When the exit poll came through on Thursday night, telling us that the Liberal Democrats would only win ten seats, no-one could quite believe it. Paddy Ashdown was so surprised by the prediction that he promised he would eat his hat were it true.
After all, the pollsters has been speculating for months that the Lib Dems would end up with between 25 and 30 seats. Surely the Lib Dem support wouldn't totally collapse in so many of their seats.
In the end, the exit poll wasn't quite right. The Lib Dems ended up with eight seats, their worst result since the Liberal Party earned six seats in 1970. There was no favour for incumbents, not even for long standing MPs, or those serving in the Cabinet.
Vince Cable is gone. Danny Alexander is gone. Ed Davey, Simon Hughes, David Laws and 44 others are all out the door, punished by the electorate for their party's role in government. Those that are left are spread around the country. There's one in six of the nine regions of England, along with one in Wales and one in Scotland, the latter being the old Liberal territory of Orkney and Shetland. The region generally regarded as the closest thing the Liberals had to a region of their own, the South West, now is entirely blue with a little bit of red.
Nick Clegg, one of the few survivors, has quit the leadership. Tim Farron is tipped to be the next leader, purely because he's the only one that many are familiar with. With a Conservative majority government, and a dominant SNP, the Lib Dems have little relevance inside the Commons, and with 1.4 million less votes than UKIP, not much relevance outside it.
How did it all come to this?
A loss of seats was inevitable. The Lib Dems have long been a party that has to work harder to get seats that the big two, so when their polling fell it was guaranteed that their seat loss would be fairly large. But the pollsters still thought there would be an incumbency effect, and that the high profile Lib Dems would just hold on. This was based on specific Ashcroft polling, which indicated that the overall perception of Lib Dems was worse across the country that it was in Lib Dem held seats that looked like becoming marginal.
As fivethirtyeight has explained, incumbency did not matter. Predictions that used the broad Lib Dem numbers proved much closer to reality, but no-one made them. What this does suggest is that the electorate's dismay with the Lib Dems was greater than any personal support they felt for their local member.
Why?
The other thing to keep in mind is that the Lib Dem's support over the years has been built on a small base and a significant protest vote. People that vote for the Lib Dems in one election have historically been likely to move to one of the other major parties, with those voters being replaced in the Lib Dem support base by other disaffected voters. The Lib Dems did not attract any of this support this time around, as they were now a party of government with the Conservatives, annoying traditional voters of both major parties for different reasons. Beyond their core of 8%, voters had no reason to pick them as the protest vote.
Traditional Labour voters went back to a Labour party that appealed to them, attempting to ditch the image of New Labour. Traditional Conservative voters had no reason to vote for the minor member of a coalition that had prevented the Tories from making certain policy decisions, and shifting voters felt similarly. Disaffected voters now had one other significant option: UKIP. UKIP made sure everyone knew that they weren't simply attracting old Tories - they were attracting old Labour too. Finally, the SNP and the Greens presented a reputable alternative to Labour for those annoyed at the Lib Dems for enabling a Conservative government. Other than classic and social liberals, what reason was there to vote Lib Dem?
Their campaign tried to emphasise their ability to be a coalition partner with either of the major parties, but in the end voters preferred having a majority government (though not by much). The reputation of the Lib Dems suffered so much from the controversial government decision on tuition fees, and the appearance of going along with the Tories budget decisions, that any hope of appealing to voters beyond their core base completely vanished years ago.
It's now a long road back to appealing to the electorate. First, they have to figure out who they are. One potential saving grace for them is that we may be near the end of first past the post, which may give them a way back in. But even then, that is unlikely to expand their base, which they need to do if they ever want to revive the cause of liberalism as being truly significant in modern Britain.
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