Main Edition
US
FR
September 20, 2021 - 7:00am
‘Tories repelled by Johnson can help the Lib Dems knock down the blue wall’, read yesterday’s Observer as Sir Ed Davey rose to speak at the Liberal Democrats’ virtual party conference. Over the last few months, the party has been in a buoyant mood, excited by the fact that they may have found a potent electoral strategy: namely, targeting disillusioned 2019 Tory voters in the south.
We should be careful about reading too much into one result, but the Chesham and Amersham by-election win in June gave Davey more than a symbolic victory. It could also be a blueprint for the party’s long-term recovery: scoring victories in constituencies in the south of England, reinforcing their status as the ‘anti-Conservative’ alternative and picking off disgruntled voters who backed the Tories in 2019. Our new working paper – ‘Breaching the Blue Wall’ – examines how likely that strategy is to succeed.
The clear lesson here is that there are a set of seats where – if the constituency boundaries remain the same – the Lib Dems can reasonably say they are best placed to beat the Conservative government. However, this cannot be achieved by the much-feted ’progressive alliance’ of Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters.
In the last election, if every single Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat voter had cast their ballot tactically for the best-placed ‘progressive’ candidate, then the Conservatives would still have won. What did the heavy lifting in Chesham and Amersham was a significant reduction in the Conservative vote share (down by 20%) and enough of a direct transfer of votes from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Democrats (who rose by 30%). It may sound obvious, but it is worth repeating: every vote previously cast for Boris Johnson counts twice for his opponents if they can peel them off the Conservatives instead of sharing the same voters among themselves.
In the graph below are the 17 places, above the horizontal x axis, where there was both a surplus of ‘progressive’ voters in December 2019 and where the Lib Dems sit in second place. It is, in other words, fertile ground for anti-Conservative tactical voting. Below the x axis are seats that would be opened up by a further swing away from the Conservatives. There are also another 16 constituencies where the combined ‘progressive’ vote is within a 5% swing of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are in second place. Among those are Witney and Henley, formerly the constituencies of former Prime Minister David Cameron and the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Going into the last election in Henley, for example, the Liberal Democrats were sitting in third place behind Labour on 15%. They are now in a clear second place on 30%. This means that the Conservatives have an opponent both better placed to win Conservative voters, and better placed to squeeze any remaining Labour and Green voters.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAs mad and bad as the present Conservative party is, why would anyone bother voting for an anti-democratic and illiberal party, such as the Liberal Democrat’s ?
In Britain, it seems, we have a Labour (workers party) that doesn’t represent the workers, a Conservative party that isn’t Conservative, and a Liberal Democrat party that is neither of the two things it most proudly claims to be, And we wonder why the UK ended up with Brexit, at least UKIP actually stood up and did “What it said on the tin”, whatever you might think of them.
It seems, modern day politics in the UK, is about voting for the party you LEAST dislike rather than the party that represents your actual choices.
The lesson to be learned is never vote for a candidate that belongs to any party.
There could be a strategy there for them, but Jo Swinson’s “cancel Brexit” will cast a nasty shadow for years to come. Also the LD’s needs to drop their current brand of trans rights lunacy if they’re to have a chance of attracting Middle England voters in any meaningful way.
Absolutely. The Illiberal Antidemocrats are doing fine now simply because they’re so nugatory they’re not worthy of scrutiny. Once they are they will fold. Johnson will win the next GE; it’s really only a question of by how much he’ll win.
Davey is one of the idiots responsible for the disastrous energy policies every government has followed.
If once loyal Conservative voters are tired of the vulgar adulterous Johnson, the shallow, flash, and avaricious Cameron and the worthy but useless Mrs May, wouldn’t they be craving a decent, serious, public service minded, fiscally and socially conservative party? How does a woke gender fluid critically theoretical Liberal party score here as anything but a protest vote?