Live Commentary
12:27pm While Labour won easily, there was a large swing to the right since 2024. Adding the swings for Reform, Restore and the Conservatives has the combined right up 19.5%. Doing the same for Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems has the combined left down 12.4%.
11:57am It took far too long to get a result in this election. In Australia, it would have been clear within a couple of hours of polls closing that Labour had won easily, based on just the primary votes. In this election, it took more than 24 hours after polls closed to get a result. I have no idea why Greater Manchester didn’t release primary vote results after it was known they would be distributing preferences between Labour and Reform.
Of the total 31.9% that were not Labour or Reform primary votes, 34.2% went to Labour in preferences, 26.6% to Reform and 39.2% exhausted. Pre-election polls understated Labour and overstated the Greens and Conservatives.
8:57am Finally a result! Labour wins the Greater Manchester mayoralty by 66.3-33.7 over Reform, from primary votes of 47.1% Labour (down 16.3 points since the 2024 election), 21.0% Reform (up 13.5), 12.2% Greens (up 5.3), 8.7% Restore (new), 7.7% Conservatives (down 2.7) and 2.8% Lib Dems (down 1.4).
6:56am Saturday Labour and Reform candidates have both qualified for the supplementary vote distribution of preferences, meaning they both had under 50%, and all other candidates have been eliminated. We still don’t know first round vote shares and won’t know anything more until we have a final result! It’s now nearly 10pm UK time; counting will continue until the bitter end.
11:53pm Turnout was 25.1%, down from 32.1% in 2024.
11 pm Four hours since counting began in Greater Manchester, there’s still no results from any of the ten boroughs. There doesn’t seem to even be any reporting of the likely result based on party sources, unlike for Westminster by-elections. This has been frustrating.
7:16pm Here’s the BBC’s live blog on the Greater Manchester count. It appears that counting didn’t start until 7pm AEST (10am UK time).
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here.
Polls closed at 7am AEST today for the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election to replace Andy Burnham after his June 18 election to the UK parliament. It will be the biggest UK by-election. Counting will start at about 6pm AEST (9am UK time). There are ten districts within Greater Manchester where votes will be counted.
This by-election will be held using the “supplementary vote” system, where voters get two preferences. Mayoral elections prior to 2024 used this system, but the Conservatives regressed to first-past-the-post for 2024-26 mayoral elections. Labour reverted to the supplementary vote.
In the 2024 mayoral election, Burnham won 63.4%, with the Conservatives a very distant second with 10.4%, followed by 7.6% for an independent, 7.5% the populist right Reform, 6.9% Greens and 4.2% Liberal Democrats. Three early to mid-July polls had Labour at 38-39%, Reform 19-24%, the Greens 14-22%, the Conservatives 8-12%, Restore 7-9% (another populist right party) and the Lib Dems 3-8%. After preferences, Labour defeats Reform by between 62-38 and 66-34.
The Election Maps UK aggregate of national polls has Reform leading with 24.5% (down 1.5 points since my July 16 article before Burnham became PM), followed by Labour at 23.4% (up 2.6), the Conservatives 20.2% (up 0.4), the Greens 11.7% (down 1.3), the Lib Dems 11.1% (down one) and Restore 2.7% (down 0.5). Seat projections give Reform 217 of the 650 seats, with Labour on 135, the Conservatives 102 and the Lib Dems 76. Reform, the Conservatives and right-wing Northern Ireland parties would probably have enough for a majority.
There will be a by-election on August 13 in Clacton after Reform leader Nigel Farage resigned to recontest. No other well-known party will contest this by-election. It’s likely Farage’s main opponent will be joke candidate Count Binface. A total of 34 candidates are standing, breaking the previous record of 26 for a by-election in 2008. In 2024, Farage defeated the Conservatives in Clacton by 46.2-27.9 with 16.2% for Labour.
US: Trump’s ratings drop to new record low
With the resumption of the Iran war, Donald Trump’s ratings have dropped again. In Nate Silver’s aggregate of national polls, there had been a recovery in Trump’s net approval to -16.4 on July 14 from -20.2 in late May. But now his net approval has fallen to -20.6, a new record low, with 58.8% disapproving and 38.2% approving.
Democrats are winning the generic ballot by 48.3-41.9 over Republicans, a 6.4-point margin. From a peak lead of 7.1 points in late May, Democrats had dropped to a 5.9-point lead on July 22. The current lead should give Democrats control of the House of Representatives but not the Senate at midterm elections this November.
Troy Jackson was nominated by Democrats to replace Graham Platner as their Maine Senate candidate last Saturday after Platner withdrew owing to sexual assault allegations. On paper, Maine should be the easiest Senate gain for Democrats as Harris defeated Trump there by 6.9 points in 2024.
A jungle primary occurred Tuesday in Georgia’s 13th federal House seat. This special election occurred owing to the death of the incumbent Democrat in late April. At the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris defeated Trump in Georgia 13 by 70.6-28.5, a 42.1-point margin.
At a jungle primary all candidates run on the same ballot paper and the top two, regardless of party, go to a runoff if nobody gets over 50%. Two Democrats, Scott and Blair, advanced to the August 25 runoff with 46.0% and 37.4% respectively, and Democrats overall beat Republicans by 86.5-13.5, a 73.0-point margin. But turnout was pathetic, with just over 20,000 votes compared with over 360,000 in 2024.
Armenian election
Armenia elects its MPs using proportional representation with a 4% threshold for single parties and 8% for coalitions. At the June 7 election, the governing centrist Civil Contract won 64 of the 105 seats (down seven since 2021), the pro-Russia Strong Armenia 29 (new) and the pro-Russia Armenia Alliance 12 (down 17). Civil Contract has governed since 2018.
Result should be announced later this afternoon.
It’s currently 10.20 here and verification will still be going on.
First stage is the verification of the numbers of ballot papers before counting first preferences.
We’ll get turnout figures once verification is finished.
Then if there isn’t a candidate with more than 50% they’ll start distribution of 2nd preferences.
They can’t do that until all councils have reported their 1st preference totals.
There isn’t provision in UK law to start distribution based on election officials guess as to who the top two candidates are as it’s based on the total Greater Manchester vote not the vote in each Borough.
Slate of Fox News polls showing that things are going very well for the Democrats in the Senate.
https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/2082622404120154247
Georgia,
Ossoff (D): 56%
Collins (R): 43%
North Carolina,
Cooper (D): 53%
Whatley (R): 44%
Ohio,
Brown (D): 53%
Husted (R): 45%
Iowa,
Turek (D): 50%
Hinson (R): 46%
Just announced it’s going to the 2nd round.
Labour and reform are the top two. Not seen any figures yet as to the margin.
It’s likely that Labour will have gotten most of the green and Liberal Democrat 2nd preferences whilst reform will get a chunk of the Tory and restore preferences.
Note that the 2nd preferences of the eliminated candidates are counted only if they preference one of the top two candidates. Preferences for other candidates aren’t counted at all.
Because there are far fewer papers to count in the 2nd round the final result should come quite quickly.
And Bev Craig (Labour) just announced as the winner.
In the first round she won 47% against 21% for reform and 12% for the greens,
The 2nd round was 66% for Labour and 33% for reform.
This is a huge blow to reform after doing so well in the greater Manchester area in the local elections in May.
The Guardian has some figures in ward by ward results.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/31/labour-wins-decisive-victory-in-greater-manchester-mayoral-byelection
Your temporary Manchester based correspondent (I’m actually here for the weekend) is signing out.
Gotta love voluntary voting. People whinge about politics and how things are being run but not even vote.
Whether or not UK Labour has done well depends on the point of comparison. Backwards compared with 2024, but much better than polling would have suggested, and far far better than would have been predicted based on the May local government results. Therefore I think UK Labour would be feeling well satisfied with the outcome, especially with its national polling also on the up since the Burnham transition.
At the least Labor will be breathing a sigh of relief.
Based on May local elections projection, Reform could have won the election if Starmer is still the PM.
Thank those that gave us compulsory preferential voting, and an independent electoral commission that makes it easy to vote for weeks before the final poll. In Australia, reform, like PHON, would get 60-70% of TPP against them and remain a bad joke. Pollsters need to start asking ‘which party is the least worst option to form government’ – in 42 years of my voting history, I have rarely voted ‘for’ anybody, but I’ve always voted ‘against’ Tories and FRWNJs. Current polling is effectively ‘how grumpy are you with the current government’ and people know that if they give the government a kick there will be some populist reaction by the government- Howard was the master of being Santa to the grumpy swinging voters in the 6-12 months before he called an election, throwing billions at whatever grievances the polls were detecting. Much of the electorate has been conditioned to behave like a bad tempered spoilt child that doesn’t appreciate how much they have.
Where is BTsays. I want to know how to bad the result is for Labour and how Reform is surging ahead.
Detailed breakdown of the vote by council areas.
https://gmelects.org.uk/result2026/
There needs to be an inquiry into why it took so long to complete the count and why the individual council areas didn’t publish their results as soon as their counts were completed.
It’s not like Wigan announcing its results would have affected how people voted or the final result.
It seems from a Guardian article they were counting so as to garner individual ward figures which is quite frankly ridiculous. Counting that way reduces any flexibility in allocating staff from a fast team to a slow one or a small ward to a larger one as teams can’t be mixed once they have started work on a ward and just slows it all down.
We certainly don’t count Parliamentary elections that way.
ChrisC says:
Saturday, August 1, 2026 at 7:31 pm
”
Detailed breakdown of the vote by council areas.
https://gmelects.org.uk/result2026/
There needs to be an inquiry into why it took so long to complete the count and why the individual council areas didn’t publish their results as soon as their counts were completed.
It’s not like Wigan announcing its results would have affected how people voted or the final result.
It seems from a Guardian article they were counting so as to garner individual ward figures which is quite frankly ridiculous. Counting that way reduces any flexibility in allocating staff from a fast team to a slow one or a small ward to a larger one as teams can’t be mixed once they have started work on a ward and just slows it all down.
We certainly don’t count Parliamentary elections that way.”
No, we don’t do it that way.
However, why worry. Nothing changes because the result was a dozen hours later. No decision would (or could reasonably) been made in that window.
Are we that fixated on immediacy?
No – because our Senate can take a month of Sundays
@Ven
“Where is BTsays. I want to know how to bad the result is for Labour and how Reform is surging ahead.”
Hello Ven
Could you please ‘translate’ the above and I’ll have a stab at answering what you want to know – thanks!
(if I remember to pop back to this thread. . .)