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Notes -
If we're talking generic party preference polls, which I think is the UK analog for the listed poll, the US is still much more stable. If we take the Presidential popular vote margin as an indicator (though a bit faulty vs generic party preference, since personality matters, but presumably an overestimate of the real generic gap), we can see a maximum swing of 25% over four years, and that was after Nixon was impeached for Watergate (!), and a few other swings north of 20% also in the 60s, which was a major time in US history with civil rights, the Vietnam war and draft, and a ton of social unrest and violence. Since (and including) Reagan in 1984, we've seen mostly 5-10% swings. I was able to find a few links to actual generic party polling that goes back to 2012, and the largest generic ballot delta was 8% there, and it seems to roughly match within a few percent.
In contrast, we just saw a generic swing of +12 (if we're doing the actual 2019 election) to -21 in three years, for a delta of 33. Is the takeaway then that Brexit was actually earth-shattering politically? Is Brexit the UK's Vietnam?
Or (the more boring answer, but maybe just more true) is party affiliation in the UK simply unstable? I guess one explanation is simply that Reform "stole" all of the Conservative votes, that makes the totals more in line with at least the last 10 years of expected swings.
(In US-related news, a 2020 generic ballot polling average had Democrats up 7%, but 2024 the same generic ballot average is statistically tied. This looks absurdly bad for Biden.)
I don't see why the presidential popular vote is a better guide than the congressional margin, congressional margin is much closer to what is actually going on in parliamentary politics.
And I would say that Brexit is, in its own way, significantly worse than Vietnam. It depantsed the entire political class, as they were collectively found to have no plan to get the thing done or for what came after.
Well, the original poll that I posted and numbers I cited was from an opinion poll-of-polls of UK voters, not Parliament MP counts. I'm just comparing apples to apples here, with another similar poll-of-polls of US voters. Maybe a similar pattern exists for the House/Parliament, but since the next election hasn't happened yet, we don't have new MP counts to compare, so it's a moot point on that level. I guess we'll see! UK and US both use first past the post, right?
Yeah, maybe I undersold Brexit. I thought things would end up more or less becoming business as usual, but I guess that wasn't so much the case. It's interesting though, if Brexit was really the cause, there's clearly some sort of lag going on (as people sour on Brexit?) because the slide doesn't seem to have stopped with the completion of Brexit, other than a brief 3-month bump after formalization (end of 2020, right?)
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