Current thoughts - why so few brexit party recommendations?

I updated my tactical voting page yesterday. The methodology was slightly changed from before, notably I reweighted the contribution of the 2017 national election and the EP election and added more recent polling data. The end result was 11 Labour held seats (almost all in either South yorkshire or South wales) where the brexit party seems like the better choice than the conservative party.

Some people are suprised its not more than this but the reality is that even in most Labour seats the conservative performance tends to be better. As an example lets look at Sunderland central which is a Labour safe seat that voted Leave. In 2017 UKIP were in 4th place and around 30 points behind the conservatives, in 2015 UKIP were in 3rd place and around 4 points behind the conservatives. I have no doubt, especially in 2015, UKIP managed to attract some Labour voters that would never vote conservative but this was still not enough to eclipse the still minority conservative vote in the constituency.

Of course the counterargument is that the brexit party is much more proffesional and robust than UKIP. I agree the brexit party is vastly superior to the 2017 UKIP iteration but is it superior to the 2015 edition? The brexit party is actually around 3 points weaker than 2015 UKIP in the national polls and it needs to be 4 points stronger for me to recommend it in the case of Sunderland central.  Not only is the brexit party somewhat weaker than 2015 UKIP, I'd argue that the Conservative party is somewhat more appealing, Boris is capable of cutting through to Labour voters in a way Theresa May was not. Factoring this in unless we see significant swings to the brexit party then it is likely I will continue to recommend conservative in all but the most anti conservative seats.

Incidentally you may be suprised that some of the seats on the list for the brexit party are far down the list on target seat projections. But keep in mind this is simply a measure of performance relative to the tory party, not performance generally. There are seats, such as Thurrock, which the brexit party has a chance of winning but to do so they would have to directly attack the Conservative vote which has a high risk of letting in a Labour remainer. The seats I have suggested are seats in which the brexit party controls the largest share of the leave vote and is likely to perform better than the conservative party and that it makes more sense for tory votes to switch as they are in the minority.

Of course a Leave alliance would be preferable to tactical voting lists, and I hope this happens. If it does both the brexit party and the conservatives can expect to win far more seats. Possibly 370+ in the case of the conservatives and 20+ in the case of the brexit party. As it is though I think the conservatives are more likely to win around 320 seats and the brexit party 0 seats.