muckles:
Winseer:
I don’t know exactly how many UKIPers from 2015 went over to Corbyn - but I estimate it would have to be between 1m and 2m in order for Corbyn to gain the 23 seats he did - when all the pundits were talking in terms of Labour losing between 50 and 100 seats when I put the bet on during the last week of April 2017. By the time the last week had come around, the odds on Labour winning 250-300 seats had dropped from 40-1 to 7/2.The daft notion was of Me as a UKIP supporter, voting Conservative in that election ?
So you a UKIP supporter voted Conservative, but you believe others who think like you voted Labour, although you have no evidence?
Sorry bud, I’ve long since spent the evidence which was the win. “Being correct” about pretty much anything at all - has a pretty short shelf-life. I’ll attempt to cash in whilst I can, but what is a good idea one week - can be a badly-timed disaster the next. This does NOT apply to my thoughts on Brexit however.For most marginal seats it doesn’t take many votes to swing it one way or another, maybe Jeremy Corbyn braking the mould from the neo-liberal Labour and Conservative parties we’ve had for years, encouraged many old school Labour supporters out to vote, where as they’d not really bothered since the Blair days and those UKIP voters went, mostly back, to the Conservative party they’d always supported, now the referendum was done.
I might have ended up moving from UKIP to Tory in 2017, but I bought into the fear-story (which I regret) that “A vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour” - when in fact, the disliked Tory who’s MP in my ward - wasn’t actually in any danger at all. I might as well have wiped my arse on my ballot paper.
Elections tend to have pundits looking at “marginals” rather than comfortable majorities that can be turned over.
However, the incidents where a marginal becomes a safe seat are on the increase, whilst marginals that become safe seats “the opposite way” - don’t seem to happen anywhere near as much.
It is almost as if there is a “low water mark” for the support that an MP might expect to get.
My own MP is a good example of this rare exception here: The Number one marginal in the country in the 2010 election, a Labour candidate flipped to Conservative - and won the seat, and have maintained it with a large majority ever since.
Most seats that “flip” , tend to “flip back” at the following election, and thus I reckon it is a mistake to target only marginals, when a better stragegy in my mind for the next election - would be to target Remainer MPs in Brexit-voting seats, and vice versa. The “crossover” seats would be Anna Soubry and Amber Rudd who have the unenviable status of both being Remainers in Brexit-voting wards. I won’t be betting on either of those two keeping their seats at the next election, regardless of Brexit being done by that point or not.
The next election, one way or the other - won’t be like ANY election we’ve had in the past.
Social Media - has well and truly broken the mould to “Voter Tactics” now, and even grandees like Boris Johnson - stand to lose their seats if I am correct, because of “Flying Voters” across the constituency boundary, as organized by none other than McDonnell, who’s ward borders that of Boris Johnson. He’d be one of many scalps to be taken by the opposition at the next election, whilst UKIP end up taking a lot of former Labour safe seats, I’d suggest. Labour supporters who voted for Blair in all three elections involving him - but deserted Gordon Brown in 2010 - are likely to stay away in droves as well of course.
I return to a theory I’ve had for a while - that if Brexit is cocked-up at the 11th hour, then the next parliament might well be a six-way split (six parties with 50-100 seats apiece) with the next govenrment ending up being a coalition of the four SMALLEST, thus shutting out whatever party gets the most seats, but never gets to win a place in Government. That those two parties could end up being UKIP and the SNP if we’re not careful…