The 5.8% increased CON GE17 vote share would’ve been a big deal if only LAB hadn’t gone up 9.8%
It’s straw-clutching to pretend this was a positive
It has started. Senior Tories at their conference in Manchester such as Liam Fox trying to gloss over TMay’s loss of majority on June 8th by arguing that the party increased its vote share by 5.8% at the general election.
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This is a nonsense misleading figure unless you mention as well that the main opposition party’s votes went up by four points more – hence the loss of seats and the majority.
I’ve published the above chart before which shows the changes in the CON+LAB vote aggregate since Edward Heath’s great victory in 1970. This, I’d argue, is a better way of presenting the data particularly as the big electoral move in June was a return to two party politics.
Remember all those pre-election projections when people were looking at the aggregate CON+UKIP GE15 in key marginals and arguing that the purple vote would almost all move to the blues. I won’t embarrass people by naming names but this formed one of the main narratives about the election.