Yazata
Valued Senior Member
And my guess is that a general election is coming soon, in November or December 2019 or so.
And it looks like an election is on for December 12, 2019.
Early polling shows that Britain is trending back towards its traditional two-party tendencies. The Conservatives and Labour are back on top, after a period in the summer (during the end of Theresa May's star-crossed regime) when Brexit and then the Liberal Democrats were on top.
YouGov (10-29-19) has (Westminster voting intention):
Conservative 36%
Labour 23%
Lib. Dem. 18%
Brexit 12%
Green 6%
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1189142458250285059
Opinium (10/23-25/19) has this
Conservative 40%
Labour 24%
Lib. Dem. 15%
Brexit 10%
https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1189299599334367233
People are pointing out that 36% is a pretty anemic figure for a party that's hoping for a parliamentary majority. Which is probably true.
But the idea is to come in first in a majority of parliamentary constituencies, isn't it? As I understand it, that only requires a plurality of votes in the district, not a majority.
Labour is only polling 23% in the YouGov poll and 24% in Opinium. They seem to have lost a large proportion of their voters to the Liberal Democrats and to the Greens. The Conservatives have lost voters to the Brexit party, but not as dramatically. Boris Johnson has succeeded in attracting a lot of Conservative voters back who couldn't stomach Theresa May during the summer. Labour has made no move to unload Corbyn which might win back some Lib. Dem. voters. And some of the remaining Brexit party voters are going to be coming from Labour constituencies in places like northern England that voted Leave and might be significantly more socially conservative than the trendy Labour party leadership down there in London. (Not unlike what we are seeing with the democrats here in the United States.)
Even though the British two party system might not have broken down entirely, things still seem unusually fluid. I still think that we are in a period of historical political reorganization in both the US and UK, with whole new voting coalitions forming in both countries while the traditional political parties scramble to keep up.
These are interesting times.
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