Who split which vote?

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When the dust settled, the ‘too-close-to-call’ by-election in Gorton and Denton turned out to be no such thing, and the Green Party gained a very clear victory. That is good news, of course, but even though the margin of victory was solid, the winner only got 41% of the vote. Under a more proportional system of voting, that means that second preference votes would have needed to be counted, and the mathematician and amateur would-be psephologist in me speculated about how the result of that might look.

Of the 11 candidates, eight (accounting for 1892 votes in total) would have been eliminated fairly rapidly and, unless we choose to believe that they would have overwhelmingly (including the 706 Tory votes) gone to Labour, the second choices of those voters would have made no difference to the order of the first three candidates. The final stage of counting would thus have seen the Labour candidate eliminated as well, meaning that there were then 11,256 voters whose second choices would have determined whether the victor was the Green Party or Reform Ltd. With a margin of 4402 between those two parties, those 11,000 votes would have to split something like 2.3:1 in favour of Reform Ltd for their candidate to overtake the Green Party’s candidate and seize the seat. We don’t know, of course, how they would have split in practice. Unless and until someone does some detailed research, it’s all speculation. But the key element of that speculation is a very simple question: of those who voted Labour, despite everything that has happened since the last General Election, would they have tended towards the Green Party or towards Reform Ltd?

Those who cling to the notion that the Labour Party is still a progressive force, and that its supporters are committed to a progressive platform (whatever the word ‘progressive’ means) will be utterly convinced that they would have gone with the Greens, leaving the outcome unchanged. I’m not at all sure that they’re right. Much of the support which Reform Ltd have picked up over the past few years has come from Labour – amongst Labour voters, there is a deeply conservative streak when it comes to issues such as immigration. I don’t think it at all impossible that Reform Ltd would have won the seat in that scenario. (That doesn't make me reconsider supporting Proportional Representation - we need to win the arguments against the likes of Reform Ltd, not rig the voting system to keep them out.)

That brings us to an interesting alternative view of the ‘vote-splitting’ concept. The worry of some before the election was that the Greens and Labour would split the ‘progressive’ vote and allow Reform Ltd to win. What if the real story here is that Labour and Reform split the reactionary, neoliberal, authoritarian, anti-immigrant vote and thus allowed the progressive candidate to win? Those who are still clinging to the idea that Labour is somehow on the side of the good guys might be blinding themselves to the true extent of the danger.