{"id":1771,"date":"2013-05-03T10:22:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-03T10:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pbs.plymouth.ac.uk\/teamweb\/electionscentre\/?p=1771"},"modified":"2013-05-03T10:22:26","modified_gmt":"2013-05-03T10:22:26","slug":"ukip-poses-a-serious-threat-to-main-parties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/?p=1771","title":{"rendered":"UKIP Poses A Serious Threat To Main Parties"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><strong>Michael Thrasher<\/strong> says UKIP&#8217;s breakthrough has amazed the most seasoned election analysts &#8211; and will have the main parties worried &#8211; 3rd May 2013.<\/h3>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>UKIP&#8217;s surge in the local elections has sent shock waves through all three of the main parties.<\/p>\n<p>It also caught out commentators (including myself) with its scale.<\/p>\n<p>Few believed that a party could field candidates and from a standing start capture a quarter of the votes.<\/p>\n<p>A ComRes poll taken during the last week of campaigning that placed the party above 20% was considered &#8220;optimistic&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>We also believed that while support for UKIP would rise, it would be unlikely that it could buck the first past the post voting system and capture seats.<\/p>\n<p>So, UKIP 2, pundits 0.<\/p>\n<p>In other respects forecasts of seat gains and losses for the major parties were accurate.<\/p>\n<p>Each of the coalition partners was vulnerable and both duly lost ground.<\/p>\n<p>The Conservatives were trying to defend their high point of four years ago and lost more than 300 seats and critically, majority control of seven counties.<\/p>\n<p>The Liberal Democrats lost a quarter of their seats &#8211; not quite the disaster of recent years but another serious erosion of its local government base.<\/p>\n<p>Labour can legitimately claim that it is one of the winners of these elections. It has gained around 250 seats, close to its own pre-election forecast.<\/p>\n<p>But parties are notorious for setting low benchmarks when the voters are drifting back and privately the party would have wanted to make many more gains than this&#8230;<a href=\"http:\/\/news.sky.com\/story\/1086440\/ukip-poses-a-serious-threat-to-main-parties\">click here to continue reading original article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.sky.com\/story\/1086440\/ukip-poses-a-serious-threat-to-main-parties\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1745\" alt=\"skylogo\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pbs.plymouth.ac.uk\/teamweb\/electionscentre\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/skylogo.png?resize=139%2C89\" width=\"139\" height=\"89\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Thrasher says UKIP&#8217;s breakthrough has amazed the most seasoned election analysts &#8211; and will have the main parties worried &#8211; 3rd May 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,7,8,11],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5YXV0-sz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electionscentre.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}