It seems a bit sad to say this, as it’s been an integral part of the way we think about elections for so long, but is it time to get rid of the swingometer?

One of the features of last Thursday night was lots of people saying ‘just what the hell is going on out there?’ As Andrew Marr put it on the BBC, the election campaign itself may have been boring, and it was the voters who delivered the excitement. Every time a result came through, we all struggled to work out how it fit into the national picture, what the swing in Loamshire South West would tell us about the projected result in Borsetshire North East, but each time we missed the real message they were telling us: there was no national picture. It seemed almost appropriate that this should be the election where the exit polls were right, just when they’d stopped meaning anything.
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