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    Simon Briscoe (Britain in Numbers): And the local election results show … Archived Message

    Posted by Sinister Burt on May 6, 2019, 1:30 pm

    An alternative local election analysis to the stuff i've seen in the normal media, albeit only on a selection of the data. Suggests the libdem 'surge' was due to a drop in tory turnout rather than the endorsement of remain some in the media/labour would like to claim.

    https://simonbriscoeblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/and-the-local-election-results-show/

    Excerpt:
    "Sadly very little of the repeating narrative of Lib Dem vote surge is true. This becomes clear by looking at the number of votes cast. I chose Chelmsford as a case study. (A “case study” is needed as, as I explain, the votes data is not readily available to analyse.) It was one of the ten Lib Dem council gains from the Conservatives featured on the BBC election summary page.

    The “Heavy Conservatives losses in Essex” story got quite some attention. As the BBC story put it: “All 57 seats in Chelmsford were up for grabs on Thursday’s poll, and the Liberal Democrats gained 26, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives who lost 31. Independent candidates won five seats. At the Chelmsford count, Ms Ford (the local Conservative MP) became emotional as she reflected on “a very disappointing night”.

    I dug out the numbers for Chelmsford. (It’s a boring exercise getting the numbers as you have to find the relevant page of each council’s website, then, depending on the council, you have to crawl over pdf or html records hidden away on websites. Each council is different and there is no central record.)

    I had wanted to do the analysis for Bath, also a big favourite in the media, but it became clear that the ward boundaries had changed between the 2015 and 2019 elections so it was not possible for me to do the work.

    Looking at the Chelmsford data (see my excel spreadsheet Local election results 2019 Chelmsford), it is obvious that the story of these elections was not about a Lib Dem surge in support. There hasn’t been a surge in support. It was about turnout and the failure of Conservative supporters to vote. The simple mean of turnout percentage in each of the 24 wards fell from 69% in 2015 to 33% in 2019. Instead of two in three voting, it was only one in three. Half of those voting in 2015 couldn’t be bothered this time.

    Within the aggregate fall in turnout, the Lib Dem vote held solid. Total Lib Dem votes rose fractionally from 38,000 to 39,000 across Chelmsford. It wasn’t that rise that got the Lib Dems their new seats, rather that was as a result of the Conservative vote falling from 97,000 to 40,000. In some wards the Lib Dem vote rose and in others it fell, but in three quarters of the wards the change per candidate was less than 200, ie not much either way. Certainly not enough of a change or a consistent enough change to make a story out of.

    Such large changes to turnout are very rare and of note in themselves but they also do funny things to the traditional metrics. Given turnout tumbled it’s a shame that none of those pieces above wrote about it. But, worse than that, it was the failure to get to grips with the numbers let the experts astray."

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