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OT for another day. Bookmark. Why can the UK count so much faster than we do in the US? Is it because we have too many races on each ballot?
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3: Yeah, I thought away was planning to write something.
Heebie's take: Tomorrow is today!
No, tomorrow is tomorrow! The election's today (Thursday) but we won't know the results until the wee hours of tomorrow. Keir Starmer (almost certainly) will toddle off to the Palace Friday morning late-ish, hopefully not too hung over, kiss hands, get told well done, and then head back to Number 10 for his first official duty: carefully handwriting four identical copies of A Certain Letter.
3: I'm going to edit your name off comment 3, because it kind of reveals how I got tripped up.
5: it's OK. We're all a long way away from you and we all look very similar at that distance.
Well, I only focus on my A students.
8: Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Commenters:
those that belong to heebie,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs--internet, no one knows if
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those who type with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look very similar
Why can the UK count so much faster than we do in the US? Is it because we have too many races on each ballot?
Pretty much.
Although we vote for fewer offices, we seem to have a lot more voting days. AIUI, and I may be wrong, the US tends to save up all its elections and have them on the same day, so you only turn up once every couple of years but are then expected vote for 20 or 30 different people. We tend not to bundle them like that.
Since 2010 I think you could have voted in an election or something almost every single year. 2010, general election. 2011, electoral reform referendum. 2014, Scottish referendum and EU elections. 2015, general election. 2016, Brexit referendum. 2017, general election. 2019, general election. Plus local elections virtually every year (for different bits.)
Good luck and kick those bastards to the curb!
11: And the trend here has been to bundle even more on to the big ones to counter abysmally low turnout in odd year municipal elections. San Francisco and Boulder per this piece, and I think New York has been doing the same.
12: thanks! We'll know (pretty much) in six hours...
12: thanks! We'll know (pretty much) in six hours...
Hopefully we'll get a series of comments like:
gwaaaan bastards YESSSSS ahahahaha AHAHAHA YSS INTO THE SEA WITH YOU
2200 is just the exit poll and I will probably still be fairly sober at that point. Expect immoderate but coherent glee. The actual results start coming in from about midnight or so. At that point I will endeavour not to disappoint 15.
I don't think it's about "saving them up," it's simply that the US just has way too many elected offices.
I have the following directly elected (not appointed!) representatives:
a president, two US senators, a US representative, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer, Secretary of State, a state senator, a state representative, a mayor, a city council person for my district, three at-large city council, local school board, a county assessor, a county circuit court clerk, county recorder, county sheriff, county council, county prosecutor, plus we vote on judges.
In the UK don't do this.
I just want the tories to lose in places I've been to. I'm looking at you Dumfries and Galloway, Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, and Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey! (This is three constituencies, not seven.)
18: duly noted. I will remember to mention them specifically.
I will probably still be fairly sober at that point.
It's like you're not even trying, ajay.
It looks pretty certain that they'll lose two of those, but D&G is marginal...
Where do you get your predictions from? I only know this place:
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/scotland.html
17: Yes, this is one of Jonathan Bernstein's hobbyhorses. When you spread democracy over that much surface area, people's ability to make informed choices gets rather thin. Here in SF, for the primary election, we have a county party committee race where you can choose up to 14 of 30 candidates, which choices are made with comical ignorance. (I mean, what it amounts to is tediously copying over a slate from some trusted endorser. The ratio of tedium to democratic value added is enormous.)
I'm having a hard time not cheering on Angus MacDonald in the Highlands just on the basis of his stereotypical name. And he's got signs up all over the place.
17, 23: In DC we have roughly as many elected officials, but half of them have literally no power. A Congressional representative who can't actually vote, members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, etc. It frees the mind somewhat.
In Vermont it's been so long that I wouldn't trust my memory, but I think there are somewhat fewer elected positions than above. Also, it's a lot easier to literally know the candidates because everything is so local. Town meetings are how most local government elections happen.
17: I did vote this year on many things locally. One was a measure to allow the town budget to grow by more than 3% which required raising taxes. That only passed by 35 votes. But the Town MEETING VOTED OVERWHELMINGLY FOR TNE SCHOOL BUDGET. Afterwards, very few people showed up to vote on the new zoning thing. Other towns seem so keen on being NIMBYs that they are willing to defy the law.
25: My town here as direct Town Meeting, but we're too big for that to be deliberative, and it happens 2 weeknights. A couple of towns do a Saturday all-day thing.
In London I have the following votes:
Member of Parliament (for the general election)
London Mayor
London Assembly Member https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Assembly
Local councillor
which is two more than most people in England, who would only have MP and councillor unless they live in one of the areas with an elected Mayor.
Do we have Andy France-dwelling commenters or French citizens abroad who can explain the next round of that election?
Re: counting delay, part of it is presumably postal votes, which unlike the US have to be received, not sent, by election day. But aside from that, even with all the extra races in the US, it does seem weird that British hand counts are much quicker than the electronic/machine-readable ones in the US. I can only assume there's just more manpower thrown at it.
Speaking of count differences, I find the partial count tallies (ie county-by-county) in the US very disorienting. Here, you generally get nothing until the entire jurisdiction is done, though London mayor is I suppose an exception.
1 is probably too few, local and national issues can be genuinely different. 2 or 3 is good. 4 is one too many (why directly vote for mayor?) but fine. Anything more than 5 is ridiculous.
29: you can select to read le monde in english, alsocheck out art goldhammer at tocqueville21, cole stangler had a piece in the uk guardian, philippe marliere in the nyt, lrb's blog has had some pieces. the new yorker has probably run something with an overview.
if le pen gets her ass handed to her along with macron being pretty definitively sidelined *and* melanchon marginalized that would make me very, very happy. alas, i suspect le pen is going to do well even if not achieve an outright majority in the assembly.
Exit poll is out. And it's...not as bad for Sunak as it could have been. Conservatives still losing incredibly badly, but not a complete wipe out.
I assume one should essentially ignore the exit poll results in Scotland? Or is there actually reason to think SNP is going to be as low as 10?
"Vernichtende Niederlage der Konservativen"
35 fuck. I want a bloodbath. I demand it. The people demand it!
Why is there no NI exit poll?
10 would mean a lot if Scottish Tories winning, no?
If the exit poll works well on small crossbreaks way out of sample, which is the hardest case for any kind of statistical estimate.
42: exit poll has Labour up in Scotland BIGLY.
Sure, but that's really not driven by just the central belt? There's lots of places where labor was a distant third or even fourth.
Yeah, apparently they're predicting 12 Scottish Tories, blech.
https://x.com/dmca0695/status/1808974702414868953
Torychef Sunak ist erledigt!
Erledigen; to deal with, finish off.
lol, not only does NI not get an exit poll, there hasn't even been any polls at all.
47 seems optimistic for the Tories. We shall see...
31: For a lot of offices, the county is the jurisdiction. You get the county count because they're done.
13 Reform MPs ffs, how many clowns can you fit in one car?
Houghton & Sunderland South wins the race to declare first, in a triumph for the forces of busy north-eastern women with clipboards!
....over other busy, north-eastern women with clipboards!
We have two lists on a big piece of paper on the mantelpiece. One of people who we want to win (drink fizz when they win) and one of people who we want to lose (whisky).
So far no names on either list have come up, but stand by for comments when they do....
I wonder whether we're going to see more realignment to a centrist party (Labour) and a far right populist party (Reform) in more places. Could easily happen in the US if the Democrats lose and decide they want to run actual centrists. Traditional center-right parties seem like they don't have much constituency any more.
That was me.
Rees-Mogg babbling about charismatic, individual figures. Interestingly, although he's a traditional Catholic he's developing the special Vicar Voice they do in the Church of England. Churisma. Purliament.
Did I tell you all we ran into Alan Cumming at a pub in Edinburgh ?
See his diptych of Churchill and Thatcher in the background. Pompous, mendacious oxygen thief.
We couldn't decide who got to put him on their Lose list so we agreed that everyone drinks if he loses.
Following up on 55, the winner (shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson) is also....in this tradition. Increased majority, although a majority over ex-UKIP rather than the Tories. The seat's turnout would get you cut from ballet class but then again it sucked in 2019 and 2017.
Ah that's good. I was worried about the turnout.
Well, looks very much as though the Tories won't be able to resist going for that Reform vote, whatever it takes. Could be super ugly.
Curtice just now saying that the swing to Reform actually a bit less than predicted. Small bit of reassurance there?
The second of the north-eastern seats that are obsessed about fast counting is in: Blyth. Again they really need to work on their stretches - 53%. The previous run was 64% but the constituency has been completely redrawn in the meantime. Ian Lavery, a Corbyn leftist who is also a complete crook having got a National Union of Mineworkers fund whose board he's on to pay off his mortgage, is elected - his majority in the old Wansbeck seat was only 814 but he's now got over 9,000. Again the Farage guy has leapfrogged the Tories.
Also the returning officer has turned up in a hat covered in feathers!
Very much pro golden chains of office, feathers, tricorn hats etc. worn at counts.
Pompous, mendacious oxygen thief.
Fuck me, now I have to change my pass phrase.
Here in Montana, votes are counted in the county seat. The ballots have to be brought to the counting location -- there are precincts more than an hour's drive away. A snowy November drive at 9 pm, ballots arriving at 10 or so. Ballots are run through the counting machines in batches of 25. I've been a counting observer several times over the years, and maybe 1 or 2% of ballots don't go through on the first run. Fortunately, we have ballot whisperers who can find a way to feed the thing through, if the issue in physical. If it's voter error, you gather up a bunch of ballots, and have a committee of 3 election judges review them, and decide what the voter was going for. This, I think, is where having all these races slows things: if you marked and then crossed out Smith and instead marked Jones for county auditor, your ballot will have to be examined by the election judges. More offices means more opportunities for voters to screw up.
In 2020, I was watching the counting in a nearby Republican county. They only had two machines, and one of them went down. At one point, the county clerk and recorder -- she's respected by even the hardest of hard core government opponents -- was working on the machine with a screwdriver in one hand and her cell phone with the manufacturer's service rep in the other. This was maybe 10 pm?
In sum, it's chewing gum and chicken wire all the way down.
Also we have special rules for military voters based overseas. There are places this would matter more than others.
Honestly I see no excuse for any kind of election machine if you're using paper ballots
Low turnouts and disturbingly high votes for Reform. Labour have won 3 out of 3, which is not surprising- they were all safe Labour seats - and Reform came second in each, Conservatives a distant third.
Is the northeast of England the New Hampshire of the UK?
70 Paper ballots with 15 different races on them?
The exit poll people seem to be backtracking a bit on their SNP prediction, saying that they don't have a lot of data and the data they have suggests that the SNP --> Labour swing may vary a lot: "The decline in [SNP's] support does, however, appear to be lower in places where a high proportion of people identify as Scottish rather than British."
Further to 73: and also my county is counting at least 15 different ballot forms.
72: not....really? No libertarians. Very post-industrial. Lots of interesting weird local twists
17 You don't vote for public service commission? Ours is gerrymandered so the county is in 2 different districts. They messed up printing several hundred ballots for the primary, putting people in one part of town in the wrong district.
Swindon South is in. First normie seat. Labour gain from a former cabinet minister. Absolutely CRUSHING swing - from a 6.6k Tory majority to a 9.6k Labour majority.
62% turnout, not good as the previous was 69%.
OTOH crushing ministers in Swindon is what I'm here for.
Curtice on Swindon South: "We expected the Conservatives to lose 25 points, Labour to gain four and Reform gain 17. In fact, the Conservatives lost 25 points, Labour gained eight and Reform gained 14. This is just the kind of result that could be a sign of a serious Conservative decline in seats tonight."
Fingers crossed. Swindon said to be a 'bellwether', eh.
Conservatives are ust destroyed in the north of England.
Newcastle Central - first big city seat but still north-eastern - in. Labour hold in a redrawn seat, tories and farage swap places, slightly lower but still 11k majority.
Yvonne Ridley, the tabloid journalist who was taken hostage by the Taliban, converted to Islam, and made a second career as a kind of reactionary-but-all-Palestine-all-the-time perma candidate got 3.6k. I hadn't noticed that she was also a Scottish nationalist for a while, flipping between the SNP and Alba because the latter was more transphobic. Presumably she isn't any more as she ran in Newcastle.
Turnout apparently down about 4 points in Jeremy Corbyn's own patch, just down the hill from me, at 67%. Obviously it can't be the lack of him in his own seat.
Buckland absolutely putting the boot into Braverman (rightly).
I had forgotten about Yvonne Ridley! What a history...
Five husbands, apparently. Only needs one more to beat Chaucer's Wife of Bath.
The Reform vote is disturbing.
Any difference between Newcastle and Sunderland votes? I have a Geordie mate I'd like to razz about it.
I mean they hate each other (or at least each others football teams).
so far the only difference was Ridley's intervention; otherwise they look like a very similar NE block.
The hat lady is back! Cramlington is being counted at the same venue. Another one where the Tories and Farage flip but the Labour candidate ends up with a honking five figure lead. Independent who isn't a Green but is wearing what looks like a Green rosette punches the air weakly at the announcement of their 322 votes.
Speculation: LibDems reckon they'll get 47 seats. Labour reckons the 13 Reforms are a furphy and Isle of Wight East is theirs with the first trans MP.
Big Green vote in South Shields, down the river from Newcastle (got students I think)
Harrogate & Knaresborough (my home town for a while) goes Lib Dem.
SUPER tony Yorkshire seat of Harrogate and Knaresborough, next door to Rishi Sunak, goes to the Lib Dems.
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Speaking of fast results:
On Tuesday, the army detained 27 soldiers after they abandoned their positions in the villages of Keseghe and Matembe in the province. [...] A military tribunal was set up in Alimbongo on Wednesday to try them and the magistrate sentenced 25 to death for theft, fleeing the enemy and violating orders, among other charges.|>
Wondering when we can officially declare the exit poll to be wrong.
Recount in my mum's home town, Basildon, a (tiresome) political icon since the 1992 elections, seems to be a three-way split between Labour/Tories/Farage coming out of a 20,000 Tory majority.
Huh. HUH. Stroud - the ultra greenie out west market town with its own currency - goes Labour, while the BBC thinks hipster ghetto Bristol Central is going Green from Labour.
I'm catching up. Alan Cumming was seen with the Bellend of Swindon?
Pigfaced tory Mark Francois holds out just to the north of Basildon in Rayleigh and Wickford (other side of the A127, always bad people)
It helped that he had a 31,000 majority
Nuneaton goes Labour. The most notorious bellwether seat.
Thanks for all this, Alex. I take it ajay is already deep in his cups.
The exciting part of the night begins!
That's a shame, I was hoping he'd crash in.
No names in either list come up yet. We are hoping to celebrate Bonavia, Abbott, Aldridge, Craesy, Phillips, Alexander, Tgendhat and West, and gloat over Rees Mogg, Shapps, Braverman, Sunak, Truss, Galloway, Mordant and Buchan.
Darlington - as in the railway - flips tory to labour. Small majority, stronger Farage but still third. Not sure if the MP is the first to be named Lola.
Interesting; Stroud had a turnout of 71% and a CON>LAB swing of 12%. It was the 40th Labour target, probably because the transition town core comes with a swath of Tory countryside.
Tory share was down 31 per cent in Nuneaton. Basildon recount is apparently down to 20 votes.
Curtice again: "The Lib Dems have won Harrogate where the 10-point increase in their vote is rather better than the two-point increase we were expecting in the exit poll. The 22-point drop in Tory support is just what we expected from the exit poll."
If every north of England seat is now Lab vs Reform, we will see colossal amounts of tactical voting (and solid Labour wins forever).
Barnsley North, south Yorkshire ex-mining seat called as Reform by the exit poll, is a Labour hold with a strong majority.
Leeds West and Pudsey, the shadow chancellor's seat (a mix of city, industrial, ex industrial, and suburbs), is a hold with a whacking CON>LAB seat.
Far from a stats person, but I wonder if the exit poll hasn't sampled for the smaller parties particularly well.
You need a bigger sample to do that, so they almost certainly had a better estimate for the parties with the larger shares of the vote.
I'm a stats person, but not that kind of stats person.
The rush is coming in now. Telford (classic bellwether new town) is a Tory>Labour flip, Eastleigh (Southampton district that's a mix of railway people, bombed out ex Ford people, and students*) has gone Tory>LD. These are high payoff marginals, very bad news for Tories.
*home and inspiration of corbyn/sanders icon Owen Hatherley
They claim a sample of, what, 22,000 voters at 130-ish polling stations, which is not _that_ many. So it's a big sample compared to your typical opinion poll, but they also have to choose the 'right' polling stations?
118: as I understand it, it's tuned quite carefully to get a good LAB/CON/LD call so as to answer "who won?" in time for the 10pm broadcast deadline.
Does "railway" people mean people work for the railroad or people who commute by rail or something else?
Big swing to Labour generally, but maybe it'll be the LDs who deliver the coup de grace to the Tories with some laser-like campaigining? As some polls indeed predicted.
Down goes a minister; Justin Tomlinson loses Swindon North (mixed industrial/generic normie) to Labour. Decent Reform showing, Labour eventually in with 4k. Swing is 19% CON>LAB - this is similar to quite a few other normie seats and much higher than the exit poll.
Also, night is young; plenty of time for things to even out.
124: it's the hub of nearly all railways south of the Thames.
122: for something like an MRP that would be fine but the twist is that it's not randomized.
Francois has lost more votes than any other Tory ever, his majority is down by a factor of six.
Labour vote share not increasing m7ch in any seat so far. But I wonder if that is masking a lot of non voters last time returning to Labour now Corbyn has gone, and a lot of others from last time going elsewhere...
The Vale of Glamorgan? How will the Lannisters ever recover from that loss.
129 is right. They try to randomize with rules about who to interview, but interviewers tend to go for whoever doesn't yell at them to fuck off. Plus the time of day matters and you are obviously oversampling the early voters.
First Reform win. Lee Anderson in Ashfield (horrible man).
Tory-to-Reform defector wins in (ex mining seat, previously the long time fief of disgraced Blair era minister Geoff "Buff" or "That Cunt" Hoon) Ashfield, beating independent, ex-UKIP/Brexit candidate and local mayor who is awaiting trial for fraud and possession of cocaine having beaten the rap about the child sex allegations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Zadrozny
Wave of Labour gains coming in now. Results have a rough normal distribution with the peak at around 3am so the rate is going ape now
Labour win Cannock Chase in Staffordshire with a 26% swing. It's a record.
Is there a Four Seasons Total Landscaping chance n the UK?
Colchester - home of 16th Air Assault Brigade - is a Labour GAIN. Hartlepool - ex-steeltown, Peter Mandelson's old patch, famous for a by election disaster - is a Labour GAIN although the exit poll rated it Reform with 91% confidence.
The Shetland ballot box plane have arrived in Orkney!
https://x.com/miriambrett/status/1809026606930788688
Just about to hear Rochdale and the bloody signal goes off...
And the only one that matters to Americans comes in with good news: "Labour gains Wrexham from the Conservatives."
Big Green spike in Norwich South, Corbyn star Clive Lewis's student heavy seat. It is far from being enough. Rochdale is declaring now - Galloway got 7k votes, which clearly wouldn't be enough, before the BBC TV feed fell down, and it's confirmed he's lost. Labour GAIN
Every time I hear "Reform" in an election context, I can't help but think of Ross Perot.
YES fuck off you repellent blob of gristle
Neil Kinnock expresses it better than I
Reading that Reform is proving weaker than initially indicated
Kilmarnock....I think this is the first Scottish result? Labour wins from third.
151 first Labour win in scotland, possibly first result too
I drove through Kilmarnock last month! Enormous traffic circle.
You put in a traffic circle around here and people act like you've required them to learn how to fly a helicopter with instruction only in Swedish.
Owen Jones has announced Corbyn winning his seat and then de-announced it and is trying to style it out.
I don't remember which bellweather Corbyn was.
Nottingham Rushcliffe, which Kenneth Clarke held for the Tories from 1972 onwards, goes Labour with a 12% swing. Massive win
Stevenage goes Labour!!! (New MP is a decent chap so this is good news quite apart from wider significance)
Labour wins: Barrow in Furness (isolated, grim shipyard town), Stevenage (average suburbs), West Dumbartonshire (Scottish, suburbs I think?), Bishop Auckland (ex mining/rural, trophy seat for 2019 Tories). In other words, everywhere.
Still only places I've driven through and nowhere I've actually been in so far.
Iraq War icon Tim Collins takes a unique approach to electoral politics, berating the public in North Down for not voting for him: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/jul/04/general-election-2024-uk-live-labour-tories-starmer-sunak-results-exit-poll?page=with:block-6687519a8f08b8c654ee55f6#block-6687519a8f08b8c654ee55f6
Meanwhile Nigel Farage has been at a "local restaurant" in Clacton until 2.50am, something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
Talking about the insurance on your Rolls as a way to show the common touch?
Nick The Incredible Flying Brick ran against Keir Starmer and got 162. Count is a complete zoo of weirdos in the best tradition. Corbyn surrogate Andrew Feinstein got 7k but SKS wins with an 11k majority.
(I saw Feinstein's campaign car by Hampstead Heath the other day - some guy holding a loudhailer out of the window of a Fiat Uno shouting in an incomprehensible plummy voice, like a sitcom caricature of a crank campaign.)
Austerity architect Rupert Harrison whipped by Lib Dems in easy seat Bicester...quite a few LD gains coming in now....
Holborn and St Pancras, now that sounds like somewhere I've been? Assuming St Pancras station is in St Pancras?
It's ANOTHER returning officer in a hat covered in feathers!
and Grant "Michael Green" Shapps is gone. MINISTER DOWN
GRAMT SHAPPPPS HAHAHAHA gtf you reprehensible polyp on the anus of a suffering nation
Iain Duncan Smith gets back in, with the Labour vote split by Corbynite egotist independent Faiza Shaheen
After the BBC incorrectly credited him with 172 votes when they meant 10x that.
CABINET MINISTER DOWN. Justice Secretary taken out by the Lib Dems
The Chiberal Chemocrats winning in Chelmsford, Cheltenham, and other places of like lettering.
Ynys Mon, now that's somewhere I've definitely been, and the Tories are out!
My phone wants to autocorrect Ynys to Yunus of course.
Ynys Mon, now that's somewhere I've definitely been
I think that would start a fight in Pittsburgh, depending on your annunciation.
SNP hold in Aberdeen North with the Tories in third, where I've been. The exit poll is definitely underestimating SNP who should be closer to 20 than 10.
Islington result in - Corbyn retains his seat
By a handsome margin. People howling as if they'd won the World Cup and the Nobel Prize and the Third World War all at once.
Weirdness in Leicester. Lots of independent candidates, one's pipped a shadow cabinet member, and a Tory is in on a split vote.
This might be really important in the long run, intersection of "immigrants against other immigrants" and "Palestine, what was the question" politics. Maybe more interesting than either version of "I used to be cool once, in 2016"
Bbc now forecasting only six SNP and Labour and Conservative much as they were in 1997. (405/154) It is telling that this result now seems slightly disappointing.
I do wonder how long until we get an actual explicitly Muslim party. Tonight is making that seem more plausible.
BBC now predicting slightly fewer seats to Labour than the exit poll (boo). And more to the Tories. Mainly because they think the LD gains are soft. Reform also now only predicted to win 4 seats.
Not sure how that works; it gives me the feeling that someone's trying to push one end of the model to make it fit Scotland and it mechanically trims somewhere else. It's an odd idea that doing really well in Scotland must be bad somewhere else.
Well, she was always going to.
Hopeful that Truss may go, though.
Tories hold Basildon by 20 on the 3rd recount.
Incredible gold-frogged formal uniform for the lord mayor of Portsmouth...
The sword lady lost and is going to have to find another way of getting people to look.
...and Tory leadership contender Penny Mordaunt is OUT.
Meanwhile, froglike health secretary Therese Coffey is out to the Greens in Suffolk Coastal! and Aldershot - an outer suburb with huge Army establishments - has gone Labour.
Johnny "so did I misuse the personnel databases for my campaign" Mercer is toast.
What do the more sedate mayors wear?
I guess there's like a mayor suit that you wear and it's not your own clothes? I think about half of the recent Pittsburgh mayors would be likely to get ketchup on it.
Massive Labour GAIN across Scotland. SNP down 21 seats, Labour up by 20 seats.
I guess the low SNP number was right, but the 12 Scottish Tories still seems really unlikely.
So do we think the BBC's 405 seat prediction is wrong? It has made me sad, so am very motivated to believe that it is wrong.
So do we think the BBC's 405 seat prediction is wrong? It has made me sad, so am very motivated to believe that it is wrong.
(Obviously it is a good result really. It's just that I want the Tory party to cease to exist as an institution.) Anyway, Mogg's seat is almost about to be declared. Will go to bed after that.
BBC prediction is up to 410 now. What are you hoping for?
450? Not so much the size of the Labour majority, more a desire to see the Tories drop below 100 seats, or some place where recovery will be seriously difficult.
I suppose, more reflectively, the ideal is one where the right vote is permanently split between the Tories and whatever the proto-Nazi formation is (Reform, currently). Actual seat count not so important.
Labour winning Stirling where they were in third place at 8% last election is pretty wild.
Andrea Jenkyns, the middle finger-raising MP, has gone.
410 of 650 is really a big margin.
Both Sunak and Hunt have made it. Berserk cheers for some independent who got 160.
Our House is so close that I'm thinking of writing Republican reps about how Dr. Fauci doesn't want them drinking raw milk.
He might come back. I've heard someone invented a Mogg Synthesizer.
That would be a splendid note to finish on.
Michael Gove's ultra-safe Surrey Heath seat goes Liberal. Also quite a crop of independents
I just looked him up. There's a Department of Leveling Up? I assume this is the first videogame reference in a major government department. Maybe following Japan when they had the Department of Agriculture go all in on Gundam.
Labour on 360 and Tories still nowhere near a hundred. I am going to sign off
Tories out in Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey contra 21. You love to see it!
Reading unsubstantiated rumors that Liz Truss may be losing.
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I have just been told I look like like McGyver. Not sure what to make of that.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx882qgdy23t
Lizardbreath's local candidate there at 07:56, looking probably exactly how she expected.
Extremely low turnout by British standards, well below the new normal for American elections.
Very little enthusiasm for any alternative, grist for the mill for those predicting a Canadian scenario.
Tories will have less than the projected 130-ish, but more than 100, sorry Charlie. Labour will have at least 410. They'll fall short of Blair's 1997 record of 418, but the increase in seats must break the post war record by far.
Lib Dems on 71, much more than people expected I think. So Tories less than twice as big as them, for the first time in 90 years or so.
The Scottish National Party has lost three fourth of their MPs, they used to completely dominate the Scottish seats.
Greens and Farage's Reform UK on four each, more than expected. Farage an MP on his eighth attempt, unfortch.
Labour's share of the vote was just 36.3, less than expected, which is in line with their results over the last twenty years, four points higher than the last election and actually much lower than Corbyn's first campaign. Tories lost votes to Lib Dems and all over, but mainly to the far right. First past the post is a grotesque system.
Liz Truss, evil cartoon character Rees-Mogg, defense minister and former blog whipping horse Grant Shapps, former big beast David Davies and various other ministers lost their seats.
In other news, Turkish national team orders 300 kebabs.
Some good news, pretty remarkable:
"Analysis by the Sutton Trust suggests that Keir Starmer's cabinet will have the highest number of ministers educated at comprehensive schools, and the lowest proportion in modern history who went to private schools.
Based on Labour's shadow cabinet, 84% went to comprehensive schools, 10% went to private schools and 6% to state grammar schools.
That would mean for the first time the cabinet closely reflected British society, with more than 90% of ministers having attended state schools. That comes as one of Labour's key policies is to add Vat to private school fees.
Since 2010 about 60% of cabinet ministers attended private schools, apart from Theresa May's cabinet where the proportion dipped to 30%. According to the Sutton Trust, the previous low was Clement Attlee's 1945 cabinet, with 25% privately educated."
238,239: Apparently both Labour and LDs got fewer total votes than in the last election. But all eclipsed by Tories getting less than half their total 2019 votes.
For the Lib Dems, is there a strategic voting element to their seat% overperformance, or just a natural geographic grouping with support that rose above a critical threshold this time around? Reform's seat underperformance seems more expected given how it works in FPTP systems for broadly-distributed parties with vote percentages in the teens (ands indeed the Lib Dems in 2019).
Anyways, good work--election and thread,
242: There's a massive strategic element. This result is roughly what it looks like when the electorate hits near optimal strategic behaviour; Labour and LDs get out of each other's way and the Tories get ripped apart between them.
I suppose, more reflectively, the ideal is one where the right vote is permanently split between the Tories and whatever the proto-Nazi formation is (Reform, currently).
Events across the Channel suggest otherwise.
This might be really important in the long run, intersection of "immigrants against other immigrants" and "Palestine, what was the question" politics. Maybe more interesting than either version of "I used to be cool once, in 2016"
I do wonder how long until we get an actual explicitly Muslim party. Tonight is making that seem more plausible.
I would appreciate expansion on both these points. (I'm not sure if they're intended to be related).
Tories in 6th place in Orkney and Shetland. Don't get their deposit back. Lol, lmao even.
245: There were five high percentage Muslim traditionally Labour seats that were won by pro-Palestine independents.
236: Did your hair turn into a mullet while your weren't paying attention?
242: Roughly speaking Labour was an industrial party (you can see it in the name) and never really established themselves in rural areas. So that's how you get a lot of LD/Tory marginals in England (or LD/SNP in the Scottish highlands), and then strategic voting gets you the rest of the way
245: Also, twitter (in its reliability) that Hindu voters went strongly Tory. That may get some of the "immigrant vs immigrant" story going.
Though there were also seats where tactical voting was difficult because you don't know which one is more likely to win, see this thread:
https://x.com/samfr/status/1809193361728758262
And can I just say that scrolling backward through UK election night via twitter has been a great pleasure.
Meant to say farming not rural in 250. Rural areas with more industry (fishing, mining) are more Labour.
The "little England beyond Wales" clearly visible in that one Labour seat west of the Plaid Cymru belt.
re: 251
Maybe, although my constituency, Ealing Southall,* which is the most Indian constituency in the UK at more than 50% British Asian has always been Labour and is one of the safest Labour seats in the UK. Presumably there are non-London constituencies where Hindus are more reliably Tory.
The Workers Party of Britain (Galloway's left-populist pro-Palestinian party) got 9% of the vote, versus 49% for Labour and 15% for the Tories. Pleasingly, Reform only got 5% of the vote.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ealing_Southall_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
245: what I am getting at is there's a distinction between candidates who are playing a communal politics game, on one hand, and ones who are pure-play Palestine protest candidates, and they are likely to interact in complicated and difficult to predict ways. In Leicester the two things seem to have overlapped and there was both a Tory-oriented Hindu nationalist thing *and* a Corbyn-y and Muslim-coded protest candidate. And both of them got in!
Meanwhile, although it was the Night of the Gaza Independents, I am quite pleased to see that Galloway's Guys bombed completely.
Hooray for the UK!!
Just like Brexit was a precursor to Trump in 2016, may this bring good things to us as well.
256: not even non-London, Hendon is a good example.
The problem with 259 is the main story of this election is the normie Republicans losing all their seats because a third of their voters went for the MAGA party instead. It's what would have happened if Trump were running independent.
Apparently the swing of 26% that took out Liz Truss was the biggest ever Tory to Labour to swing in any election.
So Inverness is one of the seats that hasn't been called, what's the other one?
I understand a tactical voting in theory but not in practice. Who authoritative tells voters what the tactical choice is in West Ruttington? Surely they can't figure it out for themselves from news, as only the exit polls are powerful enough to project seat by seat results.
For some places the same two parties have been the top two for a long time, so those ones are easy. In some places news, polls, or advertising managed to convince people as to which is likely to be higher up. And in some cases voters can't work it out and tactical voting fails.
For example, look at North Devon. In every election but one for the past century the top two candidates have been Tory and LD. (Labour managed one second place back in 1951.) So if you don't want the Tories, it's very easy to see you should vote LD.
Another one that was good to see go down
https://x.com/dr_ulrichsen/status/1809111463048495318?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
All these pictures of new cabinet appointees walking up the street are kinda charming. It's so rare to see American politicians walking somewhere.
Also refreshing how quickly all this change happens. Shouldn't some of these cabinet appointees get fillibustered?
re: 269
It's completely at the discretion of the PM. He or she just chooses.* Or, more accurately, they advise the monarch who to appoint but it's the same thing. I assume the monarch, in practice, always agrees.
* obviously there's all kinds of internal politics happening, but it's completely not subject to any democratic oversight.
249: Then you must have fixed something cleverly.
...' Meanwhile, it's incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we'd eradicated measles and Nigel Farage. Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.' Marina Hyde in the Guardian.
The only restriction on cabinet members is that they have to be members of one or other house of Parliament - but given that the PM can confer life peerages on anyone pretty much at will, that's not a huge hurdle.
Still no results from Inverness. I blame LB.
I wanted to let you know how much I appreciated the thread - it was nice reading the steadily developing good news, and the region by region synopses were wonderful.
https://x.com/iandunt/status/1809084412052521091?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
This is great news. Elections matter
https://x.com/telegraph/status/1809313761301524729?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Thanks to all for responses above.
Tory-oriented Hindu nationalist thing
Hindu nationalist like BJP? British nationalists who are also Hindu? Hindu identitarian? Something else entirely? And what do Tories have to do with it?
They've made something of a speciality of appealing to Hindus on a specifically communal basis. In this case, as well as the Tory doing that, the Labour guy who had previously held the seat on that basis before his disgrace about the rentboys and the cocaine ran as an independent. So did Claudia Webbe, a former Corbyn star who was disgraced for threatening to throw acid over her love rival, now appearing as roughly speaking a so-called Gaza independent. The Tory came through the resulting three-way split. You'll observe that everyone listed here is South Asian except Webbe and the Green candidate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leicester_East_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
Does the acid attack not make her at least an honorary South Asian?
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_summary24_20240706.html
This is an interesting read on why the forecasts were wrong.
"But in terms of seats for the big two parties, we had Labour about 40 seats too high and the Conservatives about 40 seats too low. The other parties were predicted fairly well.
The forty-seat error was mostly caused by the error in the national vote share, as measured by the opinion polls. Our final poll-of-polls showed a Labour lead of 17pc, but the actual Labour lead was around 10pc"
This is a really substantial error - hopefully we will hear more about how and why it happened!
1. Is there a downloadable table somewhere of the latest vote counts by constituency? I have the party results from here, but all the news websites provide graphics you have to hover over, or where you enter your address - no tables, even on Wikipedia yet.
2. If I were to combine the nine official regions even more broadly into London, North, and two others, what should the others be - Midands and South, or East and West? And if the latter, where would South East belong? Given it's west of London.
285: for what purpose? If you want to split England into four chunks of equal size, that's about 12 million per chunk.
You have the chunks and then the ceremonial chunks.
Each one has a chunk lord lieutenant.
So many chunks in a whale.
Made the mistake of reading CT's post-election post / comments, and my god what awful, morose people they are over there. I see a _bit_ of catastrophising on BSky (and also still a bit of the very adolescent-like 'Sir Kieth' stuff) but CT is something else. I think I picked up that Starmer is to be despised because he 'probably lays out his tie and shoes before going to bed at night'.
Obviously day two is just a touch early for conclusions. I'd be optimistic on at least a few counts. One is vote share and the sustainability of the electoral coalition: there's an implicit vote share that's much higher than 35%, evidenced by the extent of tactical voting. Labour (and the Lib Dems) seem to have positioned themselves well with respect to a broad coalition of working age people, who do a diversity of jobs, both public sector and private. This demographic isn't retiring (or dying) any time soon, either.
A second reason for optimism is that Labour isn't really doing a Ming vase strategy. It's a bit bolder than that, and is attempting some reframing of political values, i.e., 'we are not here to do politics as performance'. This is incredibly welcome (to me, anyway); instead of trying to craft some zinger of a response to some crappy, cooked up, right-wing, identity politics challenge, well, just change the subject and take away the salience. Sure, if you are going to do politics 'seriously' eventually there will have to be serious results. But since the seemingly simple and obvious approach of trying to do government in a non-perverse way hasn't been tried for a while now, there's reason for hope in at least the short term, by which I mean the next five years.
A third reason might be that Starmer actually said something recently about the far right threat across Europe (and beyond), and is surely aware of it. A charge of complacency about this doesn't seem fair, anyway.
A reason for pessimism is that some major drivers of voting behaviour are not fully under this government's control; i.e. mortgage interest rates.
Yes, if you are hoping for a transformation of fundamental economic relations, or the usual, this is probably not your government, but that has never ever been the Fabian way, and yes, they will always come across a bit like schoolteachers who can't help but annoy through being right while having authority, the worst combo.
Day 1, and they've committed to renationalising the railways ASAP, and appointed as minister of prisons the bloke who runs Timpson's (which is a chain of cobblers that employs ex-convicts, run by someone who is obsessive about prison reform). And Sir Patrick Vallance (ex chief scientific officer) as science minister.
I don't know if my cobbler has done time.
Moby, as you were asking: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2022/05/how-labour-lost-indian-vote-2022-local-elections
295 is clearly a response to a reasonable question about the election. I have been posting entirely nonsense is this thread. Maybe it was Mossy?
295 is a nice article, but not hugely surprising since I saw Chief Inspector Barnaby had South Asian suspects.
Anyone with Iran election takes?
Khameini needs to step down. He's 85, plainly not up to the job. You can't run a superpower if you're over 84. (Look at Deng Xiaoping.)
270. It's always possible in theory for the House to vote no confidence in HM Government, although obviously that's not going to happen while the party in government has a three figure majority. I don't know if there's any precedent for the House to say, "In general we have confidence in the government, but we wouldn't trust the Secretary of State for Knives and Forks to go out for the milk. Get rid of them".
There is precedent through impeachment but it hasn't been tried for a while.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_Kingdom#:~:text=Impeachment%20is%20a%20process%20in,or%20other%20crimes%20and%20misdemeanours
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Anyone who knows me on FB, pictures of my Ireland/Scotland trip are up.
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Liberté, égalité, fraternité!??
Have they actually held them off for sure, or just the exit polls so far?
The exit polls were released like 15 minutes ago, so I don't think we know anything for sure.
All the exit polls seem to agree though, putting Nouveau Front Populaire in front and the fascists third. But nobody is predicting an overall majority or anything close to one. This is quite usual in France, although the number of fascists is still alarming.
Le Pen's sister Marie-Caroline lost.
Yeah, really dodged a bullet in France.
Hoping for the hat trick here
You love to see it
https://x.com/ecomarxi/status/1810064433793704303?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
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"These lakes will be punctured scientifically to mitigate the risk of a disaster," stated Dr. Sinha. "A team of experts will arrive in July to carry out the puncturing process. Monitoring will be conducted both locally and via satellite to ensure precision and safety."|>
303: I think the third is Mbappé now, at least for a few more years.
Further to 300, the doctrine of Cabinet collective responsibility comes in here - the PM is supposed to back everyone in his cabinet, and they are all supposed to back each other (at least in public)
I wonder to what extent the left enthusiasm+turnout in France round 2 was propelled by excitement over the UK result a few days before.
Zero. Turnout was marginally higher in the first round.
First Kanak elected to French National Assembly in 38 years
https://x.com/ian_charles007/status/1809527885792981100?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
He's lucky he found a bench without a bigger divider in the middle.
Mossy (or possibly Moby) - someone who was tweeting about Tory/BJP closeness is being savaged on twitter by BJP brigade accounts: https://x.com/JamesBalliol/status/1810309058634645670
Here's Bob Blackman MP's old twitter hero image showing him literally standing next to Modi: https://x.com/JamesBalliol/status/1810227008225357867
We probably don't even look alike.
Is "avid spurs fan" one of those pain kink things that upper class English people pick up in boarding school?
I don't know much about the social standing or religious views of the people I know with South Asian ancestry. They're all doctors or CMU-related people.
313: It looks like turnout decreased by 0.08% from first to second round - but in the 2022 legislative elections, it decreased by 0.7%, and in 2017 by 6.1%. So a relative increase?
But not nearly as impactful, certainly, as candidates and voters teaming up to support the most viable non-RN candidate.
Wouldn't the number of races decided in the first round be a potentially significant determinant in the overall turnout? That was dramatically different in 2024 with 76, while the other two were 5 and 4 in 2022 and 2017 respectively. Ah looking at the detailed results I think the percentages only includes voters in contested districts the 2nd round. There is a consistent small dropoff, but of course reduced numbers of candidates, so maybe you generally get some lossage among very committed minor party voters.