THERE will be many storylines coming out of tonight's General Election count. Here are five things to keep an eye on:

  1. How bad will the Conservatives’ defeat be? If, as seems all but certain, the Conservatives are ousted from government after 14 years, what will the scale of that defeat look like? Labour’s loss of 60 seats in 2019 to fall to 202 was considered catastrophic for the party but, if the polls are to be believed, the Tories are unlikely to get anywhere near that number. From a starting point of 365 seats won in 2019, the loss of as many as 200 seats looks not just possible but likely. Some projections are even suggesting they might even struggle to reach 100 seats, which really would be a historic collapse for the dominant electoral force in British politics for the last decade-and-a-half and would trigger an existential crisis in the party – would a comeback from that position even be possible?
  2. Could Labour really win a thumping majority with a lower share of the vote than their 2017 defeat? As crazy as this sounds, it’s well within the realms of possibility, thanks to our winner-takes-all First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system which means the location of parties’ voters is all-important. In 2017, Labour defied the odds – and predictions of an electoral wipeout – to increase their vote share by 9.6%, their largest increase since 1945, and win 40.0% of the popular vote, far higher than in their election wins of 2001 and 2005, and only 0.7% below their vote share in their famous 1997 landslide. However, that translated to only 262 seats because the Conservatives won 42.3% of the vote, their highest vote share since way back in 1983. Nevertheless, analysts worked out that had Labour won just 2,227 votes in the correct places, they would have likely formed a government via a progressive alliance. While 2017 was relatively successful for Labour even in defeat, 2019 proved disastrous as the party lost 60 seats to finish on 202 – that said, its vote share of 32.1%, while a big drop from two years earlier, was still considerably higher than in the defeats of 2010 and 2015 when Labour ended up with many more seats, thanks to the quirks of FPTP. The last opinion polls for this election have put support for Labour at about 39%. If that turns out to be true, that will be a lower percentage of the vote than in 2017, but they are likely to end up with as many as 200 more seats than in that election, thanks to the complete collapse of support for the Conservatives, measured at just 21% in an average of recent polls – and considerably lower than that by some pollsters. If Labour manages to win 60-70% of seats on a vote share below 40% - as looks entirely possible – expect the calls for proportional representation to grow ever louder in the coming months.
  3. Will the two main parties’ combined vote share be the lowest in a century? Following on from point number two, if we add the projected vote shares of Labour and the Conservatives from the most recent polling, we arrive at 60%. This would be the lowest combined vote share for the two major parties in 106 years, in December 1918, just after the end of the First World War, when the combined Conservative and Labour vote share was 59.2%. By contrast, the two had an incredible vote share of 82.3% as recently as 2017, when they squeezed out the smaller parties highly successfully, perhaps in part due to how far apart they stood politically on a number of issues, leading to much clearer polarisation of voters. This could be a historic election for a number of smaller parties – we could see the Liberal Democrats making a serious comeback after taking a series of electoral beatings since becoming part of the coalition government in 2010, unseating a host of Conservatives in the south of England in the process; the Greens could see their highest ever vote share percentage and quadruple their number of seats, with polling suggesting their taking votes in particular from Labour’s left flank; and Reform UK, which was still called the Brexit Party at the last election in 2019, could win as much as 17% of the national vote if the polls are to be believed – in fact, some pollsters are even putting them above the Conservatives in national vote share – and win a number of seats, although again, the nature of First Past The Post means they are highly unlikely to win anything close to 17% of the seats up for grabs as, like the Greens, they support is largely spread across a large number of constituencies rather than concentrated in particular pockets where they would have a better chance of winning seats.
  4. Will turnout be very low? It’s been in the high 60s, percentage-wise, at recent elections but was as low as 59.4% as recently as 2001. There has been a lot of chat in the build-up of a certain degree of apathy from a large number of voters, who don’t feel that the main parties represent their interests. Will that prove to be the case and will we see a drop in turnout?
  5. Who will be the largest party in Scotland? Ever since the SNP’s historic landslide of Scottish seats in 2015 following the previous year’s Scottish independence referendum, winning 56 out of the possible 59 seats, this hasn’t really even been a question. Even the comparative low point of 2017 saw them still win 35 seats, comfortably an absolute majority of  the seats in Scotland, and they go into tonight having won 48 seats at the last election in 2019. But the party has had a very trying time of things over the last two years and has fallen significantly in the polls, at the same time as Labour have a spring in their step in Scotland for the first time in many years. The final average of polls for Scotland puts Labour narrowly ahead on 34.6% of the vote to 31.0% for the SNP – although the most recent individual poll gave the SNP a narrow lead, so it’s clearly incredibly close between the two parties. By contrast, the Conservatives, who actually finished ahead of Labour in Scotland at the last election in 2019, are currently polling down at 13.8% here and are likely in for a similarly tough night as is expected for them down south. But which of Labour and the SNP finishes with the most seats in Scotland is very much on a knife edge going into tonight and it could go either way. It will likely hinge on a handful of Labour-SNP marginals across the Central Belt, with Lothian East very much one of them.