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WI: Labour comes out against Brexit

Hexham voted remain seems strange...

Assuming it's accurate, I imagine it was very close. However like the other midlands and north Tory Remain seats you can see, I suspect it's just a function of an area knowing a certain amount of money and education and consequently a certain type of Tory voter. I find Harrogate voting Remain very predictable for instance.
 
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The obvious conclusion would be that Labour loses a load of Leave-voting seats the next election, but the trouble is the lack of any credible alternative for people to vote for in them; UKIP never were that, regardless of what the meedja thought, and while it would be a black swan for the Tories to break through in the face of deepseated attitudes, 2017 OTL demonstrated that they completely failed to take advantage of this by actually recruiting credible candidates.

A national 'Labour Leave' type party might spring up, but where from? Or there might be dozens of Blaenau Gwent Peoples' Voices type groups popping up everywhere with variable levels of organisation and success.

The actual candidate makes very little difference these days against an incumbent, it makes somewhat more of a difference in a by-election or in what the Americans call an open seat.

I have been watching the fallout from 2017 quite carefully, I think the only cases where the local Tories are blaming the candidate are Newcastle under Lyme and Darlington - and Darlo was a long established candidate.

Quite simply, if committed Labour Leave voters felt that strongly, they would either vote UKIP or stay at home, but more likely they would convince themselves that the leadership really wanted to Leave.

There might be some Labour Leave type splits, but their effect would be more on the Forward Wales level than Blaenau Gwent Peoples' Voice.
 
The actual candidate makes very little difference these days against an incumbent, it makes somewhat more of a difference in a by-election or in what the Americans call an open seat.
I mean, yes, but things as silly as them not having an address in the constituency on the ballot. Generic fill-in-blanks literature that shouts 'copy-paste another one for constituency no. 53 we have never heard of and call it a day'. A general impression of 'we're not really trying, we're just going through the motions as usual' rather than 'look, we're taking this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where people might actually consider voting for us seriously, look how seriously we're taking it'. I mean the tone of the whole campaign as well as the candidate.
 
One thought, but it might make Labour more open to quietly supporting other parties candidates in seats they’ve got no chance in and vice versa if they felt that strongly about remain.
 
I mean, yes, but things as silly as them not having an address in the constituency on the ballot. Generic fill-in-blanks literature that shouts 'copy-paste another one for constituency no. 53 we have never heard of and call it a day'. A general impression of 'we're not really trying, we're just going through the motions as usual' rather than 'look, we're taking this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where people might actually consider voting for us seriously, look how seriously we're taking it'. I mean the tone of the whole campaign as well as the candidate.

Whilst I have been guilty of promoting hyper-localism at times, the number of normies who actually look at the addresses in ballot papers is probably fairly low. Opposition candidates can make non-residence an issue and it does have an effect, but it's not a big as effect as we like to pretend it is, where it tends to get real traction is when an outside replaces a thought to be decent local candidate (Blaenau Gwent, or for a less effect Bromsgrove or Stratford - although some of that was racism) or there's an absolute parachute like Shaun Woodward. Some people actually want the smart young person from outside. However, some of the Tory choices were a bit odd and I think that resounded somewhat, but not just the parachutes, I know BG was very annoyed about the candidate in Halifax and he was a local candidate.

The copy and paste literature thing is not something that normies notice too much because unlike some of us involved in the retail end, they only get to see their local literature. What sunk them was the manifesto and the campaign and there your perceptions are bang on, also they couldn't react quickly enough to the undecideds breaking for Corbyn.
 
The copy and paste literature thing is not something that normies notice too much because unlike some of us involved in the retail end, they only get to see their local literature. What sunk them was the manifesto and the campaign and there your perceptions are bang on, also they couldn't react quickly enough to the undecideds breaking for Corbyn.
Right, I don't think I'm explaining myself well here--I don't mean normies know that the literature is the same leaflet as every other seat in the county with fill-in-blanks, I mean the perceptible sense that they're being shouted at by a bloke with a megaphone in Buckinghamshire who once looked up where Bishop Auckland is in a 1993 copy of the Yellow Pages. You can generally smell that without being able to put your finger on it, like one can spot TLs written by people who don't know what they're talking about concerning a subject even if that subject only comes up in passing.
 
Presumably it would be the end of class based voting, for one election anyway.

On class voting in 2017 Ipsos and Yougov got quite different results.

Yougov had very mild class based voting, with the Tories 8 points ahead among AB and Labour 3 points ahead among DE, but Labour winning C1 and the Tories crushing it in C2.

Ipsos by contrast had the Tories 10 points ahead among AB, C1 and C2 both having a Tory 3 point lead, and Labour ahead 9 points among DE.

Labour coming out for Remain would have weakened this class based voting even more, perhaps erasing it entirely, and seeing the main brake between the Tories and Labour being even more about Age.

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/06/13/how-britain-voted-2017-general-election/

https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2017-election
 
I don't know about seats - but surely the key is that the ideological milieu would be fundamentally different?
If there was an election (and its not guaranteed) it would be de facto the second Brexit Referendum. Which probably means greater voter engagement, more bitterness, anger, and polarisation.
 
Of course, the BES has actually already done some work on this, as they call it, counterfactual. Their conclusion was Nah.

I skimmed it - does it say where those mirror shifts are concentrated? As the Thande map demonstrates, the Labour Leave vote is very concentrated in seat terms. It's hard not to believe that even a 'give and take' vote shift isn't still a net loss for Labour in seat terms.
 
My feel is this is almost impossible to accurately model, without going full MRP like the YouGov model.

First off - just because Labour-held seats voted Leave doesn't mean most Labour voters in those seats voted Leave. Or vice versa, for that matter. In fact, looking quickly at a YouGov from June 2017, on the whole, you'd look at 65/35 Remain/Leave on average from Labour 2015 voters. And about the reverse from Tory 2015 voters.

But this would vary hugely across the country, and between constituencies. (You'd expect lots more in London to be remainy, for example)

But grab generic constituency with, say, Lab 55, Con 35, LD 5, Others 5 on a turnout of 65% which voted LEAVE 53/REMAIN 47 on a turnout of 75%. With an election turnout of 65%, this would be (out of the entire electorate): Lab 36, Con 23, LD 3, Others 3, DNV 35
With a referendum turnout of 75%, this would be (again out of the entire electorate) about 40 Leave, 35 Remain, 25 DNV

If the party voters broke as expected, you'd get 23,8,2,1 going Remain (=34); 13, 15, 1, 2 going Leave (31)
So we can guess that the non-GE-voters broke 9-1 for Leave (which fits both polling and anecdotal evidence). *


So - that's the Brexit side of things to start with. Then you have to look at the Remain/Leave voters and ask:
- Which Labour Leavers would ever contemplate voting Tory? Worst case, they stay at home.
- Which Tory Remainers would ever contemplate voting Labour? Worst case, they stay at home.
- How many Labour voters put Brexit high enough on their internal preference sheet that they'd override the rest of the prospectus (eg "I've been waiting for a true left-wing Labour leader for decades now, I love Corbyn, the tax and nationalisation agenda speak to something deep in me... but fuck it, I'll vote for May and the Tories because Brexit")?**
- How many Tory voters have Brexit high enough on their internal preference sheet that they'd override the rest of the prospectus (e.g. "I'm totally terrified by Corbyn and McDonnell, they'd devastate me and the economy, fucking hell Venezuala, but... well, Brexit, right, so I'll vote for them anyway")?**
- How are they distributed between constituencies?

My instinct is you're looking at net shifts of maybe single figure number of constituencies right on the edge, but that's sheer gut instinct and very possibly subject to my internal biases.

* Simplified, because some voters in the GE won't have voted in the Referendum, for example, but the overall thrust is about right
** The concept that Brexit doesn't override all other considerations is anathema on the Lib Dems Newbies group, but I can be dirty and admit it here...
 
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