Thread on #GE2019. Labour polling likely to increase from low/mid 20’s. Current polls driven off those give a voting intention. These DK voters disproportionately include women, 2017 Lab voters + younger voters. When they break it will be to the advantage of Labour (1/10)
Lib Dems and Labour resemble Romulus and Remus - punching it out with lots of net switching. Almost none of which achieves strategic goal of eroding Tory majority. Remain voters will need signals and steers on how to vote. Public MRP could provide this albeit with noise (2/10)
Brexit Party decision to stand in all seats obviously significant, but, UKIP hit 13% in 2015 and Cameron still won. Con-Lab delta is the ball game. Con 9 point advantage should secure Tory majority. Potentially bigger gap needed if tactical vote is smart and telegraphed (3/10)
Con-Lab delta very closely related to leader ratings. Iron law of politics identified by @mattsingh holds. Gap between between net satisfaction of PM and LOO divided by 3 gives expected Government lead over opposition. Public perception of leaders and debates critical (4/10)
There is currently a massive bias of understanding / cognisance of the types of English seats Tories likely to lose (metropolitan, commuter belt, Lib Demmy areas) which SW1 knows better, because it lives and commutes to it. Bubble knows St Albans, Guildford and Richmond. (5/10)
The sources of potential Tory gains are large + varied. The first bucket is what I call the “Red Wall”; a strip of Leavey seats from Wirral to Wigan which should be roughly equal Tory / Labour on a demographic basis, but are not for cultural reasons. There are 40 of these (6/10)
The next bucket are the 37 seats that were Tory at some point between 2010-2017. Everybody seems to have forgotten about these but they still count. Large numbers in NW England and London. Most are winnable if Labour vote continues to be 0.5x of 2017 (7/10)
The last bucket is Wales. Lots of noise about Scotland. But we could genuinely have an election where Welsh Tory gains could counter or exceed Scottish losses. Most of these seats are in Clywd - northern wales and are continuous with the “Red Wall”. (8/10)
The campaign will make a Massive difference this time, because with 3.5 major parties, 1 in 4 seats could be marginal. Absolute chaos. To get a sense of this look at the Scottish results in 2017 and see how many are three figure majorities (9/10)
Margins mean tiny poll movements could change composition of Gov’t. Huge number of unknowns. What do 4m Tory Remainers do? Labour Leavers? What about Greens? What do the the 5.5m Lib Dem’s voting outside target seats do? Independents? A Plaid vote which is 35% leave?! (10/10)
