The Labour party has won a majority of seats in the 2024 UK General Elections, and Keir Starmer is expected to replace Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister. The Conservatives, in power for the last fourteen years, have suffered a rout, losing over two-thirds of their seats.
That’s what I originally thought would be the case. But, just statistically (looking at voter share here):
2019: Cons: 43.6% Lab: 32.1% LD: 11.6% SNP: 3.9%
2024: Lab: 33.7% Cons: 23.7% Reform: 14.3% LD: 12.2% (Weirdly, wikipedia has yet to include reform in their share ranking had to use BBC)
Labour picked up less than 2% more of the vote share. Reform took the vast majority of the tory lead away.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the tories are out. But, it’s mostly because reform split the vote and Labour were second place in most constituencies. This is important to bear in mind while the conservatives sort themselves out to decide how they deal with not being right wing enough…
By that statement though, the LibDems split the left vote and so if your going to compare, you’ll need to add the liberal vote to the Labour as that’s where they would go if LibDems disappeared.
You could be right, but I am not so sure.
In terms of percentage, the lib dems made a smaller gain than labour. I’d also suggest that while maybe some of those votes came from wavering labour voters, I expect that at least a similar number would have also come from the tories. I don’t think the lib dems split the vote any more than they normally do.
Reform, while not new, last time round they did not compete against the tories. This time, they did and the result is clear.