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If every Reform voter had voted Tory the result would have been Con 303, Lab 268.
This seems to be based on the very simplistic (and rather unlikely) assumption that all movement of votes was just from the Tories to Reform.
Well yes, the clue is in the statement "if every Reform voter had voted Tory".
The point of the thought experiment, that some people seem to be missing, is that even if every Reform vote counted for the Tory in that constituency the Tories still wouldn't have won enough seats to form a majority Government (303 is less than the 326 required).
So the Tories didn't do this badly purely because of Reform splitting their vote, the Tories completely shit the bed on their own too.
Greenbank-
That's where you went with it, not the OP:
Starmer is a lucky bystander during a collapse in the Tory vote and nothing he did had any tangible effect on Labour's vote share.
Distance travelled is not a definitive measure of effort required to achieve it, as anybody cycling through Croydon can testify. "Your pedalling is having no tangible effect." "If I wasn't pedalling, I'd be going backwards!".
itsbruce
This seems to be based on the very simplistic (and rather unlikely) assumption that all movement of votes was just from the Tories to Reform. That really doesn't seem to be the case. Labour took at least some votes from the Tories, Reform didn't just take votes from the Tories (some were from Labour) and so on and so on.