Learning from the May elections

One of the most important results for us in the May elections were the constituency wins in the Scottish Parliament elections, as they blocked the SNP’s road to a majority and another independence referendum. Those wins, quite literally, played a major part in keeping our country together.

Alongside other successes to celebrate and the lessons from them, there are also lessons we must learn from the places where the results did not match our hopes and efforts.

CEO Mike Dixon’s explainer email to members (sent on 6 July) expands on this in more detail and what questions the results pose for our strategy. 

There are some additional aspects of the results worth highlighting. We did very well at incumbency, that is holding what we already had and at strengthening further our local government base in the backyards of our MPs.

In fact, our successful defence rate in the English local elections was the best for any party, with nearly 9-in-10 of the Lib Dem seats up for election being successfully defended:

Proportion of seats successfully defended
Lib Dem: 87%
Reform: 81%
Green: 70%
Conservative: 51%
Labour: 41%

This is, I believe, a record high retention rate for us. 

Of the seats that were not successfully defended, nearly three-quarters were lost to Reform. Of course, that doesn’t mean that voters necessarily simply switched between Lib Dem and Reform in those wards, but it does show how beating Reform to the winning post is an increasingly important part of the party’s challenge and opportunity.

It is not just that liberalism is philosophically opposed to populism, it is Liberal Democrat campaigning that is so often the effective ballot box rival to Reform. 

That success at incumbency along with net gains means in fact that in Liberal Democrat councils, we won 88% of the seats up for election this time around.

Another way of looking at this is how the party did in the council contests in wards which fall within Parliamentary constituencies held by Liberal Democrat MPs. 

In those wards, the Lib Dems won 82% of the seats, making a net gain of over 100 seats. That means we also made net gains outside our held Parliamentary constituencies too, though at a much lower rate and with a much more varied picture.

There will be many lessons to learn in particular from the latter part of that, particularly the way that in some places a long-running target ward campaign hoping to gain seats fell short of a Green Party campaign with very little apparent on-the-ground activity.

Mike Dixon’s email goes into that in more, and important, detail. (If you are a member and didn’t receive it, just pop a message to help@libdems.org.uk so the team can sort out what is happening with your party emails.)

There is a mini-cottage industry of reviews now underway in the party, such as dedicated reviews for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections, and including more operational reviews, such as the work the party is currently doing on reviewing key data systems.

Lessons are also starting to emerge from analysing our own data, such as the impact of sustained canvassing on our results, which prompts the question about how we can better support the growth of canvassing teams across more of the country.

Some of the questions the results pose for us are about party strategy, and so it’s helpfully timed that the once-per-Parliament party strategy review will be running this year, intended to come to a motion proposed for Autumn Federal Party Conference.  (Conference details, including how to participate remotely, are here.)

Parliamentary candidate progress

We also have the lessons from previous reviews to continue to implement, particularly getting the new structures for our Parliamentary candidate approval and selection processes running. An important impetus behind this was the evidence of the key role that PPCs can play in building up our organisation outside our target seats - and so the value in providing more training and support while also not leaving so many of those selections to right at the very end of a Parliament.

The new staff team to support our candidates process is now in place, headed by Claire Haliwell, who is returning to working for the party. The work is overseen by the Joint Candidates Sub Committee (JCSC) which is chaired by Alison Suttie. Later this year a regular cycle of reporting will start up, with key statistics that can be shared across the many different parts of the party that are involved in the candidate processes.

The FCEC will also regularly review these reports as the JCSC falls within our remit.

Thank you

That progress on our candidate system is only possible due to the combined work of our staff and volunteers. The election results too, although easy to talk about in terms of decimal points and spreadsheets, are the collected result of thousands of individual human stories. Whether the story you were in ended happily or not this time, thank you for your efforts.