By Stephen Fisher.

UKIP are putting up just 377 candidates at the general election, well short of the 624 they had in 2015. Given that the polls are showing that around half of former UKIP voters are planning on voting Conservative this year, and given that the Conservatives clearly benefitted from the collapse of the UKIP vote in the local elections, surely UKIP dropout is a big advantage for Theresa May?

Perhaps not. A good way of assessing this question is to look at the experience of local elections and analyse how much other parties benefitted when UKIP stood a candidate in 2013 but not this year, compared with where they had candidates both times. To make the context more like a general election I focus just on places fought by the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats both in 2013 and 2017.

There were 969 such divisions where the BBC collected the full details of the result. Of these 523 had UKIP candidates both times, and 446 had a UKIP candidate last time but not this time – only a slightly higher (46%) dropout rate than that for the general election (40%).

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