Posted on 05/10/2015 10:17:09 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
It was both energizing and bracing to watch the election returns roll in here Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday — energizing because the unfolding story bore little resemblance to the polls and forecasts; bracing for the very same reason and for what that said about all the pre-election analysis.
Public polls — and they were many and often — predicted a wholly different result. What the country was told to expect was the second hung Parliament in a row, and the prospect of tortuous negotiations and maneuvering to construct a new government.
Instead, the Conservative Party under Prime Minister David Cameron produced a stunning victory, giving his party its first outright majority since the Tories yielded power to Tony Blair’s New Labor Party in 1997. Cameron didn’t call it the “sweetest victory” of all for him and the Conservatives for no reason. Rather than falling back in strength after five years in power as the head of a coalition government as might be expected, Cameron was able to enlarge his party’s numbers, to 331 seats in the 650-seat Parliament.
Cameron emerged politically and personally strengthened, if nonetheless left to deal with the huge challenges the election so aptly defined and highlighted, from the place of Scotland in what could be an increasingly divided United Kingdom, to Britain’s future place in the European Union and the world. With a slender majority and a potentially rebellious back bench, his leadership could be constantly tested as he tries to sort these out.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Wait, these are the same people who are telling us that Hillary will likely be the next president, right?
bfl
Wake up America!!!!
The lies of the liberal press have been exposed and shattered by the Tory victory.
Labour’s Axelrod- Campaign Slogan was:
“Vote for CHANGE
Vote for HOPE!”
What could possibly have gone wrong?
And according to all of the Social Media and Twitter polls, the Liberal Left coalition was going to win IN A LANDSLIDE!!!
Dey was ROBBED, I tells ya’!
Yup... all those polls that predict Hillary has an insurmountable advantage - they may or may not be true.
If Hillary believes she just can coast to the presidency the way Ed Miliband thought he could coast to the Prime Minister’s Office, she’s in for a rude awakening.
She and her party have placed great faith in the myth of her own inevitability. And yet nothing is inevitable in politics - or for that matter, in life.
The Left are besides themselves. How could this have happened? It’s just not fair. Future elections should be decided by polls rather than votes. It’s just too hard to control the outcome of actual votes.
Seems as though the Brits were intelligent enough to ask what Labor was going to change and what they should be hoping for. Unlike the American electorate in the last two presidential elections
Electoral Fracking causes Electoral Earthquakes.
Well, there’s certainly a lot of methane in UK liberals.
’ ust have been using the same pollsters who said GA was going to swing to blue in a big way last year. Or, maybe conservatives are wishing up to the fact that faux polls are a leftist tactic to keep conservatives from coming out to vote.
There are a lot of things that can skew polls. In the end only one poll counts.
Pre election assumptions...
Hmmm, where have we seen those before?
Oh yes, in the Liberal press. I wonder if Great Britain has a liberal press?
I don’t trust a single pre-election assumption published by the press.
Good point! Who trusts poll results these day except when they tell you what you want to hear?
The British press is in fact dominated by Conservative-supporting titles - the Murdoch papers and also the Express, Mail and Telegraph. (By Conservative-supporting I mean strongly supporting the Conservative Party.)
Okay, several questions here.
First of all, doesn’t Murdoch own some pretty Liberal papers outside the U. S.? I had thought he did.
Secondly, this premise that a big surprise occurred, does seem to imply the papers had predicted otherwise. When this happens in the U. S. it’s generally because the press tried to drum up support for the Leftist candidates by misrepresenting their true support prior to the election.
The two main Murdoch titles in the UK (Sun and Times) have dallied with Labour in the past but were solidly for the Tories this time. All the papers I mentioned spent the entire campaign attacking Labour in general, and Millband in particular, with all means at their disposal. They had absolutely no interest in faking Labour support. They’ve always had a personal thing about Milliband because of his support for press regulation after the phone-hacking scandal.
Only three of the national titles (Guardian, Independent and Mirror) backed Labour. Their combined circulation is very much less than that of the Tory press.
A possible preview of next year’s 2016 national elections in the USA.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.