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Notes -
If you are a typical Motte-poster (i.e. under 50 and educated), the people you knew who voted Tory at the last election are likely to be highly atypical of the people across the country who voted Tory. The only person I know who falls into that category and is happy to discuss politics is my mother-in-law who is a more stereotypical Leave/Tory voter (non-graduate Boomer, self-identifies as working class despite enjoying an affluent retirement due to Boomer privilege). She is also voting Reform, but for the rather more straightforward reason that the Tories are a bunch of lying incompetent expletive deleteds who need to be thrown out.
The tl;dr version of any discussion of the issues in this election is the shockingly bad record of the current Conservative government that even the columnists at conservativehome.com are struggling to defend. Rishi Sunak's problem isn't that he is losing votes to Reform by being a closet Lib Dem or losing votes to the Lib Dems by being a closet Faragite, it is that he is so bad at governing that he hasn't delivered any agenda at all, and so bad at comms that the electorate can't tell if the agenda he failed to deliver is a Lib Dem one or a Faragite one.
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