The reason I get absorbed with this stuff is that it can show some surprising differences to the popular narratives. A lot of the time, UK election results seem to be skewed more than you'd think by FPTP. Another 🧵 on some of the figures that jump out at me:
Because I am a sad politics nerd I've been keeping track of stats relating to recent UK elections. In case they are of interest to anyone, here's a 🧵 on popular vote + related details for recent GEs:
2024 (60% turnout)
Labour – 9,650,254 (33.7%)
Tory – 6,771,974 (23.7%)
Difference = 2,878,280
The interesting thing about that one for me is that the historic Labour defeat of 2019 happened on a vote share that was 8th best out of the last 12 elections, and the historic Labour victory of 2024 was achieved on a vote share 7th best of 12
FPTP is a crazy system...
Very interesting thread :) On the results, I reckon a lack of compulsory voting helps explain somethings (I'm a big fan of compulsory voting, imo it helps focus governments on everyone and not just the extremes who are more likely to vote if it wasn't compulsory).
That's interesting. I've generally seen it as a civil liberty issue and would defend people's right to dissent, but I suppose the large bloc of non voters (who in my experience don't vote because there's no-one they want to vote for) allows parties to simply ignore them
People can always "donkey vote" (not sure if it's a universal term, but fill out their ballot paper in a way that it's invalid) - but most Australians still seem to vote properly. I have sympathe for the civil liberty side, but I genuinely believe compulsory voting is the lesser of two evils
because it only obscures what is actually happening
like how labour allowed their vote share in safe seats to slip to concentrate on gaining new ones
which looks exactly the same as a party on the defensive when you look at the popular vote
I think that implies way more control over the vote in target seats than parties actually have. Of course more campaigning goes on in target seats relative to ones that are seen as unwinnable but the national parties run national campaigns and most voters get their info from non-local sources
The strategy you describe is exactly what Labour tried to do in 2019 when it did very badly under FPTP and what it failed to do in 2017 (for unfortunate internal reasons) when it did relatively better
