15 Comments
May 8, 2023Liked by Ben Ansell

Very engaging! Thank you for writing this up. I am going to gerrymander the term "Ottolenghi Conservatives" into my teaching next year, I think. I also, on the subject of enthusiasm for Ed Davey, humbly submit the DaveyTrain.

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author

You and Mark Pack both get the Davey Train! Glad one other person liked Ottolenghi Conservatives!

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I wonder if the voter ID thing selected out Lib Dem voters this election.? When will we get any data on how it affected the turnout?

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Data on how ID requirements affected turnout would be deliberately difficult to gather because people were often turned away outside the venue before they spoke to the election poll workers who record who has / has not voted.

Anecdotally though, you would expect the Liberals to suffer less because they are more of a middle class party.

The people who lack ID tend to be either poor or very old, which affects Labour and Conservatives more.

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Fascinating reading - as a relative novice I'm wondering how this will change with constituency boundaries come October ish onto GE24?

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The Brexit referendum vote was massive. People who had been completely disenfranchised and given up were motivated to vote. Since then the Conservatives handling of Brexit has been one of the greatest political betrayals in British history. Instead of taking back control , control has been handed to the likes of Bill Gates and WEF. N.I. has been annexed by the short-term WEF place man Sunak. Millions of immigrants are completely overwhelming all public services (as per Cloward-Piven) , making employment in such professions a living hell and destroying the quality of service provided whilst taxing at record levels.

In the locals I had three votes - i did 2 LDs and 1 Lab to send a message.

The general election will be very different. I will vote for one of Heritage, Reclaim or Reform.

Conservatives will be hit very badly, indeed if Farage steps in the Conservatives will get a lower share that currently predicted.

However these votes won't go to Labour but they will allow Labour to take the red wall constituencies. Greens & LDs vote share will fall back a bit from the locals but they will win in the South over decimated Conservative voting going elsewhere.

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It will make my day to see the return of a non-Tory aligned party after the 13 years plus of damage they have done and their dire refusal to admit it.....

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I'm extremely sceptical of the idea of the Lib Dems winning 70 seats at the next GE. They can do this sort of thing in North Shropshire or Tiverton & Honiton BEs and maybe even hold on to those seats at a GE; but that's because they're able to concentrate a large amount of "winning here" footsoliders into a small area. They can't do that with all the other Con 60/LD 20 seats at a GE, where tbh they are too far behind to really motivate tactical voting (misleading bar charts notwithstanding).

On top of this, I remember the last election where wild speculation that they'd hit triple figures existed (mainly wishful thinking from commentators despairing at the Johnson/Corbyn choice on offer). In terms of comparisons to 1997, the main difference is that the coalition happened since then; while voters may have largely moved on mentally from that era of politics, it still hasn't led to the Lib Dems returning to the status quo ante where they captured about 20% of the national vote. 30 seats would be a good result for the party.

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That seems reasonable but I think it is worth considering the 2005 Lib Dem experience where they were close to 70 seats. If, and it's a big if, they have detoxified maybe it's doable.

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Very interesting and thanks for putting this together. Would it be easy to also do this using GE2017 as a baseline? I feel that both GetBrexitDone and Anti-Corbyn factors which no longer apply mean GE2019 may be a problematic data set to use, even though it’s traditional to do so.

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Yes, that wouldn't be hard - an earlier version of this did that (I had a GE19 predictor!). I'll look into it.

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Very good. It's worth noting that there could be (will be IMO) tactical anti-SNP voting in Scotland at a GE. Is it possible to include that on your slider? Or some other way of calculating it?

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Definitely could be done and in one iteration of this code I did Scotland separately. Bit of a nightmare though!

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Would be nice but a luxury I think. As Labour looks like succeeding in England and Wales, Scottish Labour will prosper.

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You may have noticed that the app cannot handle Labour at 51% as per today's Omnisis Poll ..... https://twitter.com/Omnisis?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

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