The Braindump Blog

Labour's Andy Burnham wins Makerfield election by ~9000 votes

· Braindump

Finally a surprisingly good-news election result here in the UK.

Andy Burnham wins huge majority in Makerfield byelection, paving way for Starmer leadership challenge

This is of course also potentially the entrance of our next Prime Minister, tbd.

Auto-generated description: Labour's Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with 55% of the vote, showing a 10% increase from the 2024 election, followed by Reform UK's Rob Kenyon with 35%, while the Conservative and other smaller parties saw decreases in their vote shares.

The scale of the victory is impressive. To be honest I was hoping/expecting Burnham would win but only on the basis of the despicable Restore party attracting the votes of the most hate-ridden Tommy-Robinson-pilled of the potential Reform UK vote. But here Labour attracted over 6000 more votes than those two horror shows combined.

Sure, there was a huge ground game with every potential voter’s door apparently being knocked on 6-7 times by various levels of Labour campaigners, including plenty of fellow MPs. There was a concern that it was so intense that’d it end up actually annoying the voters. That’s not obviously not sustainable for a General Election.

I don’t know how much that affected the the vote. But the point is, it can be done.