Local elections today. If they take a pasting you can't imagine them being too motivated to go door to door in the GE.
"Hey, it's me, the guy who you voted out of local office. Well I'm here to tell you how great my party is..."
They are going to get a fair kicking today, they're voting on a cohort that came into office in 2021, in the wake of the early stages of the vaccine rollout which was perceived to go particularly well in the UK. As a result, the Johnson government was pretty popular.
The Tories and Labour have about 1,000 seats up for grabs. Some estimates have the Tories losing about half of those seats, which very much would be a disaster.
The real big ones that people are focusing on are the local mayoral elections (nobody gives the slightest shit about the Police and Crime Commissioners)
The main mayoral contest is in London, nobody seriously things the Tories have a chance there. The Tory candidate Susan Hall is abysmal, running an unbelievably cynical campaign, full of very, very obvious lies.
Her big one is that Sadiq Khan is going to introduce Pay-Per-Mile charging for vehicles. Khan has said repeatedly that he absolutely won't, it'd be almost impossible to do anyway at that level of government (as the Mayor of London's budget simply isn't enough to fun such a massive scheme. And yet, she's still campaigning on it. If she wins, I really will strongly consider leaving England because something is seriously fucked.
The ones that are competitive are the remaining Tory Mayoralties, West Midlands (mostly Birmingham), led by Andy Street and Tees Valley led by Ben Houchen.
Andy Street is generally well regarded and distances himself from the Tory Party overall but despite that, there's only a couple of percent in it. If he wins it, I'd expect him to be Tory leader in a few years time if they get their shit together again.
Ben Houchen is leading a very Brexity area, there's more than a whiff of corruption about him, but despite that, he's still got a pretty solid poll lead over the Labour candidate. Houchen got 73% of the vote in 2020, so he starts from a very strong position.
If the Tories lose 500+ seats and both of the mayoralties, then they're on course for complete humiliation at the general election, good chance of Sunak being ousted.
If they lose 200 seats and keep both mayoralties, I expect that to be considered a good result by the party (and right wing press)
