Farewell to the Swingometer?

It seems a bit sad to say this, as it’s been an integral part of the way we think about elections for so long, but is it time to get rid of the swingometer?

One of the features of last Thursday night was lots of people saying ‘just what the hell is going on out there?’ As Andrew Marr put it on the BBC, the election campaign itself may have been boring, and it was the voters who delivered the excitement. Every time a result came through, we all struggled to work out how it fit into the national picture, what the swing in Loamshire South West would tell us about the projected result in Borsetshire North East, but each time we missed the real message they were telling us: there was no national picture. It seemed almost appropriate that this should be the election where the exit polls were right, just when they’d stopped meaning anything.

The election is presented to us by the media and the parties as being a national event, one where the fact that there are 646 constituencies voting separately is almost an irrelevance. Votes are won and lost in the media more than on the ground, we’re told, and by some magical process of collective destiny, the voters in each constituency will follow the national trends and swing one way or the other in agreement with each other. Sure, there’ll be the occasional seat where the voters didn’t get sent the script for the night, but they can be dismissed as a blip. On Thursday night, we had a screen full of blips.

As an example, consider Dorset. It’s in the South West where – according to the post-election analysis – the Conservatives surged forwards at the expense of the Liberal Democrats and in Dorset West they did. Oliver Letwin not only held on in the face of the decapitation strategy, he increased his majority, showing that the yellow tide had started slipping back towards Land’s End. So next door to there, in Mid Dorset and Poole North, sitting Liberal Democrat MP Annette Brooke would clearly be in trouble with only a 0.5% swing to the Conservatives required for her to lose her seat. The swing towards her of 5.6% was clearly a blip, though, as the Tories went next door and picked up Labour’s second most marginal seat, Dorset South, with ease. Except they didn’t. Jim Knight (probably assisted by his Tory rival Ed Matts’ Photoshop skills) saw a 1.7% swing towards him, turning a marginal into a vaguely safe seat.

Heading out of Dorset into the South West, David Laws in Yeovil saw a 4.5% swing towards him from the Conservatives, but Don Foster fell back towards them in Bath. The Liberal Democrats lost Devon West and Torridge, lost Weston, dropped into third in Bridgwater and were perhaps only saved by UKIP from losing Torbay, but increased the majority in many of their seats and surged from third place to win Falmouth and Camborne. And it’s not even as though that was just one region acting strangely. In the North West, the Liberal Democrats took Rochdale back, but Labour’s majority over them increased next door in Oldham East. The Conservatives took a swathe of seats in the East, but couldn’t get close to Labour in Norwich North or Great Yarmouth, and saw North Norfolk go from being the second most marginal Liberal Democrat seat to one of the safest.

Just take a look at the list of target seats for each party before the election and you’ll see the lack of a pattern. The Conservatives took their 114th target – Enfield Southgate – but couldn’t take their top two. The Liberal Democrats went all the way down to their 145th target – Manchester Withington – but took only three of their top ten. Each party ended up roughly where the swingometer and the exit polls said they would, but none of them went by the recommended route.

So what does all this mean for future general election campaigns? Firstly, the parties are already changing their methods of campaigning, even if the media haven’t noticed. Both Labour and the Conservatives are adopting the Liberal Democrat style of pavement politics, rediscovering that it’s volunteers delivering leaflets and knocking on doors that gets votes as much, if not even more than, big national campaigns and billboard posters. Expect to see the parties doing much more over the next few years to recruit more members and active volunteers, and if you’re living in a potential swing constituency – which are more than just the recognised ‘marginals’ – expect to see a lot more literature coming through your letterbox.

Also, I expect we’ll see individual candidates getting as much emphasis as their parties. Candidates are gong to recognise that the personal vote is what can put them over the top in a constituency, regardless of how their party is doing in the national picture. Except another explosion of candidate websites and blogs, with much more effort made to persuade the casual internet user at home to read them, not just us ardent web-savvy bloggers.

Finally, expect the media to learn the lessons of this year and stop relying so much on national opinion polls to tell them the story. Expect much more in the way of public polls of single constituencies, not just seeing what party people want to vote for, but which candidate they’re backing, as the two could tell very different stories. And while we may not be seeing the swingometer as prominently next time, the triangular three-way battleground map that Peter Snow unveiled on Thursday night could be the tool to try and give meaning to the chaos.