
Why tactical voting?
The paths our history has taken, along with the First Past the Post/constituency system in use in Britain today means that in many places your preferred party has no chance. Who your preferred party is and whether they have a chance varies from person to person and constituency to constituency. Tactical voting is an extremely inefficient and limited response to that — but right now it is all we have.
Tactical voting for Remainers
This is a guide for Remainers — people whose assessment is that the key issue in this general election is helping the nation avoid a historic and very difficult to reverse mistake. Your reasons for thinking so will differ and are beyond this piece. It’s also not the purpose of this piece to persuade you that Remain should be your key issue. If you have a different key issue, you will need a different guide.
However, since the key first step in this journey is preventing the Conservative party from attaining a majority and (as of writing) no other party looks likely to get a majority, the advice here may be of use to anyone else whose priority is to end the current government.
So how does it work?
Given the assumptions above — vote for the candidate most likely to keep a Conservative government candidate out. (Key point: we may not trust other parties re:Brexit, but we *know* the Conservatives want a Hard Brexit and still have tendencies towards No Deal.)
Sounds simple — what is the catch?
The catch is typically only a small-ish minority of voters will vote tactically.
Thus, the decision on how to vote tactically depends heavily on an understanding of how most voters (i.e. non tactical voters) in a constituency will vote. All this in a time where voting behaviour appears more volatile than in the past.
What does that mean for me?
Well… it depends where you are. Let’s look at a few common cases (I’ll look further down at the really tough question of how you decide which situation you are in in your area):
1) A safe Conservative seat.
In some seats the Conservative majority is just very high. Every opposition voter could unite behind one candidate and you’d still need a very unlikely swing (especially given current polling) of Conservative voters to the opposing candidate to get a change. In this case your best opportunity to make your vote mean something is to look at vote swapping. SwapMyVote appears to be the main site co-ordinating this activity at the moment.
2) A clear 2-way fight.
This can be a Conservative seat with one clear challenger or a seat held by another party where the Conservatives are the main challenger and everyone else is far behind. Grit your teeth and vote for the non-Conservative candidate, even if you aren’t convinced that their Brexit stance is much better.
There are a couple of clear Lab-LD marginals. Here the choice is up to you, assess the candidates according to your preferences — but be sure it really is clear and not actually a 3-way fight.
3) Looks like a 3-way situation.
3 parties running quite close. Here a fine judgement needs to be made who is best placed to win. One thing people worry about a lot is that choosing the wrong candidate may let the Conservatives in. An extra concern is that the quality of information matters a lot. I’ll look at the details of how to think about that further on in this piece.
4) Special factors — including Nations and Independents
As ever, none of this directly applies to Northern Ireland as they have a different set of parties. Polling for Scotland indicates that the SNP are one of the 2 main parties in most races and in Wales Plaid Cymru have to be considered.
Independents raise a number of issues: How good are the chances of an Independent candidate? How much do you trust them on Brexit issues? What about particular candidates, is there ever more to the story than party polling? In a few constituencies these difficult questions arise.
How do I work out what is the case in my constituency?
There are already tactical voting guides being released, some with controversial results. What I hope to do here is to give you some ways to think through the situation.
First, if you’re not sure, find out which constituency you are in via the Parliament website.
Second, take a quick look at the constituency on Wikipedia. If your MP is a Conservative, make a note of the majority. If it is more than around 13,000 votes, it looks like a safe seat. In this case, while the tactical voting sites will have a recommendation of who is the best runner up, it is likely more valuable to the cause to offer your vote as part of a vote swap. You can read more about vote swapping here and the main website link for SwapMyVote is here.
The reason to do this is that be engaging in vote swapping you may help convince someone else to make a difficult choice between voting tactically and voting with their heart. To my mind this is more valuable than making sure the gallant loser in your constituency than otherwise would. Of course, if the polling changes significantly and the Conservatives are suddenly on course to lose many votes to the Brexit Party, you may want to revisit this assumption.
Third, take a look at the tactical voting sites. (We’ll look at manual checks later.)
So far tactical.vote has put out a calculator based on 2017 results and Best for Britain has created their site using polling data, including a large MRP poll they commissioned. I would not be surprised if at least one more site is put up before polling day.
If the sites agree, good news for you, you can probably just go with the recommendation. You are welcome to think about the manual checks below, but it’s less important for you. If they disagree we’re going to have to do some extra thinking. Of course if you are making a tactical vote, it is worth considering registering on SwapMyVote as vote swapping cannot solely work from safe seats.
Extra thinking
To understand why in some constituencies the picture is unclear, we have to go back to the implications of the fact that most voters are not tactical voters. Thus we need to look at how they will vote. GE2017 is one evidence point of that, and it’s an important one as it was not that long ago and it was a general election under the same rules as we will use in December. However, we also know that voter behaviour is less loyal than in the past and that polling shows us that the Liberal Democrats in particular, but also the Brexit Party have been polling better this year. We also have the evidence of a different election under different rules, the European Parliament election.
This is how we end up with more than one answer, it depends on the assumptions. We must also note that the polling may change closer to the election and it is fair to say that the campaign has (as of writing, 3rd Nov) barely begun.
I very much hope that sites using polling as an input to their tactical voting advice will continue to update as new polls are released. It does seem that MRP polls (expensive and time intensive to run) provide better local information than the average national poll.
Of course, the different approaches involved have meant a lot of noise from partisan activists who wish to push things in the direction of their party. What can we do to examine the situation? First, I think it’s important to accept (since most voters are not tactical voters) that the polling data does suggest a resurgence from the Liberal Democrats. GE2015 and GE2017 results were profoundly affected by the fallout of their time in coalition. Many voters may still not forgive them for that time, but there are definite signs a significant number have.
Political scientist Paula Surridge has created an excellent blog post about how you (or someone you know who likes wrangling numbers) can take the evidence of elections from 2010 to discover what the vote may look like in your area. I highly recommend it as a means of deciding how the terrain looks.
In the end however, in the closest seats it is going to be a set of judgement calls. I hope it is apparent why that is and I urge you to look at the assumptions in various sets of advice and make your own judgement, with the heavy knowledge that whichever party you prefer may not be in pole position where you live.
Key points to watch when looking at online advice:
- Does the advice work only from GE2017 data?
- If the advice adds polling data, when was the last poll they incorporated? Do more recent polls suggest a different picture?
Special cases
First, we must note that Northern Ireland seats operate with a completely different set of parties and not all tools address that. In Scotland, the polling suggests the SNP are riding high and are the main competitor in most seats. In Wales, Plaid Cymru must be considered in seats where they are polling well. Local knowledge (which I do not have) is crucial in these areas.
A further issue involves independents and can only be answered using local knowledge. Some independent runners are previously from a political party — do they have the name recognition to mount a genuine challenge? Others are true independents running on their local political achievements — does that provide enough recognition to mount a genuine challenge. If they do, are their views on Brexit appropriate to attracting a Remainer vote? Only you can decide.
