Friday 13 December 2019

Did Boris win a landslide or did Labour simply fail?

I'll admit I was surprised by the election result. Labour was closing the gap, lots of young voter registrations, Brexit Party still running in marginals and polling at 10-20% in some. Looked to me like a close race and possibly the Conservatives ending up with a working minority or a wafer thin majority.

But instead he won a landslide. So what happened? Looking at the numbers, it was right to think Boris is not that popular. Despite 4.6m new voter registrations, he only gained 330k votes on 2017. 

 
The election instead was more about Corbyn repelling Labour's traditional working vote in the North. Somehow the pollsters and journalists didnt pick up on the apathy/ reluctancy to vote by Labour's core heartland supporters.

If you take into account the number of young voters registering and their apparent Labour bias, Corbyn possibly managed to get 3.2m of so long time Labour supporters to stay at home or vote Lib Dems/ SNP. 

Amusingly this is one of the few noticeable things he has achieved in a political career defined by protest. 

Boris was lucky he wasn't up against a centrist like Kier Starmer or similar. 

The Lib Dems actually did well, gaining 1.33m votes, but with the FPTP system the Lib Dems saw their 12 seats from 2017 drop to 11, and the SNP stormed Scotland with 48 out of 59 seats despite only gaining 260k votes.

Northern Ireland now has more nationalist MPs than unionist, so we will have to see if they ask for an all-Ireland reunifiction vote.  

Anyway, Boris and Cummings now have the decks cleared and can implement the plan.

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