On top of their collapse in Wales, the Lib-Dems face even worse news in tomorrow’s Daily Mail. The paper has a Com-Res poll that shows an even greater implosion for the party in the West Country. The poll surveyed 14 constituencies currently held by the Lib-Dems. As the table above shows, their vote share in those seats has plummeted from 48 percent to 26 percent. By those figures, they would lose every single one of the seats surveyed. The Tories would be the main beneficiaries of the collapse of their Coalition partners in raw parliamentary numbers, and would likely win all fourteen seats (though, as I argued in an earlier post, some seats will be won or lost against the trend.) All parties would gain voters who had previously been Lib-Dem, however; Labour and UKIP would actually gain more in voting share than the Tories, but because they both start from a lower base, they are unlikely to win Lib-Dem seats.

If these trends hold up, the election will be an utter disaster for the Liberal Democrats. Wales and the West Country are the Celtic heartlands of Lib-Dem support. Voters there continued to send Liberals — the precursors of the Liberal Democrat party — to Westminster even in the bleak years from 1931 to 1961, when their parliamentary party got as little as five percent of the vote nationally and had fewer than a dozen members of parliament. If this picture is repeated elsewhere, it will be very heartening news for the Tory party, though not for David Cameron, who has subtly made clear his preference for leading a Con-Lib Coalition rather than a purely Conservative government.

While an outright Tory victory (which is still unlikely) would briefly make Cameron a hero to Conservatives, he would not enjoy leading a more right-wing government, especially one more inclined to be obstreperous in demanding different policies now that it was free of the need to keep the Lib-Dems happy. For that reason, Cameron may seek to keep the Coalition in being even if he doesn’t need Lib-Dem support. It is doubtful if the Lib-Dems would cooperate with Cameron in such circumstances, however. Deputy Prime Minister Clegg will probably not remain his party’s leader, even if he returns to the next parliament, and the party will be wounded and resentful that its former Coalition partners have trounced it so resoundingly.

A caveat or two is necessary: as I argued in previous posts, the election results are likely to show very different swings in different regions. Wales, for instance, showed Labour benefiting in seats from the Lib-Dem collapse which here helped the Tories. The rise in votes for Labour, Greens, and UKIP in the West Country are also probably the start of a larger transformation of the region’s politics in future elections. The West Country was hotly-contested between the Liberals and Tories for more than a century. It is unlikely to settle down to a stable voting loyalty for the Tories in these newly turbulent conditions, especially if a second Cameron government seeks to stay inside the European Union. The West Country is a stronghold of Euroskepticism.

So, this election goes on getting more and more exciting, more and more unpredictable, and perhaps more and more a historic game-changer.