And here it is;
That’s a Liberal Democrat majority of 1,771 on a turnout of 52.8%.
So, time to get back to those county campaigns with a spring in your step. I’ll leave the last word to Greg Mulholland…
Right fellow Liberal Democrats, I want you to get #libdemandproud trending. Bad news for the old media barons, they don’t rule any more!
— Greg Mulholland MP (@GregMulholland1) March 1, 2013
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11 Comments
I’m glad beer baccy and crumpet beat the Christians. But not as glad as I am that Mike won
I’ll be the first to admit it – I was wrong.
Congratulations to Mr Thornton
Congratulations to Mr Thornton and the Lib Dem team.
Kippers for breakfast?
Congratulations to Mike Thornton for an impressive win.
I wonder, however, who would have won the seat if it had been contested under AV?
The roar in the Eastleigh office when the words “Thirteen Thousand…” were uttered was unbelievable.
Congrats to Mike and Eastleigh are very fortunate to have such a great candidate
Also shows you can’t smear your way through the ballot box!
I would exercise some caution about “smearing” after all the main person who has been on the news over the past week, giving Interviews and statements to the press has been one of the alleged victims of the sexual harassment, who was a Liberal democrat activist.
The media have been running stories on the running commentary that she has been providing.
I think the party will run a risk of failing to learn lessons from the alleged allegations made by these women, if the party starts to put all this media attention that it got, as a “smear campaign” it would be failing to give the respect to these women that they rightly deserve which was clearly lacking in the past and forced them into the position of going public in the first place.
Congrats to lib dems on winning. As a Labour supporter I don’t think the allegations were a smear but the timing of them a week before the by election was suspicious.
There appeared to have been several candidates including an anti gay marriage stance as part of their platform, notably the Tory, UKIP and Christian Party candidates, but the only candidate standing solely in this basis was the Independent Danny Stupple, who polled significantly better than the other fringe candidates. Does anyone know why he polled so relatively well?
Congratulations to Mike and the Eastleigh party.
The harassment allegations were simply more newsworthy because of the election. IMHO.
Proves that good local involvement can with huge effort overcome Perty messups, perhaps. Having watched the ups and downs over years, it might be worth remembering that the ‘coalition’ parties both lost 15-16% of their earlier showing (I am sure someone can correct my math if I’m wrong?) while UKIP shot up; and we “won” on about a third of the votes cast and much less as a proportion of the electorate – pretty shaky by even AV standards, let alone PR. Hardly a triumph for our radical views of reforms needed to achieve democracy, but OK if you believe a small *balancing” party should dominate the outcome in spite of larger masses of votes against on all sides?