The strange shape of Liberal England, 2024 edition. Constituencies with more Lib Dem vs more Labour votes (ignoring other parties) are still largely divided by Watling Street (modern day A2/A5), a Roman road built almost 2000 years ago that divided Wessex and the Danelaw in 886AD Even after controlling for age, education, socioeconomics, home ownership, industrial composition, ethnicity, religion and urbanicity, whether your constituency was controlled by Alfred the Great or the Vikings is STILL a statistically significant predictor of the Lib Dem vote!

By-election night thread! Polls have just closed at the #Wakefieldbyelection and the #TivertonandHonitonByElection. Analysis follows

As usual THERE ARE NO EXIT POLLS

Load up on coffee as it's going to be a late one. BBC suggested earlier that declarations could be around 4am... In terms of likely outcomes I'll have much more on this later, but little doubt that #Wakefield (for which polls have been published) is going back to Labour, whereas #TivertonandHoniton (where none have) is murkier, but Lib Dems I've heard from seem much happier than Tories...

It's by-election night. Voting has just ended in Birmingham Erdington to elect a successor to Jack Dromey, who passed away at the start of the year. Here's how the constituency voted in 2019: This is a seat contested between Lab and Con and has red since it was recreated in February 1974. However in strong Tory years it's been close (single-digit % Labour majorities from 1979-87 and 10% after 2019)

1/ New year, new MRP model, and an inevitable raft of takes. Here are my thoughts
thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/d… 2/ Equal seats is about what would be expected based on a 2-point Lab lead (its popular vote estimate) due no doubt to Labour continuing to pile up votes in its safe seats. And in turn a 2-point Lab lead is well within the range of what conventional polls were showing last month

🚨Case study in the ecological fallacy: Local authorities in England and Wales with more over-65s have LOWER #COVID19 death rates. If you only looked at this data, you might think it killed more young people. But we have robust individual level data, so we know it's the reverse. Why is this the case? The obvious statistical explanation is that age is negatively correlated both with population density and especially with ethnic diversity.

Lord Ashcroft's report on Labour, based on a poll of 10,000 and 18 focus groups in seats Labour lost. Nothing in these two paragraphs is unexpected, but it's great that he's collected the evidence to back up what many of us have been saying for years.
lordashcroftpolls.com/2020/02/diagno… Top five reasons for Labour losing

According to defectors:
Brexit
Corbyn
Division
No longer represents its traditional voters
Undeliverable promises

According to Labour members:
Brexit
Mislead by media
Mislead by Tories
Voters are wrong
Voters are racist

THREAD ON BOUNDARY CHANGES: Guido Fawkes is reporting that boundary changes will not now involve cutting the number of seats to 600. This is unsurprising given past rebellions, but if correct it will have a number of consequences. 1/
order-order.com/2020/01/02/tor… Firstly, the reviews completed in 2013 and 2018 will have to be junked and the whole process started again with, presumably, 650 seats. That means changes to the legislation. Whether other aspects (the tolerances, protected seats, nation allocations etc) will change is unclear 2/

Oh great, here comes another polling conspiracy theory, regarding the latest Kantar poll. Long time followers will be able to guess how this ends, but here's the detail. 1/8
reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/c… Someone on Reddit decided to divide the turnout-plus-standard weighted by the unweighted counts to imply "turnout". In fairness, the OP did say "unless I've massively misread the tables", but of course the conspiracy theorists (the usual suspects) aren't being so cautious. 2/8