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Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

Worse than that Joey... Is that most people simply don't understand the ins and outs of how it works. Most people don't have an in depth enough interest in politics to actually follow the process of how constituencies and formation of government works. Simply put, most people believe that today's result - conservative majority - means that the conservatives got over 50% of the vote. They will argue blue in the face that we have a Tory government because "most people wanted one and that's that". When the reality is that actually, most people did not want it, in fact most likely more than 50% of the vote was for parties that could collectively be thought of as "anti-tory" in terms of policies, just different flavours of such.

It's actually a bit of a mess. If it was a choice of two parties only, as with the US presidential elections, Labour would certainly have been a more popular choice than Conservative in my opinion.

I doubt anyone thinks the Tories had over 50% of the vote but national vote share is and always has been irrelevant in our system - this ain't the USA after all. What the Tories did do is win the individual contest in 331 out of 650 seats so it is true to say that over 50% of constituencies wanted to be represented by a Tory MP.