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Originally Posted by Chris
Yeah …. I’m not convinced. Tactical voting almost never occurs to such a massive extent in British elections, and certainly not when the outcome is a mid-term by election that won’t affect the parliamentary arithmetic in the slightest. This is a huge vote against Boris Johnson and a very serious wake-up call for his party which must now decide if it wants him to continue as leader. But it isn’t an endorsement of the Labour Party in any way. There’s nothing in last night’s result that can possibly support your claim that Starmer is “electable”.
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I think it's hard to explain why this result breaks with the national polling so abruptly without anti-Tory voters tactically voting. We saw this happen Chesham and Amersham, we saw the reverse happening in Bexley.
It doesn't make any sense that Labour would lose 10 points on their 2019 result, one of their worse since the war, yet nationally be polling at some of their next numbers since they lost in 2010 whilst the Liberal Democrats outperform their national polling by quite some margin. Tactical voting is in play here. And it's more likely, not less likely, to happen in a by-election anyway. By-Elections tend to produce weirder results than the national election.