At 18% the Liberal Democrat vote share was up 3 points on last year and up 4 points on four years ago when most (although not all) of the seats were previously up for election. It was also the party’s best vote share for seven years. The party’s progress over the last two years has been to close half the gap between where it slumped to and the vote share it used to win in the party’s local election happy years (with an average vote share of 25% between 1982, when this particular run of data started, and 2010). On vote share alone, that, therefore, looks like a pretty positive picture. Much more to do, but quite a lot achieved this time round. The strong vote share increase also explains why the feedback many Lib Dem campaigners were picking up was positive – more people were indeed supporting the party. But seat numbers are not down to just one party, they are down to how the other parties do too. Here the picture was very simple and very different. There was a Lib Dem to Conservative swing of 3 points since last year and of 5 points since 2013, with the Conservatives taking the lion’s share of benefit from the collapse of Ukip. The swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats of 4 points (since last year) / 3 points (four years ago) couldn’t offer up nearly enough for the Lib Dems to avoid losing seats overall. The result? The number of Lib Dem seat losses this year almost equalled the gains made last year. The predictions, based on Lib Dem council by-election success and made by a range of independent and non-Lib Dem experts, of Lib Dem seat gains this year were undone by the big movement to the Conservatives in the polls in the last couple of weeks. Polls carried out in the week before polling day put the Conservatives seven points higher on average than in that previous year of repeated Lib Dem council by-election success since the 2016 local elections. The one forecast that got the Lib Dem result just about right (kudos, Stephen Fisher) took into account that late polling shift, although even his own write-up doubted whether his predictions would be more accurate. It was. Note: all these vote share figures are the equivalent national vote shares calculated for the BBC. These adjust each year’s raw voting totals to account for which seats are up for election and thereby make year by year comparisons meaningful even though different seats may be up for election. There is a second run of equivalent calculations done by Thrasher and Rallings, which is often slightly different in detail but identical in terms of overall picture and trends. These use a very different methodology to do the adjustments, and the fact that two different ways of making the adjustments come out with similar answers is a good reason to have confidence in them.