Today’s election day across the pond. The election was called just a month ago (Apr 6). It’s a parliamentary election – in other words, the winner is the party with a majority of seats in the UK lower house.
This is one of those rare UK elections where the outcome is rather uncertain. The betting is still on a “hung parliament” where no party gets a majority, though it’s still quite possible that the Conservatives (sometimes also known as Tories) will get a majority.
(X posted at Daily Kos)
Update – unfortunate exit poll rumors – http://www.politicshome.com/uk…
OTOH, turnout is supposedly around 70%, much better than the 61% in ’05, which should benefit the Liberal Democrats.
At the last election (2005), the seat totals were:
Labour: 349
Conservative: 210
Liberal Democrat: 62
Others: 29
That was based on the following overall vote:
Labour: 36.1%
Conservative: 33.2%
Liberal Democrat:22.6%
Others: 8.0%
Currently, there are 650 seats up for election, so a majority is 326. If memory serves, about 18 seats are in N. Ireland, and the major parties don’t contest those seats.
There have been three debates between the leaders – the first time there have been debates in a UK general election. The first debate essentially elevated Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats to a status equivalent to that of the other leaders. While the other debates were less conclusive, David Cameron, Tory leader, got a positive push from the third and final debate.
Loosely speaking, Labour is the leftist party, the Conservatives are the right-wing party, and the Liberal Democrats are in the middle. But that’s just a very loose comparison.
Many Conservative policies seem to resemble those of moderate Democrats here. While the traditional Conservative color is blue, they’ve taken a green tinge, on their website, and in some of their policies.
Many Liberal Democrat policies (and yes, they don’t use the -ic at the end) vary : while some seem rather free market, they are decidedly the antiwar party, especially w/r/t Iraq and Afghanistan.
Labour is the traditional left-wing party in the UK. AFAIK, their support is based on the stronger unions in the UK. But that constituency also resembles working class swing voters in the US in some ways. Some leftists have broken off of Labour because of their pro-war stance, and have formed a smaller party called Respect.
As for election projections, I like the UK Polling Watch site at http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/b… . Based on a “so-called” Uniform National Swing (UNS), they’re projecting the following seat totals, based on their poll of polls:
Conservative: 274
Labour: 264
Liberal Democrat: 81
Respect: 14
They’ve been monitoring what our own Nate Silver calls a “Nerdfight” with at least four rounds. The essence is based on variations on the UNS, based in part on regional UK polls. Nate’s projecting:
Conservative: 312
Labour: 204
Liberal Democrat: 103
He has a range of scenarios at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com…
My own personal guess, as Labour has quite a favorable advantage based on the way the UK has been gerrymandered:
Conservative: 299
Labour: 220
Liberal Democrat: 101
(In other words, I’m guessing that the Liberal Democrats will take some Conservative seats where Labour is not competitive, esp in the S & W of Britain.)
The UK polling report suggests that UK exit polls were spot on w/r/t Labour seats in the ’05 election, so we should have some idea where the election is going at 10p UK time (2p Pacific). I’ll try to remember to update then.