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Liberal Democrat: Recovery or Resurgence? – politicalbetting.com
Liberal Democrat: Recovery or Resurgence? – politicalbetting.com
2019 wasn’t all bad for the Lib Dems. Yes, they won just 8 seats and lost their leader. Which was pretty poor. But the vote became much targeted. The Lib Dems gained more than doubled their number of second place seats (from 38 to 94).
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Royal Mail: parking illegally!
Thank you for it. Am inclined to agree with your conclusion but that’s not why I like the thread. This kind of informed, balanced, thread is why this site is so good.
So where’s the betting value for LibDem gains? I’m expecting some gains in Surrey, perhaps momentously so. But generally have them finishing around the 30 seat mark.
Not least, for letting TSE choose *that* photo...
Main thrust of around 22-30ish seems logical as well. I'll be very surprised if they hit 40.
I'm also confident they'll win no seats in Wales, where they always used to have a few 'bankers.'
IIRC, they had a pact with the Greens last time. No Green in Harrogate and no LibDem in Skip & Rip.
On the other hand, even the MRP from yesterday has the LDs on 39 before a tactical voting adjustment. Maybe if tactical voting does top our fairly low these bets will win even in that scenario.
Gtg, but thank you again for this thread. It’s very helpful.
In all of England and Wales at the last election they won only one seat north of the Thames - Westmoreland and Lonsdale.*
They've won Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire since, although I expect them to lose the latter again.
Where else in England could they target, realistically? @SandyRentool suggests Harrogate. Round here, maybe Solihull if Julian Knight has decided to split the vote, although that means overtaking Labour. Cheltenham and the Cotswolds are mentioned. But where else might come into play?
It doesn't seem to me a very long list since they blew up their carefully assembled strength in uni seats by voting through the Browne review nonsense. Edited because I hadn't even seen that when I wrote this!
*Had forgotten St Albans (sorry @Verulamius ) but the essential point stands.
I do expect the Lib Dems to have a goodish night in the North West, Hazel Grove seems nailed on, then add in Southport and Cheadle.
Gaagh, I'm tying myself in knots. Ignore me...
I know Mike said he knows some Lib Dems who thought they could have ended up on 75-90 MPs had they have been more realistic.
There was a great potential to take seats off Labour after Iraq but Kennedy decided to go after high profile Tories.
I think Davey is utterly focussed on getting back third party status.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/conservatives-anti-immigration-reform-social-media-campaign-labour-pqb2btt28
If you've assumed that the cash the Tories and Labour are throwing at social media will make a difference, you're completely wrong.
The two skint parties, Reform and the SNP, are smashing it where it matters - Facebook.
Unless the Tory vote doesn't collapse by anything like as much as currently polling suggests, I would still expect the LDs to overtake the Tories in most and maybe all of the equivalent of the 24 old seats held by the Tories in 2019 with a margin over the LDs that's in single % digits. There may be one or two of those where they are beaten by Labour coming from third place. That would give the LDs about 30 seats in total. The LDs might also pick up a few seats where they are more than 10% behind the Tories. However, on current polling there are relatively few seats where they are starting from a notional 2nd place allowing for post election swings, so the ones where they are the genuine tactical voting choice are quite limited this election. And so I think Pip is right and the LDs will (just) total less than 40 seats.
I find myself oscillating wildly between the two extremes of 20 and 60, skipping right over 40 like it doesn't exist. So I think I'm seeing it the same way as you, but can't quite nail down why. Quincel's header is very good, but hasn't settled that instability in my mind.
Right now my thought pattern is the Lib Dems will tail off the football starts to dominate. Gut feeling.
As Chapel-going waned in the 1960s, the Liberals remained the party of the Welsh language and Welsh devolution (which they proposed first in 1936 if memory serves) much more so than Labour, and people still voted for them in rural areas where the Welsh language was strong.
As the Welsh language ceased to be so prominent an issue due to the Welsh Language Act and Plaid Cymru emerged to take their mantle as the party of Welshness, they rebuilt themselves as a university party (Ceredigion and Cardiff) and a NIMBY party (Radnor and Montgomery).
When they ceased to be much use as Nimbies and blew up their appeal to students - what was left?
Such innocent times. Such horrible music.
Who knows which is more likely, but I do wonder how sophisticated the voters would need to be to allow tactical voting to kick in in a truly significant way.
We're in Machynlleth for the RedBull mountain biking and it's effing lovely.
The Noom of supermarket carparks?
Labour.
It’s the antibiotics talking.
The obvious one is the hyperlocal hyperintense campaign that the Lib Dems do very well. The places where that is happening ought to be visible from space by now. I suspect that the old "where we work we win" adage will apply to those.
The other set is places where Con loses lots of votes to Lab, in line with the national pattern. Enough votes for Con to undertake second placed Lib Dem, but not enough for Lab to overtake both.
Rural Oxfordshire might have fallen into that category, except that the swing now looks like being too big. Hence the awkwardness we see here from time to time.
There must be a set of inequalities that define where those seats are. Lib within about twenty of Con, Lab more than twenty further behind? So about 55:35:10 last time?
In 2010 they lost one.
In 2015 they lost two more.
In 2017 they lost their last seat.
Since then they won the 2019 Radnor by-election but haven't even looked like winning a seat at an election. They're only second in the two Powys seats and I'd not be surprised to see them come third in both of those next time.
They also went from having consistently six AMs in 1999, 2003 and 2007 and being power brokers in 1999 and 2007 to five in 2012 and just one in 2017.
They have wiped themselves out and I can't see how they come back. List PR might see them get maybe three or four seats in the Senedd but out of 96 that's an irrelevance.
I believe the town is closing for this event sometime next week
And it is a lovely day as well
When Sporting opened its book on GE seats I was disappointed that they seemed to have pitched the figures about right. If they had got anything wrong, I thought,it was possibly that they had put the LDs a bit too high at 36-40. When two other illustrious punters from this illustrious site, Casino Royale and RCS, expressed the same opinion I entered the market as a seller. Now I see you can be added to the panoply. I also see that since I put my money down, the market has moved seven points the wrong way to 43-47. Why?
There has been no discernible increase in the LD poll rating. Davey may have made splash of sorts, but not the kind that readily sways voters. There is nothing I can see to cause a LD surge, yet if Sporting is right and Sir Ed brings home 45 seats or thereabouts, that would be one heck of a result for the Yellow Peril.
I am puzzled. Perhaps you are right though and the answer lies in starting from a stronger base. Maybe last time round wasn't so bad after all.
Maybe you should follow your attack theory, and be a buyer not a seller.
Perhaps.
Except in the context of a government that has annoyed all but a handful of its potential voters over the last five years.
In that light, if it turns out to be the result, I think my response will be "Gosh. Are there any more of those delicious canapés?"
Even at local level LD success in Sefton is somewhat deflated by a fair wodge of West Lancashire in the constituency.
Lab / Con battle for me.
I think Con value on both IoW seats too at similar prices at Bet365. There will be a strong Green vote on the Island and LD will be standing again.
What would help it would be if the anti-Tory parties themselves made most of the judgement for the voters, and targeted their own campaigns in complimentary ways so that the viewer could vote tactically by seeing which anti-Tory party was campaigning locally.
However, it's often not actually in the parties interests to do this, certainly not for Labour, and they might prefer to run spoiler campaigns in a couple of dozen seats to reduce the number of Liberal Democrat gains.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Tory campaign was doing its damnedest to make sure there were enough tactical voting websites to prevent a consensus on what the tactical vote for each seat was. Though they might not need to do anything.
BBC News - Pisa: Wales slumps to worst school test results
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67616536
https://x.com/johnrentoul/status/1796828953136566356?s=61
What I'm saying is part of your surprise at that is probably from your own understand of how things are really going. You can't chalk it all up to everyone else being ignorant and you being the only one who knows what's going on. You are susceptible to confirmation bias too.
It's a function of the Tory failure, thus far, to make any of the widely anticipated polling uptick.
Edit. See @ydoethur got there earlier and more succinctly.
Alex Chalk is, sadly, a goner in Cheltenham. Clifton-Browne is under pressure in Cotswolds South. Even Laurence Robertson isn't entirely secure in Tory Tewkesbury.
What about Reform and Green voteshares of >10% and >5%?
And where have I said everyone else is ignorant and I am the only one who knows what's going on
Indeed if you follow @Ydoethur you will see I am not alone in my criticism of Cardiff
Leon can disagree, but I think Britain does modernity noom very well. I have experienced no noom at the Glastonbury Tor or Durham Cathedral, but was practically floored by Stendhal Syndrome the first time I drove past that bit on the M25 when the Heathrow planes practically land right in front of you. Seeing a larger than life jumbo leg it across your field of vision while traversing with three lanes on one side of you, four on the other, blasting down the motorway at 90 miles an hour (*in the era before there being a camera at every bloody gantry) was a sight to behold.
Right now, I'm betting on individual constituencies to seek out value. I find the under/overs too much honest to fortune with odds that just aren't attractive enough for me.
Can I say thanks to TSE for stepping up since Mike Smithson's retirement from the blog.
Your headers are excellent. Thanks for all the hard work.
Also thanks to all of the other header writers.
On the subject of the election: I still think that the Conservatives will get at least 200 seats.
Feel free to mock me if this turns out to be rubbish.
There is a name for this phenomenon and my bloody swiss-cheese memory has forgotten it! If you have a line of five or seven identical pictures and ask people to pick their favourite, they will pick the middle, even though there's no reason to.
In BrexitRef, one group of pollsters said it would be a solid Remain win, another said it would be a narrow Leave win, and we all split the difference and we[1] were wrong to do so.
In samples from a bimodal distribution, the central limit theorem will still give a number in the middle (and the sample mean will still vary normally - that's the point of the CLT), but the middle is not the highest-probability event.
The "pictures" example explain why people plump for the middle, the bimodality explains why the CLT gives unreliable results.
Notes
[1] Honour compels me to point out that I called it right
I would also add I think the actual Welsh vote for the Libs dwindled away over decades. Indeed, the fact they held on to their strength until the 1960s suggests habit as much as anything. By the finish, many of their voters (in my experience at least) were English incomers.
It would be nice to see Labour suffer such a collapse but having successfully predicted 23 of the last 0 Labour failures in Wales I will not hold my breath.
https://x.com/estwebber/status/1796863927302680878?s=61
So one thing I am particularly looking out for is whether these ratings improve as a post hoc rationalisation for a decision to vote Labour despite Starmer.
I think there's been a little movement in that direction in the polls to date, but it's one reason why I'm looking forward to the Ipsos polls during the campaign.
Winning will be a stretch and may depend on the next five weeks activity plus how good our GOTV is - I expect a lot of Conservative abstentions.
With Truss one couldn’t be sure if she’d got the right country in which to murder high six figures of brown people.
We all owe him a debt.
The car, the church, the T34 in the background. The statue of Lenin is behind the trees
Ships bearing Ivory, apes, and peacocks are yours.
Apart from we don't have any in Wales.
So you're getting slate, Andrew 'RT' Davies and red kites instead.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4305928/#Comment_4305928
Albeit, he did have the Unionist candidate win in the end...
When you say that it's "extraordinary" that large numbers of people do a certain thing, that should ring a little alarm bell that says that it might actually the opposite, it's perfectly ordinary, but you are surprised because your views are somewhat misaligned with that large number of people for some reason. Again, very normal. Most people end up surprised about one thing or another, because their information is imperfect. Which brings me back to the possible cause of your surprise, that you are consuming information in a different pattern to all those other people.