked at the overlaid 2019 vs 2017 run up to election poll results as shown in Electoral Calculus. In 2017 they kept converging, in 2019 they clearly began to diverge.

Mortimer

Great first ball from Anderson - good on him!

ydoethur

I wonder where Justin is. He hasn’t been on recently to tell us that there’s always swing back to the opposition in general election campaigns.

Alistair

Story that is getting almost zero play in America

https://twitter.com/NYMag/status/1209608450193444871?s=19

Obligatory "imagine if he was a Muslim" comment goes here.

DecrepiterJohnL

Alistair said:

Story that is getting almost zero play in America

https://twitter.com/NYMag/status/1209608450193444871?s=19

Obligatory "imagine if he was a Muslim" comment goes here.

Imagine if he were a Democrat.

matt

ydoethur said:

I wonder where Justin is. He hasn’t been on recently to tell us that there’s always swing back to the opposition in general election campaigns.

Working for his freedom.

alex_

It seems to me that the big flaw in the run up to this election was not in the polling but in the modelling. Quite simply, the scale of tactical voting built into the base (2017) figures was not app

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Alistair said:

Story that is getting almost zero play in America

https://twitter.com/NYMag/status/1209608450193444871?s=19

Obligatory "imagine if he was a Muslim" comment goes here.

Imagine if he were a Democrat.

What about this!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50786368

DavidL

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

Philip_Thompson

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

ydoethur

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

isam

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

Politically engaged people are surely the worst to have on panels, for the reasons you give. They are too aware of what is going on in the bubble

ydoethur

isam said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

Politically engaged people are surely the worst to have on panels, for the reasons you give. They are too aware of what is going on in the bubble

But here is the paradox. How do you get politically un engaged people to engage in the ultimate geeky political activity?

DavidL

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Fysics_Teacher

ydoethur said:

isam said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

Politically engaged people are surely the worst to have on panels, for the reasons you give. They are too aware of what is going on in the bubble

But here is the paradox. How do you get politically un engaged people to engage in the ultimate geeky political activity?

Pay them?

isam

ydoethur said:

isam said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

Politically engaged people are surely the worst to have on panels, for the reasons you give. They are too aware of what is going on in the bubble

But here is the paradox. How do you get politically un engaged people to engage in the ultimate geeky political activity?

My idea was to ask supplementary questions designed to find out the respondents level of political engagement, and downweight those who follow it (watch Newnsight, follow several politicans on social media)/upweight those who dont

ydoethur

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

DecrepiterJohnL

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

kinabalu

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Yes. A false narrative is taking hold and should be nipped in the bud. The election was more won by Johnson than it was lost by Corbyn. He framed and timed the contest perfectly and then his persona - which appeals strongly to apoliticals and to WWC sensibilities - allowed people in Labour heartlands to think of themselves as voting not Tory but for "Boris" and of course his Brexit. May tried this strategy in 2017 and it did not work. This time it did - in spades. And TBH the outcome was obvious from the outset. This was the easiest election to call since 2005.

HYUFD

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

Yougov should just have kept their first MRP and not put out a second, the same in 2017 where again the first Yougov MRP was more accurate than the second

Theuniondivvie

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

HYUFD

So Opinium and Ipsos Mori now the new Gold Standard pollsters, overtaking Survation.

Kantar was also close to the final result, though it had the LDs a bit higher than they got

DavidL

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

DavidL

Broad and Anderson back on the board. All is right with the world.

Morris_Dancer

Any word on what topped the TV ratings or do we need to wait a bit to find out?

ydoethur

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

No it isn’t. I said people recognised him, due to his previous media work. That’s entirely separate from his skill as a campaigner.

Sandpit

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

The Conservative social media campaign in the last fortnight was extensive and varied, with thousands of different messages trailed to guage responses before the last week’s onslaught.

The team behind it included several that had been involved in Vote Leave, and what’s absolutely certain is that almost none of the messages were targeted at people living in London, engaged in politics and with Twitter accounts - so the Commentariat won’t have had a clue what was actually happening in the rest of the country.

HYUFD

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

Despite the poor LD campaign, more Labour voters went LD than Tory, given Labour were down 8% on 2017, the LDs up 4% and the Tories up only a little more than 1%

Wulfrun_Phil

Given the resources that YouGov put in to their polling, I'm surprised that their final polling ended earlier than most other companies. They have been a bit vague about the effective dates of their polling within the broad 4-10 Dec period used for the much bigger sample in their MRP, other to say that they weighted towards the back end. It isn't really an excuse to say that there might have been a late swing, when it was perfectly within their capabilities to conduct a final poll over 10-11 Dec.

Opinium deserve a lot of credit because they were clearly an outlier for most of the election period, yet they were confident in their method and stuck by it rather than succumb to herding by making methodology changes. For example they continued with a far tougher question filter based on electoral registration/eligibility to vote than did other pollsters.

DavidL

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

No it isn’t. I said people recognised him, due to his previous media work. That’s entirely separate from his skill as a campaigner.

One feeds the other. The love actually video was inspired.

ydoethur

HYUFD said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

Despite the poor LD campaign, more Labour voters went LD than Tory, given Labour were down 7% on 2017, the LDs up 4% and the Tories up only a little more than 1%

Although of course there may have been churn within those figures - almost certainly was, given where the votes were.

Wulfrun_Phil

isam said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

Politically engaged people are surely the worst to have on panels, for the reasons you give. They are too aware of what is going on in the bubble

It shouldn't be a problem as since 2015 they have asked questions to establish the level of political engagement and filter their panel quotas/weighting accordingly.

MaxPB

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

MJW

isam said:

The polls during the GE campaign were accurate. The pre campaign polls underestimated the big two at the expense of the Lib Dems and Brexit Party. It seems the big beasts always firm up their vote during the campaign, happened in 2015 and 2017 too

This hasn't always happened. And didn't in 2015 when the Lib Dems were polling appallingly, and from memory, the big question was whether they'd do better than polling suggested thanks to incumbency and the coalition being less toxic where they had most of their seats.

I'd suggest the two party squeeze in 2017 and 2019 is a product of several factors - firstly the Lib Dems being so far back in seats the 'Cleggmania' dynamic where a Lib Dem leader becomes seen as a potential PM or at least a real player just wasn't open to them. Most importantly, Brexit and dislike of the big two's leaders meaning disgruntled their disgruntled voters held their nose and returned. For Tory remainers it was a 'Stop Corbyn' election, for moderate Labour remainers it was 'stop Brexit, stop Boris'. One worry Labour should have is that if they get their choice of leader wrong, the latter two dynamics will have vanished - if they're miles behind in the polls and looking useless still, moderates can look to punish them safe in the knowledge that they're not responsible for putting the hated Tories in, because they're hammering Labour anyway. More positively for the Lib Dems, disgruntled Tories won't fear even a pretty useless leader as much as Corbyn, and if it looks like they're comfortable, many may feel they can give the government a kick and keep them honest by defecting.

isam

Wulfrun_Phil said:

isam said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

Politically engaged people are surely the worst to have on panels, for the reasons you give. They are too aware of what is going on in the bubble

It shouldn't be a problem as since 2015 they have asked questions to establish the level of political engagement and filter their panel quotas/weighting accordingly.

Oh goodo, I think that's what they should do

ydoethur

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

No it isn’t. I said people recognised him, due to his previous media work. That’s entirely separate from his skill as a campaigner.

One feeds the other. The love actually video was inspired...

...by a Labour candidate doing the same thing.

ydoethur

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

A gentle reminder that people said the same thing about Corbyn after 2017.

DecrepiterJohnL

Sandpit said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

The Conservative social media campaign in the last fortnight was extensive and varied, with thousands of different messages trailed to guage responses before the last week’s onslaught.

The team behind it included several that had been involved in Vote Leave, and what’s absolutely certain is that almost none of the messages were targeted at people living in London, engaged in politics and with Twitter accounts - so the Commentariat won’t have had a clue what was actually happening in the rest of the country.

You are right that the pundits did not have a clue what was being said up north on social media, and nor did political opponents. This imo is dangerous for democracy because there can be no debate. Plaid Cymru cannot deny it plans to outlaw the English language if it does not even realise the allegation is being made.

And what little we have been told is that untrue claims were being made.

malcolmg

Philip_Thompson said:

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

We will be independent before they ever need to help Labour into office.

DavidL

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

The Tory vote held up surprisingly well post Ruth who completely dominated the campaign up here in 2017 (May not really being allowed in the country). The problem was the increasing consolidation of the ex Labour vote by the SNP. The SNP grip on the central belt is as great as it was by Labour for the previous 25 years and I struggle to see how that is going to change.

NorthernPowerhouse

Sandpit said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

The Conservative social media campaign in the last fortnight was extensive and varied, with thousands of different messages trailed to guage responses before the last week’s onslaught.

The team behind it included several that had been involved in Vote Leave, and what’s absolutely certain is that almost none of the messages were targeted at people living in London, engaged in politics and with Twitter accounts - so the Commentariat won’t have had a clue what was actually happening in the rest of the country.

Not that any of this is underhanded. It’s modern campaigning, but I think a stage might be reached in which a record needs to be kept of all promoted posts which are open for inspection like current financial election returns are.

It’s not unreasonable for there to be accountability for those adverts. Micro targeting has the potential for some reprehensible messages been spread that might never get wider circulation.

DecrepiterJohnL

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

Boris gained only a third of a million votes more than Theresa May. Labour dropped nearly three million. That's the difference.

DavidL

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

He’s built an entire career on being underestimated. It’s his secret weapon and he’s going to do his best to keep it.

Luckyguy1983

malcolmg said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

We will be independent before they ever need to help Labour into office.

Hopefully that's true, but not in the way you intend.

Happy boxing, day everyone!

NorthernPowerhouse

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

It was repeatedly said on here... “you all thought Boris would be the star campaigner, and he’s as bad as May”

kle4

Fishing said:

Yes, the polling industry did reasonably well this time.

And a stopped clock is right twice a day.

True story, I was gifted yesterday one of those 24 hour clocks which only does one pass a day, so sadly if it should stop working it will only be right once a day.

malcolmg

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

That is because we are nasty nationalists , too stupid and too wee to understand his big joined up words.

DavidL

DecrepiterJohnL said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

Boris gained only a third of a million votes more than Theresa May. Labour dropped nearly three million. That's the difference.

Boris increased the Tory vote for the 6th election in a row, consolidating all that had been done before and reaching out to new voters in the midlands and the north. That’s the difference.

MattW

HYUFD said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

Despite the poor LD campaign, more Labour voters went LD than Tory, given Labour were down 8% on 2017, the LDs up 4% and the Tories up only a little more than 1%

Is there a map of falls in the Lab vote anywhere?

kle4

alex_ said:

It seems to me that the big flaw in the run up to this election was not in the polling but in the modelling. Quite simply, the scale of tactical voting built into the base (2017) figures was not app

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Alistair said:

Story that is getting almost zero play in America

https://twitter.com/NYMag/status/1209608450193444871?s=19

Obligatory "imagine if he was a Muslim" comment goes here.

Imagine if he were a Democrat.

What about this!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50786368

They're not kings, I don't see why they even have the ability to offer pardons.

malcolmg

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

No it isn’t. I said people recognised him, due to his previous media work. That’s entirely separate from his skill as a campaigner.

One feeds the other. The love actually video was inspired.

Like everything else , he had to steal it from someone else. Like London when he came up against an aged commie on the downslide, his luck held again and he came up against an old commie at bottom of slide. I could have beat Corbyn.

MaxPB

ydoethur said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

A gentle reminder that people said the same thing about Corbyn after 2017.

Except that Jez hadn't and still hasn't won anything of worth. Rubbish.

malcolmg

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

kle4

malcolmg said:

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

That is because we are nasty nationalists , too stupid and too wee to understand his big joined up words.

Boy, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future passed on a really strange message to you yesterday if that is the outcome - I'd ignore them.

ydoethur

DecrepiterJohnL said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

Boris gained only a third of a million votes more than Theresa May. Labour dropped nearly three million. That's the difference.

Ever since 2017 I have been saying that the next election would be won by the party that kept more of its voters than its rival.

Turns out I wasn’t quite correct, but the basic thrust was accurate.

DecrepiterJohnL

DavidL said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

Boris gained only a third of a million votes more than Theresa May. Labour dropped nearly three million. That's the difference.

Boris increased the Tory vote for the 6th election in a row, consolidating all that had been done before and reaching out to new voters in the midlands and the north. That’s the difference.

Barely, and by far less than the much-derided Theresa May.

NorthernPowerhouse

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

As he ever really failed at anything he has ever attempted (with the exception of fidelity, and I doubt he really tried), though he has been fired a few times ?

Mp first time of trying, mayor of London first time of trying, win referendum first time of trying, becomes leader of con party second time after prematurely pulling out first time (a habit he doesn’t seem to have in his personal life), now PM.

There’s only on word to describe someone who carries on underestimating a person who repeatedly succeeds. Foolish.

kle4

NorthernPowerhouse said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

It was repeatedly said on here... “you all thought Boris would be the star campaigner, and he’s as bad as May”

I dont know what you are talking about. *cough*

NorthernPowerhouse

kle4 said:

NorthernPowerhouse said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

It was repeatedly said on here... “you all thought Boris would be the star campaigner, and he’s as bad as May”

I dont know what you are talking about. *cough*

We are many a PB-Bedwetter on here.

DavidL

malcolmg said:

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

That is because we are nasty nationalists , too stupid and too wee to understand his big joined up words.

Nonsense. The SNP performance was not up to 2015 standards but it was impressive enough. It’s the strategic implications of SLABs collapse that worries me as a unionist. They were the backbone of Better Together. Although the Tories are much stronger than they were then they will never reach deep into Glasgow and it’s environs. A lot of people and territory are becoming solid SNP.

kle4

malcolmg said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

We will be independent before they ever need to help Labour into office.

Could be an aggravatingly slow process, you never know.

But it does seem 2015 was the beginning of the end- it made it so much easier for the tories to be largest party, which just helps sindy cause more.

malcolmg

kinabalu said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Yes. A false narrative is taking hold and should be nipped in the bud. The election was more won by Johnson than it was lost by Corbyn. He framed and timed the contest perfectly and then his persona - which appeals strongly to apoliticals and to WWC sensibilities - allowed people in Labour heartlands to think of themselves as voting not Tory but for "Boris" and of course his Brexit. May tried this strategy in 2017 and it did not work. This time it did - in spades. And TBH the outcome was obvious from the outset. This was the easiest election to call since 2005.

Take off those blue tinted specs, that is the biggest amount of bollox I have read on here in a week or so. You could have picked anyone randomly and they would have beaten Corbyn, it was pure luck.

MaxPB

DecrepiterJohnL said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

Boris gained only a third of a million votes more than Theresa May. Labour dropped nearly three million. That's the difference.

From an already high base. Everyone expected the con vote share and absolute number of votes to go down, significantly. Even I was calling the polls putting us at 45% too high, but that's where we ended up.

Theresa may made Jez look like a reasonable alternative, such was her crapness. It allowed a lot of the non Tory vote coalesce around him. Boris showed that Jez wasn't, and the Labour voter coalition fell apart.

ydoethur

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

A gentle reminder that people said the same thing about Corbyn after 2017.

Except that Jez hadn't and still hasn't won anything of worth. Rubbish.

I dunno. He won the Labour leadership, and his followers keep telling me he won the 2017 election and all the arguments in 2019.

nunu2

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

On your first point, the tories missed out on a bunch of so called "red wall" seats in the north and Midlands by very close margins. I suspect Brexit party did cost them a few seats, especially in the midlands, because there it is clear in Dudley North for example the BXP vote would of gone Tory. Also some of Labour's majority in these seats were so big they really are take two elections to fall.

On Yougov, their first MRP had the Tories in 359 seats and was much more accurate then the second release. But their MRP only uses YouGov polls, so if that is wrong the MRP will be wrong.

nunu2

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

I'd prefer they keep underestimating him. I rather like Boris.

MaxPB

ydoethur said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

A gentle reminder that people said the same thing about Corbyn after 2017.

Except that Jez hadn't and still hasn't won anything of worth. Rubbish.

I dunno. He won the Labour leadership, and his followers keep telling me he won the 2017 election and all the arguments in 2019.

Yes well, if you want to listen to delusional types then that's where you're going wrong. 😅

isam

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

That is a false premise, she wasn't an abject failure in getting people to vote for her in General Elections

kle4

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

She wasnt an abject failure that's why, not in terms of winning votes. Unfortunately for her she was an abject failure in securing a sufficient lead and that is rightly more important, but that doesnt mean everything she ever touched was terrible and a failure.

It's like with Corbyn- it was a terrible result and his acolytes sharing his vote shares or total votes are missing the most vital point, but his getting to 40 in 2017 is still a thing even though it was a loss.

malcolmg

kle4 said:

malcolmg said:

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

That is because we are nasty nationalists , too stupid and too wee to understand his big joined up words.

Boy, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future passed on a really strange message to you yesterday if that is the outcome - I'd ignore them.

Bah Humbug , I am still sore and suffering so not in mood for any mince. I shall be grumpy all day.

nunu2

Wulfrun_Phil said:

Given the resources that YouGov put in to their polling, I'm surprised that their final polling ended earlier than most other companies. They have been a bit vague about the effective dates of their polling within the broad 4-10 Dec period used for the much bigger sample in their MRP, other to say that they weighted towards the back end. It isn't really an excuse to say that there might have been a late swing, when it was perfectly within their capabilities to conduct a final poll over 10-11 Dec.

Opinium deserve a lot of credit because they were clearly an outlier for most of the election period, yet they were confident in their method and stuck by it rather than succumb to herding by making methodology changes. For example they continued with a far tougher question filter based on electoral registration/eligibility to vote than did other pollsters.

Perhaps YouGoV didnt trust themselves not to herd in their final poll! 😂

malcolmg

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

That is because we are nasty nationalists , too stupid and too wee to understand his big joined up words.

Nonsense. The SNP performance was not up to 2015 standards but it was impressive enough. It’s the strategic implications of SLABs collapse that worries me as a unionist. They were the backbone of Better Together. Although the Tories are much stronger than they were then they will never reach deep into Glasgow and it’s environs. A lot of people and territory are becoming solid SNP.

We will be the better for it David but the last thing we need is for them to end up like Labour. We need the boil lanced sooner rather than later and then get some real Scottish opposition parties.

Wulfrun_Phil

Luckyguy1983 said:

malcolmg said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

We will be independent before they ever need to help Labour into office.

Hopefully that's true, but not in the way you intend.

Happy boxing, day everyone!

The political vocabulary around Scottish secession is looking pretty outdated now. By the end of 2020, Scots will be living in a fully independent country as will the English, Welsh and N Irish.

felix

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Sandpit said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

The Conservative social media campaign in the last fortnight was extensive and varied, with thousands of different messages trailed to guage responses before the last week’s onslaught.

The team behind it included several that had been involved in Vote Leave, and what’s absolutely certain is that almost none of the messages were targeted at people living in London, engaged in politics and with Twitter accounts - so the Commentariat won’t have had a clue what was actually happening in the rest of the country.

You are right that the pundits did not have a clue what was being said up north on social media, and nor did political opponents. This imo is dangerous for democracy because there can be no debate. Plaid Cymru cannot deny it plans to outlaw the English language if it does not even realise the allegation is being made.

And what little we have been told is that untrue claims were being made.

I agree it was very striking just like all the crap about queues in Battersea on polling day while ignoring the rest of the country. Second biggest losers on the day were the metropolitan chatterati who continue to arrogantly sneer at the rest of the country and were given a well deserved kicking for their pains.

malcolmg

Wulfrun_Phil said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

malcolmg said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

We will be independent before they ever need to help Labour into office.

Hopefully that's true, but not in the way you intend.

Happy boxing, day everyone!

The political vocabulary around Scottish secession is looking pretty outdated now. By the end of 2020, Scots will be living in a fully independent country as will the English, Welsh and N Irish.

Numpty

Theuniondivvie

DavidL said:

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

It is also very striking to consider that’s the highest Tory voteshare since 1979 (43.6% vs 43.9%). In an age where there are several parties fighting for votes and the nationwide demos is fractured, that’s quite an achievement.

As for your second point, I think Yougov will reflect that their first MRP (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/key-findings-our-mrp) was astonishingly accurate - they got within six seats for the Tories, ten for Labour, five for the SNP and one for the Liberal Democrats. They also got the vote shares bang on. However, they may wish to reflect on why their model when updated became less accurate. My guess would be that politically engaged people (who are the majority on YouGov’s panels) started changing their views, but the majority of voters (who are not on voting panels) did not.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

The Tory vote held up surprisingly well post Ruth who completely dominated the campaign up here in 2017 (May not really being allowed in the country). The problem was the increasing consolidation of the ex Labour vote by the SNP. The SNP grip on the central belt is as great as it was by Labour for the previous 25 years and I struggle to see how that is going to change.

Not immensely surprising, you just swapped the centrist 'progressives' temporarily picked up by Ruth for Kippers, TBPers, LOLers etc; Brexit and the Union (now inextricably linked in Scotland) inspired them, not BJ.

ydoethur

malcolmg said:

Wulfrun_Phil said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

malcolmg said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Fishing said:

Somewhat off-topic, I've noticed that the current boundaries with the present distribution of votes do not seem to advantage either the Conservatives or Labour.

If you Baxter a hypothetical result by redistributing the share of the vote between Conservatives and Labour, keeping the other parties as they are, the crossover in the number of seats occurs roughly when you allocate equal votes to each party, i.e., because the GE result is based on a Conservative lead of 12 points, to get a roughly equal number of seats, you need to assume a six point Tory-Labour swing. On the proposed boundaries, however, you need to assume a more than seven point swing to reach crossover in seats.

In other words, the new boundaries are worth a couple of percentage points in vote share to the Conservatives, cet. par.

That's because of Scotland. Formerly Labour seats now are SNP seats but the SNP will never support the Conservatives and will support Labour into office.

We will be independent before they ever need to help Labour into office.

Hopefully that's true, but not in the way you intend.

Happy boxing, day everyone!

The political vocabulary around Scottish secession is looking pretty outdated now. By the end of 2020, Scots will be living in a fully independent country as will the English, Welsh and N Irish.

Numpty

Morning Malcolm, hope the turnips are thriving.

Anyway, I am off for a drive.

DavidL

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

Well one lost a small majority and one won a large one. Some might say May was unlucky with the distribution and efficiency of her vote but I think the difference is that May appealed greatly to Tories and was deeply unattractive to everyone else. Boris can reach beyond the Tory natural support, even if traditional Tories will never love or trust him like they did May. He’s not one of them and they know it. A latter day Disraeli in many ways.

nunu2

alex_ said:

It seems to me that the big flaw in the run up to this election was not in the polling but in the modelling. Quite simply, the scale of tactical voting built into the base (2017) figures was not app

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Alistair said:

Story that is getting almost zero play in America

https://twitter.com/NYMag/status/1209608450193444871?s=19

Obligatory "imagine if he was a Muslim" comment goes here.

Imagine if he were a Democrat.

What about this!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50786368

How corrupt can you get.

isam

felix said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Sandpit said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

The Conservative social media campaign in the last fortnight was extensive and varied, with thousands of different messages trailed to guage responses before the last week’s onslaught.

The team behind it included several that had been involved in Vote Leave, and what’s absolutely certain is that almost none of the messages were targeted at people living in London, engaged in politics and with Twitter accounts - so the Commentariat won’t have had a clue what was actually happening in the rest of the country.

You are right that the pundits did not have a clue what was being said up north on social media, and nor did political opponents. This imo is dangerous for democracy because there can be no debate. Plaid Cymru cannot deny it plans to outlaw the English language if it does not even realise the allegation is being made.

And what little we have been told is that untrue claims were being made.

I agree it was very striking just like all the crap about queues in Battersea on polling day while ignoring the rest of the country. Second biggest losers on the day were the metropolitan chatterati who continue to arrogantly sneer at the rest of the country and were given a well deserved kicking for their pains.

Lefty remainers drooling over lefty remainers taking pictures of loads of people who agree with them both and plastering them all over social media, while the conservative leavers just voted and went home

felix

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

MaxPB said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

I disagree. Looked at with a cold eye, his campaign was in many ways comparable to Theresa May’s. The same shyness, the same erratic targeting, the same inability to connect leading to a series of gaffes. He had two advantages, however:

1) He had - has - extraordinary name recognition. People who are not interested in politics and don’t care who the PM is recognise him and know about him. Like Charlie Kennedy but much more so. This allowed to cut through and get publicity wherever and whatever he did;

2) Learning from Theresa May’s ghastly mistakes, he and his team put forward few policies, and those they did were quite vague. That meant people who were reluctant to vote Tory had however no particular reason to vote Labour instead, especially when they were led by an antisemitic apologist for terrorism with a dodgy record on child protection and tax affairs. The striking story of this election was the dissipation of the anti-Tory vote to the Yellows, Oranges, Light Blues, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Much of this vote was strikingly inefficient. How else do we account for the Liberal Democrats getting 1.3m more votes and yet one fewer seat?

So what he did was adequate. Not good, necessarily.

But up against Corbyn, who was again utterly woeful, it didn’t need to be.

No, you're fitting a preferred narrative onto the election starting from a base of wanting Boris to be crap.

He had a pretty good campaign. Everyone keeps saying he's very lucky, but he's now won pretty much everything he's campaigned form at some point his haters will need to stop underestimating him or they will keep losing.

Boris gained only a third of a million votes more than Theresa May. Labour dropped nearly three million. That's the difference.

Boris increased the Tory vote for the 6th election in a row, consolidating all that had been done before and reaching out to new voters in the midlands and the north. That’s the difference.

Barely, and by far less than the much-derided Theresa May.

surely the truth is the tory vote increased most where it led to big gains in the north and midlands while being flat or falling a little elsewhere where it led to one loss in battersea and some smaller majorities in a few seats. Hence a pretty efficient vote distribution.

Theuniondivvie

Wasn't someone advising a bet on Xmas day ratings? Thought G&S was pretty gash myself.

https://twitter.com/superTV247/status/1210143126175784965?s=20

Edit: the full results.

https://twitter.com/superTV247/status/1210143943884705792?s=20

Sandpit

NorthernPowerhouse said:

Sandpit said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

In fact, the Conservative Party polled not much better than in 2017: 44.7 up from 43.4%. The difference is Labour dropped a full eight points: 33.0 down from 41.0% two years ago.

The story of 2019 is not that Boris is a vote magnet. Theresa May did almost as well with just 330,000 fewer votes. It is either that Labour actively repelled voters, and I posted several times that their campaign promises were so obviously counter-productive they might almost have been designed by a Tory mole, or it is that CCHQ's under-the-radar social media campaigning was highly effective.

The full extent of that latter campaign has yet to be revealed.

The Conservative social media campaign in the last fortnight was extensive and varied, with thousands of different messages trailed to guage responses before the last week’s onslaught.

The team behind it included several that had been involved in Vote Leave, and what’s absolutely certain is that almost none of the messages were targeted at people living in London, engaged in politics and with Twitter accounts - so the Commentariat won’t have had a clue what was actually happening in the rest of the country.

Not that any of this is underhanded. It’s modern campaigning, but I think a stage might be reached in which a record needs to be kept of all promoted posts which are open for inspection like current financial election returns are.

It’s not unreasonable for there to be accountability for those adverts. Micro targeting has the potential for some reprehensible messages been spread that might never get wider circulation.

Yes I agree, all ads used should form part of the electoral returns by each party, whether online, on leaflets, posters or billboards.

As I may have said before, the US election next year is going to be an absolute sh!t-show of fake and unattributed online ads, with Facebook and Google right in the middle of it. The more disjointed campaign group structure over there also gives the candidate plausible deniability about things that are ostensibly said in their name.

No matter who wins and loses in the US next year, those two companies are going to come under massive scrutiny for how they accept political ads - remember that the social media companies are being paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the advertising.

MaxPB

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

Well one lost a small majority and one won a large one. Some might say May was unlucky with the distribution and efficiency of her vote but I think the difference is that May appealed greatly to Tories and was deeply unattractive to everyone else. Boris can reach beyond the Tory natural support, even if traditional Tories will never love or trust him like they did May. He’s not one of them and they know it. A latter day Disraeli in many ways.

Tbh, by the time May was kicked out I wasn't sure she was actually a Tory. Most of her policies were Labour police state or recycled SDP rubbish.

kinabalu

malcolmg said:

Take off those blue tinted specs, that is the biggest amount of bollox I have read on here in a week or so. You could have picked anyone randomly and they would have beaten Corbyn, it was pure luck.

Anyone who managed to frame the GE as "Get Brexit Done" and consolidate the Leave vote would have smashed it. Big FPTP majority nailed on. He did both those things. How much was dumb luck versus how much was political skill and the appeal of his persona? Of course we can debate that. But on the whole I'm inclined to give him most of the credit. Dislike doing it, mind, but I feel I have to.

squareroot2

in the 2017GE Corbyn had the advantage of being relatively unknown, but by the time of the 2019GE he was a known(and really disliked) with a load of ludicrously unaffordable policies.. that's why Labour lost. They weren't singing "there's only one Jeremy Corbyn"...

DavidL

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

Theuniondivvie said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The table brings home that the Tories got within 0.1% of Labour and the Lib Dem’s put together. A truly remarkable achievement and one that really should have produced an even bigger majority than it did.

On the pollsters I think that Yougov must be particularly disappointed. They threw a lot of resource at this election and they set the story line for a chunk of it, possibly inaccurately. I wonder if it was ever as close as they were saying it was.

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

Except in Scotland, despite some fairly pitiful yearning beforehand.

That is because we are nasty nationalists , too stupid and too wee to understand his big joined up words.

Nonsense. The SNP performance was not up to 2015 standards but it was impressive enough. It’s the strategic implications of SLABs collapse that worries me as a unionist. They were the backbone of Better Together. Although the Tories are much stronger than they were then they will never reach deep into Glasgow and it’s environs. A lot of people and territory are becoming solid SNP.

We will be the better for it David but the last thing we need is for them to end up like Labour. We need the boil lanced sooner rather than later and then get some real Scottish opposition parties.

The SNP performance in government wanders from poor to abysmal, education definitely being in the latter camp. They have many of the Labour faults, statist, excessive regulators, more interested in the views of appointees than their competence, very unwilling to listen or admit mistakes and with an increasing air of entitlement. It makes building a viable economy much more difficult.

squareroot2

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

Well one lost a small majority and one won a large one. Some might say May was unlucky with the distribution and efficiency of her vote but I think the difference is that May appealed greatly to Tories and was deeply unattractive to everyone else. Boris can reach beyond the Tory natural support, even if traditional Tories will never love or trust him like they did May. He’s not one of them and they know it. A latter day Disraeli in many ways.

May lost because of the social care policies by taking benefits away from older people.. simples.

DavidL

Theuniondivvie said:

Wasn't someone advising a bet on Xmas day ratings? Thought G&S was pretty gash myself.

https://twitter.com/superTV247/status/1210143126175784965?s=20

Edit: the full results.

https://twitter.com/superTV247/status/1210143943884705792?s=20

The only reason our TV was on yesterday was to have background Christmas songs. We had a great family day with 10 of us and games of Articulate into the evening. Best Christmas for quite a while.

isam

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

Well one lost a small majority and one won a large one. Some might say May was unlucky with the distribution and efficiency of her vote but I think the difference is that May appealed greatly to Tories and was deeply unattractive to everyone else. Boris can reach beyond the Tory natural support, even if traditional Tories will never love or trust him like they did May. He’s not one of them and they know it. A latter day Disraeli in many ways.

I would say the reason was Theresa May was up against a Labour Party committed to respecting the referendum result, and Boris was up against one that wasn't, and there isn't much more to it than that.

Could be that Boris wouldn't have got as many votes as May in 2017 had he been leader, as the public wanted a safe pair of hands to guide us through Brexit. As it was, he got almost all the Brexit votes, people who weren't that bothered or wanted another referendum went Labour and those who didn't want to respect the referendum went LibDem

DavidL

MaxPB said:

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

Well one lost a small majority and one won a large one. Some might say May was unlucky with the distribution and efficiency of her vote but I think the difference is that May appealed greatly to Tories and was deeply unattractive to everyone else. Boris can reach beyond the Tory natural support, even if traditional Tories will never love or trust him like they did May. He’s not one of them and they know it. A latter day Disraeli in many ways.

Tbh, by the time May was kicked out I wasn't sure she was actually a Tory. Most of her policies were Labour police state or recycled SDP rubbish.

People like Richard and TSE never had those doubts that I saw. My test for a Tory is someone capable of governing. She failed that test.

Theuniondivvie

DavidL said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Wasn't someone advising a bet on Xmas day ratings? Thought G&S was pretty gash myself.

https://twitter.com/superTV247/status/1210143126175784965?s=20

Edit: the full results.

https://twitter.com/superTV247/status/1210143943884705792?s=20

The only reason our TV was on yesterday was to have background Christmas songs. We had a great family day with 10 of us and games of Articulate into the evening. Best Christmas for quite a while.

Glad to hear it. Mind you, you missed the chance of some top notch guffawing at the Hebridean accents and geography in Call The Midwife.

DecrepiterJohnL

squareroot2 said:

DavidL said:

malcolmg said:

DavidL said:

ydoethur said:

DavidL said:

The second MRP is what we will remember. After a spectacular 2017 it’s lost its magic. It also has to be said that those who claimed a Boris’s skills as a campaigner were grossly exaggerated were just wrong. He continues to reach voters few other Tories could get close to.

be.

I think your first point is an acknowledgment of my point. The second is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the very high percentage of the vote he got. He’s still being underestimated. It’s a remarkable gift.

He just beat Theresa's numbers and she was an abject failure, explain the difference.

Well one lost a small majority and one won a large one. Some might say May was unlucky with the distribution and efficiency of her vote but I think the difference is that May appealed greatly to Tories and was deeply unattractive to everyone else. Boris can reach beyond the Tory natural support, even if traditional Tories will never love or trust him like they did May. He’s not one of them and they know it. A latter day Disraeli in many ways.

May lost because of the social care policies by taking benefits away from older people.. simples.

Except that Theresa May got more votes than Cameron in 2015. Two million more. It's not simples at all.