TACTICAL VOTING

Electoral Calculus made a few attempts to explore tactical voting before the 2024 general election by conducting polling exploring people’s first and second preferences if all parties had an equal chance of winning in their area.

Their polling consistently found the Greens getting 15-20% of first preference votes, at least double their vote share in standard polling, and this came largely at the expense of Labour. This polling strongly suggests there are a lot of Green supporters tactically voting for other parties, and that better targeting could easily unlock this support and grant them a great many gains at the next election. They only targeted 4 seats in 2024, and in the ones they gained, they achieved a 30-35 point increase in their vote share.

If the Greens targeted 30-100 of Labour’s safest seats at the next election, underlined that targeting by withdrawing candidacies in more marginal Labour seats, and took advantage of Labour’s waning popularity, they could very well win a great many of those targets.

The Electoral Calculus research found Reform and Conservative voters to be least likely to consider tactical voting, but it would be interesting to see whether this will change as a potential right-wing “get Labour out” movement grows over the parliamentary term, and right-wing tactical voting builds on the information provided by the 2024 election results.

Progressives have probably reached the height of what tactical voting can deliver in benefits for Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Voters wanting change at the next election will gravitate towards the party that is most likely to deliver that change. Historically this would be the Conservatives, but if they begin to lag behind Reform UK in polling, the change option could become Reform UK.

The ”Get the Tories Out” effect would be gone, and the Conservatives and Reform would be wise to learn from unofficial progressive co-operation which saw Labour and Liberal Democrats being very disciplined in not targeting the same seats in 1997 and 2024.

If the Conservatives and Reform co-operate in their targeting, we could see Labour’s closest right-wing rivals in each seat coast past them with ease across the country.

At present attempts to communicate a progressive “change” option have not broken through at all into the public conscience. Sprint for PR will seek to provide that essential progressive change option.

We would welcome and encourage further research on tactical voting and how intentions have changed since the electoral calculus research was conducted.

PREFERENTIAL VOTING

Around half of voters would rank Reform last

YouGov asked how people would rank the UK’s main parties shortly after the last general election.

This polling showed that nearly half of voters would rank Reform UK 5^th (or lower) out of the 5 main parties (plus SNP and Plaid in Scotland and Wales). Reform had 18% of 1st preferences and 48% of 5^th(or lower) preferences, while the Liberal Democrats had 13% of 1st preferences and only 4% of 5^th (or lower) preferences. Reform UK would beat the Liberal Democrats in all proportional voting systems where people only cast one vote on their ballot paper according to this polling. Single-preference systems reflect only people’s favourite party. They do not measure the voter’s tolerance or intolerance for all other options on the ballot paper. It is our view that people’s full political opinions should be measured and reflected by an electoral system, and if it is the voter’s wish to suppress Reform UK’s representation by ranking them dead last, then we will work hard to grant that wish through the adoption of a preferential, proportional voting system like STV.

At the same time as this polling, the Electoral Reform Society were conducting their own polling in order to produce their report “A System Out of Step: The 2024 General Election”.

They modelled how the election might have looked under STV and a regional list system. It is difficult to compare the two systems as modelled by the ERS as their STV constituencies were generally between 3 and 6 members and their regional list constituencies had tens of members each. Smaller constituency sizes suppress the representation of smaller parties as they struggle to reach the vote threshold to achieve representation in each constituency. Some comparison of the effects of STV versus a regional list are possible however, and are useful for the debate we are hoping to promote.

The ERS have not made their raw data available and so we are making assumptions that their data was similar to the ranked preference data published by the same polling company for the same time in July 2024.

The two largest parties were affected very differently by STV and the regional list systems. Labour won 33 more constituencies under STV than in list PR, while the Conservatives won 1 more. This presumably reflects Labours far greater number of 2^nd and 3^rdpreference votes relative to the Conservatives.

For the smaller parties, the Liberal Democrats were 7 seats down under STV, Reform 19 seats down and the Greens 16 seats down relative to List PR. This broadly reflects the numbers of 2^nd and 3^rdpreference votes each party was receiving. 67% of voters ranked the Lib Dems 2^ndor 3^rd, 23% of voters ranked Reform 2^nd or 3^rd, and 43% of voters ranked the Greens 2^nd or 3^rd.

In total using ERS modelling, the Conservatives plus Reform won 256 seats under List PR and 238 under STV, while progressives (Lab, LD, Grn, SNP, PC, Ind) won 376 under List PR, and 394 under STV. With the potential for new parties of Left and pro-European centre-right being founded and helping get out the not-right-wing vote under STV, the potential for STV to provide a fire-break against far-right rule becomes clear.

What would be more useful to the cause would be modelling which allows direct comparison between STV and List PR in constituencies of the same size. We believe the ERS could do this with their July 2024 polling data and constituencies of 6 MPs each (occasionally 5 or 7 to respect national borders).There is no need to respect local municipal boundaries at this modelling stage if this was the reason for very variable constituency sizes in their modelling.

Sprint for PR will also be lobbying for polling companies to continue to ask voters how they would rank the main parties, and we would welcome the assistance of other pro-democracy groups in these efforts. If STV genuinely has the potential to suppress far-right representation, then it would also be very useful to campaigners across the continent and beyond if similar polling could be carried out in every country where the far-right pose an electoral threat under their current electoral systems.

If the YouGov results showing half the electorate would rank the far-right dead last could be replicated going forward and across the world, then it becomes so much easier to dismiss their demands for power, and perhaps psychologically more challenging for people to identify with their cause.

STAND-ASIDE PACTS

Apart from the clear evidence from France that stand-aside arrangements are very obviously effective against the far-right, the most useful polling evidence on stand-aside pacts comes from Professor Andrew Blick’s polling research for the Constitution Society, viewed in the context of the rapid disintegration of party loyalty in British progressive politics shown below.

The proportion of voters considering Labour and at least one other progressive party for their vote has doubled in 10 years.

The analysis of this polling suggested that stand-aside pacts could be 100% effective in transferring voters from stood-aside progressive parties to their chosen recipients (at least in the net effect of voter choices). This effect may be less with an unpopular incumbent party involved, but this reluctance could be lessened if voters were aware of actions elsewhere intended to deprive Labour of an overall majority and permanently end the future need for tactical voting or stand-aside pacts through electoral reform.

Similar polling and modelling could be conducted again in order to test the results of the suggested stand-asides and vote-splitting advocated by the Sprint for PR plan and/or how prepared progressive voters are to follow the intention of progressive stand-asides with a struggling progressive incumbent.

Perhaps more important, would be a similar study investigating how Reform and Conservative supporters would respond to a stand-aside pact. The Brexit Party stood aside candidates for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, and there is much more press speculation about a Reform-Conservative pact for the next election than there is about any progressive pact.

Given the lack of democracy in the strategic decision-making within Reform UK and the Conservatives, both parties would be able to blind-side British politics at the last minute and stitch-up our next election result. Perhaps spelling out what this might look like is exactly the shock that progressive parties, and dissenting Labour MPs, need to encourage them to start considering their own collaborative efforts.

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If anyone has tens, thousands, or millions of pounds they want to donate in order to deliver the campaigns and research discussed on this website, please get in touch at:

sprintforpr@gmail.com