A Conservative victory in Thursday's UK General Election was not a surprise, but the manner of it certainly was. In fact, it was one of the most surprising, and shocking, results of recent elections.
The collective gasp on the airwaves and social media as the exit polls flashed up at 10pm came as months of the illusion of a neck and neck race evaporated. The massive Tory lead, the Liberal Democrats collapse, and the SNP surge had all been far beyond anything expected.
The YouGov poll that emerged at the same time as the exit poll put the gap at the far more, then, realistic, 20 seats. It offered solace to Labour supporters. The exit poll figures seemed almost impossible - opinion polls often miss the mark, but rarely to such a major degree. And if those skewed reality and expectations weren't, the rise of the SNP in Scotland surely sent us over the edge. Taking 56 of 59 seats north of the border, the Scottish National Party have pulled off one of the momentous shifts in power in UK election history.
But how typical are these sorts of shocks and shifts?
We look back here at some other examples of shock results, and power shifts, both at home and abroad.
1948, USA Presidential Election - Truman defeats Dewey
1948 brought was is widely seen as the biggest upset in American political history.
Harry Truman, the Democratic incumbent, was widely expected to lose out to Republican Governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey.
Compared to his predecessor, the late Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman was seen as ineffective and unable to step out of the long shadow cast by the four-term Roosevelt.
In a last ditch bid to avert defeat Truman set out across the US, visiting towns and cities to meet with the voters directly. It worked, and Truman quietly won voters’ affections.
A two million vote margin in the popular vote saw Truman take a win that was so unexpected papers had even gone ahead and printed Dewey victory headlines - leading to one of the most remarkable and memorable pictures in political history.
Harry Truman holds aloft the world's most famously hasty front page
And if winning the election wasn't enough, Truman's moment of victory would later be immortalised in the election for class president at Springfield Elementary.
Canada, 1993 General Election – The PC crash
If Labour’s hammering this week was bad, the Liberal Democrats’ was even worse. In Ireland we’ve seen the Greens and The PDs in recent years face the wrath of the electorate and fail to re-emerge. But there’s probably no election in which a party has lost like Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party did on October 25, 1993.
Starting the election with 156 seats, as the second largest party in the country, they finished on just two. That’s a loss of 154. Their popular vote plummeted from 43% to 16%.
That’s a government lost, give or take a few seats. It was the biggest political defeat in Canadian history – unsurprisingly.
Despite running the best funded campaign, and being led by a recently appointed first ever female Prime Minister, the PCs were poorly organised both logistically and ideologically – they were doing everything from printing leaflets wrong to disagreeing on the party’s message.
There was also a considerable voter backlash against a TV ad the PCs ran, which appeared to mock rival leader Jean Chretien, focusing on his face. Chretien suffered a facial deformity due to Bell's Palsy, and many voters felt the ad was offensive.
Coming out of a period as the ruling party when unemployment and the national deficit had increased sharply in Canada, the PCs could have expected losses – but nothing like what they found in the end.
Jean Chrétien’s Liberal party would lead the new government, while Canada’s Tories would never fully recover from the blow of 1993.
1992, UK, General Election - The Tory Mystery
In 1992 Labour looked set for a comfortable election win, with polls putting them far ahead of the John Major led Tories.
A harsh recession had scarred the nation and the Tories, leaders for 13 years, leaving the challengers with a seeming open goal to retake charge of the House of Commons. High unemployment, collapsing house prices and ballooning interest rates all made it look like Labour and their leader Neil Kinnock just had to show up.
The 10pm exit poll stuck to the script, with Neil Kinnock looking very much like a Prime Minister in waiting as the first indications of the voting came out.
John Major took a shock victory from Labour's Neil Kinnock in 1992
When the results came in Britain was stunned, the Conservatives had taken 42.8 per cent of the vote, Labour just 35.2 per cent. Major’s Tories had hung on to almost all of their vote from 1987.
The reasons for the turnaround are still somewhat unknown, studies have analysed the results and experts have pored over possible factors at play.
Everything from the influence of the press to the choice between Major and Kinnock and the shrinking of the working class has been put forward - and there still doesn’t seem to be any clear explanation for the election that flummoxed the UK, even more than Thursday night’s shock.
2011, Ireland, General Election - The Fianna Fáil Collapse
The heaviest defeat of a sitting government in Ireland is the most recent one, with Fianna Fáil’s 2011 hammering at the hands of the electorate still the prime example of one vote suggesting a seismic shift.
Brian Lenihan (r) was the only Fianna Fáil TD in Dublin after the 2011 general election, as Brian Cowen's (l) party felt the anger of voters
On February 25, the party held just 20 of the 71 seats they took in the 2007 election, putting them third behind Fine Gael and Labour. The long dominance of Dublin also ended, with Brian Lenihan emerging from the cote as the only Dublin TD.
Perhaps Ireland’s most significant election is to come next, with the polls showing that civil war politics may have had their day, and the rise of Sinn Féin and the increasing popularity of independents suggesting that the binary choice between the historical big two could be over.
But, of course, that was the talk of the UK on Thursday morning.
