Was anybody ACTUALLY surprised that the Conservatives destroyed the election?

Yes and no. As a doorstep campaigner for Labour we were always one standard deviation away from a big win or a big loss - this much was obvious from the public polling.

Locally we knew 14 days before the result where the voter retention was sitting around 70% and that proved to be bang on the money nationally. As a result we chucked everything and the kitchen sink at our local marginal, reduced the already skeleton campaigns in the nearby safe seats to zero in order to free up volunteers, and held the marginal as a result.

What was remarkable, even in a marginal that we won, was how late people made up their minds. The election day warp sheets* in the area I worked (a brexity marginal ward) showed that the many voters only decided in the late afternoon / early evening. I flipped to the opposite ward (another breixity marginal ward) for the final 7 - 10pm canvas and in the finish ward 1 went Tory and ward 2 flipped Labour entirely on late votes.

There were a lot of voters who told us were either going to vote Labour or not vote in the morning canvas, many that cited Brexit, and some that cited Corbyn in the later rounds. The data supports the idea that many of our voters didn't show up in the end and that turned a bad result into a wave election.

The weather did nothing at all to help voters or volunteers, which was precisely what the timing of the election had been about in the first place. BXP's uber-negative, uber-quiet, and uber-last-minute, leaflet campaigns did not help, the fact that the Liberals, Tories and BXP were all running the same anti-Corbyn message meant that they amplified each other.

In sum after two weeks straight on the doorstep I knew were going to win locally - a record level of promises, strong personal/local appeal from the candidate, and serious hard work. Nationally, if we'd got the strategy switch two weeks out right and the Liberals had a good time in their Lib/Con marginals, then we might force a hung parliament. Equally, if the doorstep campaign worked we would crush the Liberals in our Lab/Lib marginals and the SNP would crush them in Scotland.

The national strategy was, very sadly, wrong. We were attacking in lean-Tory seats when we should have been defending lean-labour marginals. In our Leave voting seats local MPs who should have spent two years building their ground ops and spoiling for a fight on hyper-local issues, had failed to do diddly squat (yes, I'm looking at you Dennis) and what happened, happened.

*you run four canvases a day entirely focussed on voters who have said they will vote for you in order to get out the vote, and you monitor the data as it comes in. Between those and count sampling we knew we'd won locally by 11pm, just not by how much.

/r/unitedkingdom Thread