Tactical Coping: A Postscript

Could Reform UK save Rishi Sunak? Would PR kill the Conservatives? New tweaks to my tactical voting app.

Thanks to all of you who have been playing around with the GE24 tactical voting app I produced for my last Substack post. The app made a few media appearances, including on Peston (a second appearance for me on Geek of the Week in a month - what dreams may come); in the Times thanks to Chris Smyth (and through them to the Washington Post); and on the News Agents, where Emily Maitlis read out my tongue-in-cheek Substack title in such a way that I couldn’t figure out if the joke had worked. But the app left a few questions unanswered. This post will answer them.

Oh, and other quick updates. On Tuesday May 23rd, I’ll be doing a Tortoise ThinkIn on Why Politics Fails - details here. I also had a great pod chat with the wonderful Rafael Behr, whose book you should all buy, which is available here.

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There’s a danger in producing political apps. First off, obviously there is the huge time suck. But worse there is the constant temptation to fiddle and add new functionality. Which for my sins I have done, in response to a couple of questions prompted by the quasi-viral post I wrote last time.

First, is there a way to make tactical voting play in the Conservatives’ favour? And second, given Keir Starmer’s dalliance with electoral reform, and Andrew Neil’s mildly hallucinatory article about how PR would lock the Tories out of office forever, how much difference would proportional representation make to British politics?

Oh and finally, you can now put in very large Labour leads and the app doesn’t just wave a white flag and give up any more.

So, let’s add more bells and whistles to the app…

Get Brexit (Party voters back or you’re) Done

As a card-holding political scientist, I like to be an equal opportunity kind of scholar. And the tactical voting setup of the last post wasn’t hugely encouraging for the Conservative Party. But unlike Rishi Sunak’s ‘beloved’ Southampton, I don’t think the Conservatives are dead and buried yet. It’s important to think about ways that the Conservatives might be able to claw themselves back. So let’s put on the old tunes and see if the crowd will still dance. Is there still mileage for the Conservatives in looking to their right? A Rejolt on the Right, if you will.

Remember the Brexit Party phoney war against the Conservatives in 2019? After trouncing Theresa May’s Conservatives in the 2019 European elections, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party clearly played a major electoral threat to Boris Johnson in the General Election at the end of that year. Boris, of course, was no Theresa May. He was willing to countenance a No Deal Brexit. He would ‘Get Brexit Done’, even if it meant risking life and limb by driving a bulldozer through a wall of polystyrene bricks.

And so this left Farage in a quandary. Realistically, the Brexit Party was only going to be a spoiler in the 2019 General Election since Britain’s First Past the Post electoral system (we’ll come back to this) made it near-impossible for them to have a large parliamentary presence. But being a spoiler had hardly made UKIP impotent - arguably they were Britain’s most successful political party of the twenty-first century in getting what they wanted, despite never having more than two MPs at once.

Nigel Farage was not going to get Brexit without Boris Johnson winning - so rather than threaten the Conservatives directly, he stood down Brexit Party MPs in seats held by Conservative MPs. Which meant that the Brexit Party threatened only in Labour and Lib Dem seats. Arguably this led to Labour losing a number of Labour Leave seats in the Red Wall. For example, Burnley, Stoke on Trent Central, and Bolton North East had Conservative margins of victory far smaller than the Brexit Party share.

The Brexit Party’s overall vote share was not large - just over two percent. But this was in part because so many would-be Brexit Party voters in Conservative constituencies were deprived of the opportunity to vote for them. Essentially, Farage’s decision was an official, party-level version of the tactical voting we looked at last week, as he shifted would-be Brexit Party voters into the arms of the Conservatives in Tory seats.

But Tice is not so nice. Reform UK is the ready-made, same party colour, replacement of the Brexit Party. I think the chances of Richard Tice, Reform UK’s leader, standing his candidates down in Conservative seats are similar to the chances of Southampton magically staying in the Premier League (sorry again, Rishi…). And Reform UK currently poll pretty well - between 4 and 8 percent usually. There is a space on the populist right of the British political spectrum that a largish group of voters will flock to. Not so many that I think the National Conservative movement is really a likely goer. But a lot of people nonetheless.

So could Sunak win these voters back? And what would happen? In previous posts I’ve looked at the social attitudes of Reform UK / Brexit Party voters and they certainly look (a) like Conservatives, and (b) like social conservatives. Hence, STOP THE BOATS!!! It looks like this is a crucial part of the electoral plan and explains a great deal about Suella Braverman’s tenure as Home Secretary as a signal to this group of voters that the Conservatives share their priorities. And, despite his superficially metro-liberal appearance, Rishi Sunak really does share many of these beliefs.

One way - nay, the best way - of figuring out whether this is a real electoral opportunity for Sunak, is to crank out the tactical voting app and see what happens if we transfer Reform UK voters to the Conservatives.

I have a new exciting slider you can pull that does just that - at zero we have no transfer, at one you move all Reform UK voters to Conservative. And I use Uniform National Swing based on the 2019 Election. There is a slight problem here in that Reform UK only stood in non-Conservative constituencies. But that’s what we have. Like last time, I’ll put up some pictures of what the vote share looks like. If you want to see which constituencies flip or look at a map, you’ll have to head to the app.

Let’s start with the existing Parliament. I’ll begin with the voting patterns from 2019. What would have happened Boris Johnson had captured all Brexit Party (now Reform UK) voters in those constituencies where they did stand..?

An even bigger Conservative majority.

Now we know this is a weird assumption because the very reason Farage stood Brexit Party candidates in Labour constituencies was to attract Labour voters not Conservatives in order to weaken Labour. Still, it’s worth noting that simply taking two percent of the vote that went to the Brexit Party and giving it to the Conservatives in 2019 gives you a result not too far away from the Blair landslide of 1997 and very similar to 2001, albeit with Labour and the Conservatives reversed.

So there’s gold in them hills for the Conservatives.

Sadly for Rishi Sunak the year is not 2019. And the polls look far worse for the Conservative Party. Let’s take the polling average provided by @BeyondTopline, which I used last time: L: 44. C: 28, LD:11, Ref: 5.7, Green 5.2 and keeping SNP and PC at last election’s level (yes, yes, I know the SNP won’t do so well but honestly creating a Scotland only version of this app is several more hours work I ain’t doing).

Side by side, here are the results with no Reform voters going Conservative and with all. The Conservatives gain thirty seats and Labour lose 25 (LDs lose 5). And that’s enough to deprive Labour of an outright parliamentary majority. You can see this because one of the tweaks I made to the app is to put a dotted line at 325 votes. Be careful here though. Because of the four Speakers / Deputy Speakers and because of Sinn Fein, it’s likely that Labour could rustle up a majority on something more like 321 votes. So it’s very very close. Although I should note is that it leaves the Conservatives very very far from largest party.

And worse, I haven’t allowed for any Lib-Dem, Green, Labour tactical voting. I’ll now shift this to 30% - a number I’m relatively happy with for two reasons. First, per Steve Fisher and John Curtice the proportion of tactical voting in 2001/2005 was about 10-15% but higher than that among Lab and Lib Dem and with an incumbent Labour government. Second, my slider is highly inefficient since it shifts Libs to Labour in Labour strongholds as well as in Conservative seats where Labour runs second. So, we need to pull the slider to 30% to get aggregate tactical voting of around 20%, but concentrated in those districts where people will actually do this. If you don’t follow… well I can’t blame you. You’ll just have to trust me.

So if we do this, still giving all Reform UK voters to the Conservatives we get a Labour majority again.

So on current polling, attracting Reform UK voters helps the Conservatives but not enough to make them a likely next government. It would likely also have the effect of driving the Conservative Party further to the right when they leave office. Which in turn might mean more electoral cycles until they get back in again (or not, see Trump, Donald).

But what about local election results? Here Labour only received around 35% of the votes, using the Projected National Vote from John Curtice. Using L 35, C 26, LD 20, Others 19 and splitting Others such that I give seven percent to each of the Greens and Reform UK and keep SNP and PC as in 2019, what happens?

Here is the no tactical voting outcome:

Here is what happens if you shift all those Reform voters to the Conservatives…

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Please please please give us this outcome. Obviously it would be chaotic, but you have to admit very, very, very funny.

Sadly also unlikely, because if I now increase LD/Lab/Green tactical voting to 0.3, I get the following.

Essentially, I have completely cancelled out the impact of moving Reform voters to the Conservatives by allowing a reasonable amount of LD/Lab/Green tactical voting.

So, what’s the take home? Capturing Reform voters is always better for the Conservatives than not doing so. And in one particularly extreme case, where there is perfect tactical voting on the right and zero on the left AND the voting patterns are the same as the prediction from the locals, the Conservatives can tie Labour for the lead. This is clearly within the realms of possibility. Actually it looks quite a bit like what happened over the course of 2019. But for the 2024 Election? It would not be my pick from the tombola of political fortune.

There is of course a further wrinkle to this. I am assuming there is no-one left voting Conservative who might switch to the Lib Dems or Labour. A Conservative move to sweep up Reform UK voters could lead to further leakage on the left of the Conservative Party.

The horrified media reaction - even the reaction of mainstream Conservative MPs - to the National Conservatism conference suggests that there are indeed conservative-leaning folks who won’t tolerate any further shifts to the right.

I have learned over my years as a political scientist never to underestimate the number of people who will hold their noses and vote for a party they think is rhetorically too extreme. But my guess is a Unite the Right strategy might have some limitations in our current electoral cycle.

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Would PR really “keep the left in power FOR EVER...”?

The thing about tactical voting is just when you create a complicated app that has all kinds of Rube Goldberg mechanics reassigning people within constituencies and recalculating the plurality winner, someone comes along with a much simpler electoral system that doesn’t require all this nonsense. Curse them.

A pure proportional representation system, along Dutch lines, would simply allocate Westminster seats proportional to votes. Now in reality there would likely be some kind of threshold (perhaps 1/650th of the total vote), below which you couldn’t get a seat (sorry Monster Raving Loony Party). But for the parties we are looking at here, they would all get more than 1/650 of the vote so would gain seats. And yes, as before I am ignoring Northern Ireland - sorry sorry sorry too much work - and the Speaker, so actually it will be 1/631.

OK, so why are we talking about this? Well… as ever, it’s a Daily Mail oped.

Andrew Neil had a hyperventilating piece in the Daily Mail, arguing that Keir Starmer’s dalliance with electoral reform would “keep the left in power FOR EVER…”. So first, I really don’t like splitting the word ‘forever’ in too. It’s weird. But I guess we can blame the subs for that one. But second, what on earth is he on about?

My guess is that Neil is violating the first rule of political punditry: “Don’t assume vote patterns will always remain the same.” Yes in Britain in 2023 it’s easy to imagine a coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems, or maybe the Greens, or maybe if you squint, the SNP. And yes their combined vote shares outpace the Conservatives and Reform UK.

And if no-one ever changed their votes and we were all locked in to vote for the same parties for the rest of our lives, and the parties all liked each other the exact same amount forever, then yes, in those conditions, Andrew Neil could possibly be right.

But assuming the world changes and we’re not caught in a time loop, I would argue that the history of every single country that has PR is not hugely supportive of Neil’s conjecture. Let me introduce you to Mark Rutte, leader of the conservative VVD and PM of the Netherlands since fish first crawled onto land. Or Angela Merkel. Or Ulf Kristersson. Or Leo Varadkar. And so on and so on.

Now it’s possible, I suppose, that Andrew Neil read Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s seminal article on the partisan effects of electoral systems, where they argue that majoritarian systems tend to favour the centre-right and proportional systems favour the centre-left.

In their view, middle classes in plurality/majoritarian systems such as the UK freak out about not being able to control the left in a single centre-left party and getting taxed more, so they ally with the right in centre-right parties more often. In PR, by contrast, middle classes can have their own party, which conveniently always ends up in government as part of a coalition - allowing them to moderate parties to their left or right. It’s a neat argument and they empirically show that in PR systems left governments are more common than in majoritarian systems. And indeed that right governments are more common in majoritarian than PR systems. Here’s the table showing that for 1945-1998.

So there’s a pattern for sure. But I dunno, it doesn’t scream forever… sorry, I meant “FOR EVER”.

Still, it did give me the opportunity to create a new tab on the app where you can see how pure PR would compare to the system we have. I toyed with the idea of a more complicated model with multi-member districts etc but life’s too short. So think of this as the most extremely proportional system we could have.

What are the effects on British politics? Let’s start with the 2019 General Election.

Our current First Past the Post (FPTP) system is represented by the ghostly boxes, whereas the coloured bars are the PR parliament. Notice that the Conservatives and SNP would have been hurt by PR in 2019, whereas the Greens, Brexit (then, Reform now), and especially the Lib Dems would have massively benefited. For Labour it’s much of a muchness. In fact, the Labour Party would have actually done slightly better under PR.

So would we have ‘Got Brexit Done’ after all? Well, maybe not, since the Conservatives plus Reform, plus the DUP (not here, but let’s say seven to nine seats), wouldn’t get you to a majority. But nor was a progressive coalition of Labour, Greens and Lib Dems very close to governing.

You know what I like to think would have happened - a ‘grand coalition’ with PM Boris Johnson and Deputy PM Jeremy Corbyn. A truly chef’s kiss outcome for British politics.

How about on current polling averages? PR hurts both big parties but Labour much more than the Conservatives. Now Labour’s majority goes away. But they have options. They could do a straight coalition with the Lib Dems and their sixty-nine seats. Or with the Greens and the SNP. Or a bigger one with the Greens and Lib Dems. Reform UK do pretty well here too but not well enough to offer the Conservatives much hope of governing.

What about if we use the local election results?

Here the big three parties look fairly close in size. Labour and the Lib Dems together can still make a decent sized coalition. But a Labour, Green, SNP coalition doesn’t look viable without the Lib Dems. And this is with me giving a generous seven points to the Greens (and Reform). This is a world that looks rather like Iversen and Soskice’s abstract version of PR, with a centrist party the kingmaker and likely to be in any coalition, even if the Conservatives did slightly better.

And that means, that Andrew Neil was almost there - if only he’d written “keep the left LIBERAL DEMOCRATS in power FOR EVER...”

But let me end by noting one irony in Neil’s column. Among the leading explanations in political science for the origin of proportional representation is that conservative parties, fearing the rise of the working classes under democracy at the end of the nineteenth century, abandoned plurality voting because they thought the majority of workers would always win it. They believed that plurality voting would favour socialism!

Now, it turns out that this was… uh… not quite accurate. But in 1918 there were grand debates in the Conservative-Liberal coalition about the merits of PR and ATV and it very very nearly happened.

PR has not always been anathema to Conservatives and indeed the experience of Continental Europe shouldn’t give people on the right nightmares about being locked out of office. Indeed, it might be the only way left to keep a centre-right leader in Britain in office for Rutte-Merkel style decades of dominance. Be careful what you don’t wish for. It might not come true.

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