Let The Shite One In?
Why small parties standing in marginal seats isn’t the problem.
So, one of those little parties stood in a seat and got more votes than the Tory (or perhaps the insufferable Lib Dem who may now back a Tory government) won by. If only those plucky rascals had just plucked off and let you inherit all their votes. You’ve got a good mind to give them a piece of your mind.
Should you?
No. Here’s why. Lets call the smaller party the Plucky Party and the ones challenging the Tory the Jumbo Party.
- They’re human beings.
Shouldn’t have to point this out, but have you seen the state of social media? If you let off steam at them, you’re probably joining a pile-on against somebody who probably already feels worse than you- a Tory MP got in, after all, and nothing is worse- even the Plucky Party believe that.
2) How were they supposed to know this would happen? Are they Mystic Plucky Meg?
Nominations went in up until 14th November. Realistically, the decision to stand would have been made a day or two before that. That’s a full month before polling day. In that time 20% of the Premier League managers have been sacked. Yes, there’s only been a small (2%ish) swing in the polls overall, but the same period in 2017 saw an 8% swing.
Let’s take that 8% swing as a guide for the sort of change that can reasonably happen over a month, and take 2017 results as a baseline for this election. An 8% swing in the Tories favour would have gained them another 86 seats, and an 8% swing in Labour’s favour would have got them another 98. In total, that’s nearly 200 seats could be very close, but most of them would not have been close at all.
But local swings can be much more pronounced. Thinking of a few of the more memorable results from last time, Rosie Duffield managed a 9.3% swing in Canterbury and Emma Dent Coad managed a 10.6% swing in Kensington. The biggest swing, though, was 20.4% from the SNP to the Tories in Gordon. A Gordon-size swing would mean that well over 500 seats are within range of changing hands in 2019.
So, in summary, when candidates decide to stand, nobody knows whether the result will be on a knife-edge or not. If they claim to know, they have very special powers indeed.
Now you could say that the Plucky Party should only stand where there is absolutely no chance they’ll “interfere” with the result, but shaming parties into not standing in up to half the seats available is a little bit authoritarian, no?
3) Standing doesn’t affect the outcome as much as many people think it does
It gets less technical after this one, honest!
The most common fallacy in “Plucky Party cost the Jumbo Party this many seats” type arguments is always that they assume that if the Plucky party didn’t stand in those seats, their votes would have automatically transferred over. I can see why people may jump to those conclusions, but consider this:
In close elections, big parties are VERY good at squeezing the voters who are most sympathetic to them away from smaller parties who are standing. That means that, with Plucky standing against Jumbo who are in a close race with the Tories, the Plucky party end up supported by voters who are least bothered about helping the Jumbos win.
Anybody who’s ever seen an STV count at an election will know just how all-over-the-place voted can be. You can throw all notion of votes passing between parties with the most policies in common out of the window. The electorate don’t do that, and it’s political bubble-think to assume they do.
Here’s a typical guesstimate at how a residual Plucky vote would pan out if they didn’t stand.
- Jumbo- maybe 50%
- Other small parties (including people who vote plucky because they hate all the big parties) 30%
- Stay at home/spoil ballot- 10%
- Tory- 10%.
This all varies greatly on who the Plucky and Jumbo parties are. For example if you’re in an SNP/Tory Marginal and Plucky are Labour, you’d get a lot more Tory votes as they’d only want to vote for a Unionist party, but a good ballpark figure is that the impact of Plucky standing down is about 30–40% of Plucky’s residual vote
In other words, if Plucky stand and the Tories win by more than 30–40% of Plucky’s (already squeezed) vote, Plucky deciding not to stand wouldn’t have made any difference.
So standing down only has an effect if it’s very very close, and it’s impossible to know which of a list of hundreds of constituencies are going to be very very close. This standing down thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?
But there’s more!
4) FPTFP
The electoral system. All this wouldn’t matter if we ditched it. Parties could all stand and be true to themselves and not bully each other into not standing. The voters would have a wider choice and rarely have to look into their crystal ball to work out whether their vote may have unintended consequences.
Let’s do it. Please.
5) Look in the mirror
If at first you don’t succeed, get it right next time.
Frankly, with enough resources, time and skills, any seat is winnable for any party. I’ve seen appalling campaigns from bad candidates from every party I can think of who may take the place of the Jumbo Party. Plucky Parties owe them nothing. So why are you blaming Plucky when there are probably dozens of things Jumbo could have done better to win? Aren’t they forcing you to up your standards, and won’t the electorate benefit from that?
Perhaps this is for another post, but I firmly believe that the reason why a Tory Government is seemingly immovable is that they have the resources to win the air campaign (media, social media etc) and the other parties between them simply aren’t organised in enough communities to counter it. There are too many seats where it’s always been enough for MPs and candidates to rock up a month before the election and encourage the right people to vote. These are the constituencies that are dropping into the hands of the Tories and the constituencies where politics has become dominated by anti-politics. We need to change that and devices like tactical votes and electoral alliances is only a temporary sticking plaster over a wound which continues to fester.
6) Moving the Overton Window in your favour?
Why are the Plucky Party standing?
I bet they’re not standing just to annoy you. They’re not standing to help the Tories.
Even if you get very few votes, standing and campaigning for election can be very effective. You get free delivery of an address to the whole constituency and the opportunity to address big meetings and get coverage in the local media you’ve only ever dreamed of at other times.
Most significantly, you can force candidates to confront issues and influence the agenda.
One of the single most influential factors deciding how floating voters will cast their vote is what issues are salient- what they’re thinking about when they go into the polling station. In this election, the Tories know that it helps them if people are thinking about getting Brexit done, so that’s why they try and fill every second of election media with Brexit. Labour know that Brexit works badly for them, but public services, the NHS, climate change and a host of other things will get them votes.
Supposing there’s one left of centre party talking about that Labour stuff constantly up against a bunch of Johnsons and Farages? The election would be far more likely to turn into a race to the bottom on Brexit with the left getting drowned out. Labour then come across as being weak on the big issue of the day (remember the European elections?)
Could it be that having a number of parties who believe broadly similar things can actually benefit the largest of them? I wouldn’t rule it out.
In summary
Run that by me again? You’re slagging off the Plucky Party because they failed to predict which ones of hundreds of constituencies would unpredictable be very close, when the Jumbo party could have done far more about the situation, and anyway, there may even have been ways in which their standing helped you out?