Scottish National Party Nicola Sturgeon was one of the big winners of the night,
with her party taking 40 of Labour's 41 Scottish seats
Across the pond, both the Labour Party and British pollsters had a terrible election night on Thursday. The final polling averages (which included numbers from a
lot of different outfits)
called the race a dead heat at 34 percent each for Labour and the Conservatives, which in practice would have meant an end to Tory rule because the incumbents wouldn't have had enough seats to retain a majority, even via coalition. While the polls showed that Labour wouldn't have won a majority either, they could have counted on informal backing from the Scottish National Party, which loathes Tory Prime Minister David Cameron.
Instead, the Conservatives won the overall popular vote by 6.5 points, taking 36.9 percent to just 30.4 for Labour. That led to a 28-seat increase for the Tories, something almost no one was predicting, giving them 331 overall—an outright majority in the 650-seat chamber. At the same time, Ed Miliband's Labour lost 24 seats, taking the party from 256 to 232. The fate of Ed Balls, one of Labour's most prominent members, underscores how awful the night went. Before the polls closed, Balls looked like he was on track to become the next chancellor of the Exchequer, a powerful post similar to Treasury secretary here. Instead, Balls lost his seat to the Tories in a shocker. Unsurprisingly, Miliband resigned as party leader the day after the election.
But as badly as things went for Labour, the Conservatives' former partners, the Liberal Democrats, fared far worse. The Lib Dems had long been expected to lose a significant number of seats, but few predicted they would shrink from 56 to a pitiful eight. The party's leader, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, managed to hold his seat in the face of a Labour offensive, but he unsurprisingly stepped down as head of what was left of the Lib Dems. The party had long occupied a mostly barren middle space between the two big parties, but presumably, anti-Tory voters deserted them for putting Cameron in power, and pro-Tory voters probably figured they were just better off voting for actual Tories.
But the Tories weren't the only big winners on Thursday. Head below the fold for more.
The SNP, meanwhile, saw their fortunes head in the opposite direction from the Liberal Democrats' and surged from just six seats to 56 under leader Nicola Sturgeon, mostly by crushing Labour. This explosion was fueled by extreme resentment over opposition on the part of the big three "Westminster parties" (Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems) to last year's Scottish independence referendum, but since Labour had by far the strongest presence in Scotland, the SNP's gains were taken out of their hide.
What makes these numbers even more impressive is that the SNP only runs candidates in Scotland and captured all but three seats there—but the SNP may also have affected elections south of the border, too. That's because some English voters may have been put off by the prospect of even a loose alliance between Labour and the SNP, something Labour was definitely concerned about since Miliband had taken pains to publicly distance his party from the SNP.
Fortunately, the xenophobic UK Independence Party failed to make gains and actually lost one of its two seats, and their leader, Nigel Farage, stepped down as well. But the news isn't as good as you might think. UKIP saw its vote share surge 9.5 percent compared to the last election in 2010, by far the biggest gain for any party. But thanks to Britain's "first past the post" system, where the leading vote-getter in any seat wins no matter how few votes he or she takes, the party struggled badly to win any pluralities. Right now, the UKIP's support is geographically diffuse, but in the future, if they can build up any regional strength, they could become dangerous.
So what the hell happened? There's two ways of looking at that question: 1) Why did Labour do so poorly and 2) why were the polls so far off? For the former, if Labour's internals matched the public polls, then it's hard to say they did much wrong, since they looked like they were in a good position to win. (Put another way, why would you change your campaign tactics if your polls are positive?) Given how stunned Labour appeared on Thursday night, this was probably the case. A common critique on the left is that Labour failed to present a sufficiently liberal alternative to Tory austerity, but there isn't much evidence to support that thesis. An analysis of Labour's failure will require a much deeper examination of why the party did not connect with as many voters as it thought it would.
As for the latter, that's a similarly difficult question. FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten thinks there's some indication that pollsters may have been guilty of "herding"—that is, weighting their results to match those of other firms, lest they look like outliers. Indeed, one outfit, Survation, admitted to just that: The company's CEO claims that his final poll had the Tories up 37-31 on Labour, but he says he "chickened out" of publishing it because it appeared to be "out of line" with the consensus.
That's not entirely true, though. There was one firm that did release final numbers that were very close, online pollster SurveyMonkey. Their last poll had the Conservatives up 34-28, the same spread as the final Tory margin. It's particularly notable because traditional telephone pollsters performed somewhat better than their online counterparts, but still, the UK polling industry has to do some serious soul-searching to find out what went wrong—just like Labour.