6 ways to judge the Liberal Democrat election results (LDN#209)
Welcome to Lib Dem Newswire #209, which is a special edition ahead of the May elections, looking at six key yardsticks for judging the Liberal Democrat election results.
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Good luck to everyone working hard to ensure the Lib Dems have a cracking set of results.
If you’d like to get in touch with the local Lib Dem team to offer some extra help, you can find the contact details here or find an Action Day to take part in here.
Best wishes,
Mark
P.S. If you haven’t yet had time to read it, last time’s edition is available online: Q. Are we delivering too many leaflets? A. No, and here’s why…
6 key things to watch for as the results come in
1. Does the Lib Dem tortoise keep on trundling forward?
The Lib Dems have made net gains for seven rounds of local elections in a row, the longest winning streak in the party’s history. Will that continue this May and make it eight in a row?
Along the way, there have been all sorts of excitements among other parties soaring one year and plummeting another. But Lib Dem progress has just kept on grinding along year after year. A tortoise to other people’s hares, perhaps. Will that continue?
2. Is the party system being remade?
I’ve previously crunched the numbers to show how in local council by-elections we’ve been moving to a new two-party system, with the Lib Dems and Reform being the top two parties. Hence those two parties are also making the most gains in council by-elections.
But with this set of local elections there’s a much bigger tipping point approaching: who are the two biggest parties in terms of councillors? Currently that is Labour and the Conservatives.
Do the Lib Dems take another step forward this time towards overtaking one or both of these parties, and if so how big is the step?
(The Lib Dems have already overtaken the Conservatives in terms of councils run.)
The crucial point about this yardstick is it uses numbers which normally get neglected in media coverage, namely how many councillors in total (i.e. including those not up for election this year) each party ends up with after the elections.
So look beyond the headline figures to judge this and remember that neither the Liberal Democrats nor, before them, the Alliance or the Liberal Party have ever been the top party in local government in the era of equal voting rights for men and women, and only briefly (in the mid-1990s) one of the top two. But if the trends of last year and by-elections since continue, not only might the Lib Dems become one of the top two, but aiming to be the largest may even be a realistic aim.
3. Are the Lib Dems expanding from areas of strength?
Surrey will be an important test of one strand of the current Lib Dem theory of growth: establish a strong council base somewhere, turn that into Parliamentary gains, then expand into new areas nearby.
The 2024 general election saw step two being achieved spectacularly in the county. Can that success now spread across the county more widely?
4. Are small teams growing in (former) Labour heartlands?
Brent and Preston are two touchstone examples for this, both traditional Labour-facing areas where the local teams have been growing from low points earlier this century.
This pair therefore epitomise another strand of the current Lib Dem theory of growth: that it comes from the bottom up, achieved by helping small teams grow election by election.
5. Can the Lib Dems cut through in multi-party competition?
Birmingham epitomises the complicated multi-party nature of modern politics, as Conservatives, Greens, Reform and independents all have reasons to hope for progress in this Labour-run city. It has big wards and it has many wards (69 wards, with 101 councillors).
That might all add up to an unpromising backdrop for the Lib Dems for whom progress normally rests on intensive campaigning in a small area to show that the party is one of the two parties with a chance of winning.
So Birmingham is a good test of how far the party can stretch that model and whether gains can be made there too.
6. Scotland and Wales
There is plenty of nuance about judging success in the council elections. But it’s more straightforward for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections: the larger the seat tally, the more successful the result.
But don’t draw conclusions too quickly
The bulk of Lib Dem good news in the council elections is likely to come in late, between 5pm and 7pm on Friday evening. (And perhaps even later, as if anything, expected election declaration times tend to slip.)
Similarly, in Scotland and Wales the results will not come until well into Friday as there is no overnight counting in either of those contests.
Two successes already banked
We already have some hard data on two aspects of Lib Dem growth: candidates and canvassing.
The percentage of vacancies contested by Lib Dem candidates is up by seven percentage points this time around compared with four years ago (the most comparable previous year in the cycle). That includes the best local election candidate showing in London since 1986. There’s still more work to do to match and exceed other parties, but that’s significant progress.
A different sign of the health of grassroots campaigning is the volume of canvassing, which so far this year is up 27% compared with four years ago. (Although four years ago there were no Scottish Parliament or Welsh Senedd elections, there were all-out local government elections in both countries.)
Even after the 2024 general election, there simply aren’t enough held and target Parliamentary seats for that sort of volume and growth of activity to be coming simply from them. It is a sign of broader grassroots strength.
Don’t miss out
The next edition of Lib Dem Newswire will look at the results once we have them, so make sure you don’t miss out and sign up now if you are not already a subscriber:
Elsewhere from me
Earlier this week in Parliament I raised the daisy-chain of verbal briefings that took place over the vetting results for Peter Mandelson.
The more senior the person, the more their crucial role, the more removed they were from seeing the relevant paperwork: we need a complete overhaul of how vetting is done for key posts:
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And finally…
Urgent memo to Alison Bennett. It is meant to be a TWO horse race.
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Thank you and best wishes,
Mark
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