Author Archives: Paul Walter

I’m watching Election night on CNN, which provides a very pithy, statistical coverage of the results.

My first takeaways are not encouraging for Kamala Harris. Mind you we are very short of tea leaves to read so far.

A Florida county which Biden won by several points is showing Harris trailing Biden’s number.

In Georgia, it’s very early in the counting process. Independents, which make up 31% of the electorate, are going clearly for Trump, whereas Biden won the independents in 2020.

From the University of Bath website:

On the coalition negotiations in May 2010, William Hague is reported to have told his wife, Ffion: ‘I think I’ve just killed the Liberal Democrats.’

Well, William, it seems we have come back to life.

Some personal reflections on the campaign, if I may:

Firstly, I never thought we’d win Newbury outside of a by-election again after dear David Rendel was our MP from 1993 to 2005. During the campaign it became clear that the Tories had, more or less, given up. Two Tory stakeboards were spotted. They didn’t have a stakeboard campaign – this from the party who used to put up hundreds of posters in fields full of sheep throughout the constituency. The Tory GOTV effort on polling day was virtually non-existent. But well done to Lee Dillon and the whole Newbury Lib Dem team for years and years of hard work to get Lee into the House of Commons! It gives me goose-bumps just to say that.

I’ve been involved in general election campaigns in Newbury since 1987.

I haven’t dared make a forecast about whether we might win the seat this time.

But on the ground, something extraordinary happened. The Tories gave up. They didn’t put any posters up (there were just a couple isolated Tory posters where individuals put up old posters on their property). And on polling day, there was only a very thin Tory knocking up operation in evidence.

Fingers crossed for Lee and team. The Newbury result is due at around 7am.

The outstanding LibDem results are coming so thick and fast it is difficult to keep up. I’m just going “Blimey – we’ve won XXX with a majority of YYY thousands” all the time.

But just hold on, for a moment, to the Wokingham result. We won with a majority of over 8k!!! Well done Clive Jones and team! This is the result of huge effort over many years!

I’ve woken up after a four hour sleep.

The size of our majorities (eg Cheadle – well done Tom and team!) is just extraordinary. And we are appearing to win seats where I didn’t know we had targets.

Chichester for example. We won it with a majority of over 12k. Looking at my target seats list, we overturned a Tory majority of over 19k and only 4 out of the 13 pre-election MRP surveys said we would win it. So it was very low down on our list of expectations.