Earlier in the week, on a whim, I collated figures for every vote cast so far this year,* by party, expecting either the Tories or Labour to lead by a decent margin. The actual result surprised me – prior to this week’s by-elections, the Lib Dems were leading Labour by over 800 votes despite standing in barely over half the contests. Even after those by-elections, which were decidedly mixed for the Lib Dems (1 hold, 1 gain, 2 losses, 1 no-show), we’re still leading the pack, 500 or so votes ahead of Labour.

I hadn’t planned to share this graph again for a while – it’s nice, but doesn’t really compare to the cumulative by-election changes graphs myself Brian and I have been preparing since the summer. But, next week we have six by-elections – one on Tuesday (!) in Basingstoke and five on Thursday. Two of those are Parliamentary, in Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland. You may have heard of them. Both are in “Labour heartlands” where we “can’t win”.
Here’s the thing, though: we are. We’ve stood in five fewer elections than Labour this year, and we’re still beating them. Labour’s largest win so far is smaller than our second-largest, their second-largest is only 5 votes more than our third-largest – and our third-largest win was Sunderland/Sandhill, which made jaws drop up and down the country.