Thread by @jburnmurdoch

NEW story with @SebastianEPayne on the Conservatives’ strategy in the north, where they hope their blue wave will break over Labour’s red wall ft.com/content/fbd00e…

This one comes with a Strategy Scatter™️, which I’m going to build up step-by-step:

@SebastianEPayne 1/ Here are the 255 seats Labour won in ENG & WAL in 2017, plotted according to:

• The Con-Lab margin in 2017 (horizontal)
• The level of cultural/social conservatism (vertical), which is a combo of English national identity + Leave vote

Tories want to win lots of these.

@SebastianEPayne 2/ I’ve added some simple labels here to show what it means to be in different part of the chart.

• Top: more English identity & more Leave
• Bottom: less English & more Remain

• Left: very safe Lab seats
• Right: tight Lab/Con marginals

@SebastianEPayne 3/ Spot the difference:

I’ve adjusted those 2017 Lab/Con margins to take account of current polling.

Lab’s current vote share is still well down on 2017, so the Lab/Con zero-line migrates leftwards, putting dozens of Lab seats into possible Tory control.

@SebastianEPayne 4/ How many seats? 81.

These are seats that — if all constituencies moved in line with national polls (it won’t be that simple) — would now be at high risk of flipping Lab to Con.

i.e Lab’s 2017 margin in these seats is narrower than Lab’s national polling backslide since 2017.

@SebastianEPayne 5/ But the Tories also have more ambitious targets in the new light blue area here.

These are 16 seats that Lab won by slightly larger margins in 2017, but whose socio-cultural profiles the Tories think lean in their favour:
• Strong English national identity
• Big Leave votes

@SebastianEPayne 6/ But on the flip side, seats at the bottom right — well within reach under UNS but culturally liberal and Remainy — may prove out of reach for the Tories due to an increasing cultural mismatch.

@SebastianEPayne 7/ And of course, the Leave/Remain axis can work both ways:
• Leavey seats look more socially/culturally ripe for the Tories, but Brexit party could hamper them
• Remainy seats could move away from Tories, but if Lab and Lib Dem split Remain vote, Tories could come thru middle

@SebastianEPayne 8/ But all-in-all, we think this is a good approximation of how Conservatives are approaching this election:
• Need to win lots of seats in ENG & WAL to offset likely Scottish setbacks
• Somewhere in region of 90 Lab targets, but top end of that is on a very good day for them

@SebastianEPayne 9/ Which brings us on to the 'red wall':

When you plot these targets on a map, there’s an almost unbroken swath of 50 red Labour-held seats stretching from Clwyd in the west to Grimsby in the east.

This is the key battleground of this election.

@SebastianEPayne 10/ Here’s the whole lot of that packaged into one nice slow GIF, from the gradually layered Strategy Scatter™️ to the map at the end.

@SebastianEPayne 11/ Main caveat here: all this is based on current polling.

If ~hypothetically~ the Tories were to unload a huge string of gaffes on the first day of campaigning... their position relative to Labour might deteriorate, moving the zero-line rightwards & shrinking their target list

@SebastianEPayne Fin.

@SebastianEPayne Oh and shouts-out to the likes of @leonardocarella & @benwansell who’ve also been using plots like these to illustrate different scenarios, plus @JamesKanag & @drjennings for other bits and pieces.