My post on tactical voting at the local and devolved elections 2026:
blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandp...
No evidence of effective anti-Reform tactical switching by the left, so 50% of Reform gains were in places were most votes were for parties of the left....
.. which probably tells us that an important, untold story of the results we're seeing today might be about changes in turnout.
Even with survey data, this would be a very difficult story to tell, but it’s important to keep this in mind when trying to assess where the votes actually went!
2/2
Notable how much this year's local results for Con+Lab were favourably skewed by London's elections falling this year
Proportional seat change
Lab
London: -40%
Unitaries: -69%
Districts: -73%
Counties: -73%
Metros: -75%
Con
London: +1%
Metros: -49%
Districts: -49%
Unitaries: -57%
Counties: -76%
Nerding out
The most reasoned and reasonable thing I’ve read so far on the locals. By my Nuffield colleagues @profjanegreen.bsky.social and @martamiori.bsky.social
This crossed my mind a lot when looking at the locals in 2025, where the raw votes in many wards suggested either significant switching from left to right, or Reform gaining non-voters and Labour voters staying home.
The individual-level data then showed that intra-bloc switching was low...
1/2
What have we learnt - that’s actually new - from today’s results? Not much! But here’s our summary:
www.itv.com/news/2026-05...
@martamiori.bsky.social @itvnews.bsky.social
Steve Fisher
We would be better off without the data. Not only are constituency polls deeply unreliable, but if they have any influence on the outcome, that a) is extremely inappropriate and b) will skew our understanding of British politics.
drmatthewbarnfield.substack.com/p/if-polls-p...
Marta Miori
I spent way too long this weekend correlating 81 census variables with local election results, so you don't have to.
Enjoy! datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QQQ3D/7/
