Thank you

From our low of 6 seats in 1959 through to our then peak of 63 in 2006, gaining 57 seats took 47 years. We’ve now gained 61 seats in just 5 years. It was an amazing team achievement, and we all should be proud of the roles we have played.

Perhaps the most amazing helper is our kind deliverer Geoff, who both campaigned locally and in a target seat, a mere 79 years(!) after he delivered his first leaflet as a very young deliverer in the 1945 general election.

Whether it was your first or your twenty-second general election, and whether you helped with leaflets, canvassing, money or in one of many other ways, thank you.

This is what you did:

A particular thanks too to those who worked so hard on campaigns that did not quite make it this time. Just missing out is always frustrating, and all the more so when so many others around you are celebrating. I hope though our other successes can give you hope that success will come in your area too in the years to come.

What happened

That photograph did not happen by accident. Although Rishi Sunak, and before him Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, gave us a helping hand, it was a result we created – deliberately, following a plan all through the Parliament.

We did so by breaking all previous records for the effectiveness of targeting.

Nor was this just due to split opposition votes, because the Lib Dem vote share in the seats we won was impressively high, as Patrick Dunleavy’s figures show:

1983 was the high point of the Alliance and previous attempts to break the two-party system in Westminster. Compared to then, we secured half the votes this time – but three times as many seats. In a political system where the currency of success is seats, that is quite the success.

Of course, the national campaign had an important part in that too. It was a national campaign focused on the voters and media outlets that most mattered for winning seats, and which caught the public’s imagination:

That image captures one of the important lessons from our 2019 election review: the importance of strong visual images to cut through a crowded media landscape and to reach a public often not that interested in the details of politics.

Though I suspect none of that review team – whose work was essential to guiding our work through the last Parliament – quite foresaw what visual images would be coming…

The response from voters came through clearly in the polls:

How it happened

There will be more lessons to digest as there is more time to hear feedback and analyse the evidence, both of what worked well and of what areas we need to work on for next time.

The broad picture though has some clear features. Success came from:

1. Concentrating on the issues that mattered most to voters;
2. Building strong teams in our most promising areas;
3. Explicitly targeting seat numbers rather than vote share – aiming to win seats where we could and to build up our organisational strength elsewhere;
4. Investing early in intensive support for our candidates and campaigners in our most promising areas;
5. Taking each round of elections seriously, with each important in its own right but also as a building block for the next too; and
6. Working together as one team, following a collective strategy based on what you, party members, decided at our conference.

That comes through in the reasons people gave pollster More in Common for voting Liberal Democrat: