Council Elections

There’s an interesting discussion over at the Political Betting website, using local election results to predict the General Election outcome.

The author of the original article, Sean Fear, states:

How then, have the parties performed since the start of the year? There have been 39 contests so far. The Conservatives have won 22 seats (a gain of 6), Labour 8 (a loss of 2), the Lib Dems 5 (No change) and Others 4 (a loss of 4); 4 of the Conservatives’ net gains have come from Independents and Plaid Cymru. Of these 39 seats, only 14 have been contested on both occasions by the three main parties.

My back of the envelope estimate, based on those 14 seats, is that the Conservative vote share is at about 37%, Labour at about 28%, and the Lib Dems at about 27%.

Putting those figures into the Electoral Calculus site, we get the following:

• Tory 309 seats
  
• Labour 225
  
• Lib Dems 80
  

Making the Tories 15 seats short of a majority

Later on, a commenter called Andy states:

There have been 246 local council by-elections since the general election, over a third of which changed hands

Con Held 82 Gained 33 Lost 21 net +12
Lab Held 40 Gained 20 Lost 18 net -2
Lib Held 28 Gained 20 Lost 21 net -1
Ind/Oth Held 10 Gained 13 Lost 26 net –13

Vote shares (change on previous)

Con 33.97% +3.38%
Lab 25.14% - 2.18%
Lib 28.17% +3.12%
Ind/Oth 12.71% -4.32%

Using the Electoral Calculus site, this gives the following:

• Tory 304 seats
  
• Labour 206
  
• Lib Dems 106
  

We end up with a Tory minority government (20 short of a majority). Interestingly (from my point of view anyway), one of the seats Labour lose to the Lib Dems is Burnley… Bye bye, Ms. Usher?

It’ll be interesting to see how the main local elections in May turn out.