How Mid Dorset and North Poole has changed

Mid Dorset and North Poole is one of the tightest seats in the country on paper — Vikki Slade took it from the Conservatives by a margin smaller than a school assembly, with Labour and the Greens trailing well behind. None of that arithmetic shows up in the seat's platform voices yet: with only two residents scored, the straw poll splits evenly between Green and Liberal Democrat, and the readable lean sits Left and Centre Left, leaving the seat's actual electoral rival unclaimed entirely.

The sharper signal comes from the referendum questions. Where the UK splits four-in-ten in favour of rejoining the EU, this seat's lone respondent says yes outright, and where the country runs three-quarters in agreement that Britain is too London-centric, the seat matches that near-unanimously too — a small sample, but one pulling in the same anti-establishment, pro-European direction as the incumbent's own Commons record sits studiously Centre. One of the two voices carries the label The Liberal Hardliner, which fits a seat where the Liberal Democrat brand appears to mean something firmer than the party's national centrism suggests.

This is the seat's first read, so there is no prior balance to defend or overturn — only a baseline being set from an unusually thin slice of its electorate. What is notable already is the absence of any Conservative-aligned voice in a seat the Tories lost by a whisker, and the absence of Labour despite its real vote share here.

A single new Conservative-leaning voice next week would not just shift the straw poll — it would be the first sign that this seat's platform sample resembles the marginal it actually is.