Thande
Donor
As we know, there are several excellent timelines about the UK general election of 2010 on the site (such as The Fourth Lectern and Were you still up for Balls?, both of which I highly recommend). This is not a timeline but just a discussion of some alternate scenarios I have developed quite by accident while doing something else.
On the ASB Electoral Systems thread in ASB I have been looking at what the UK political landscape might look like if we had the French-style system of a two-round election, where you get elected in your constituency in the first round if you gain more than 50% of the vote, but otherwise the top two vote-winners go forward to a second round runoff election. In the process of this I made a map sorting the OTL 2010 results by majority (i.e. win in first round) vs plurality (would go to second round). To better understand whether the second round would be competitive or not, I also made a map showing the OTL runners-up in each seat, sorted by whether the runner-up was within 10% of the winner or not (i.e. there is a difference between a seat where the Tories beat the Lib Dems with 35% to 34%, and one where Labour gets 49% and the Tories or Lib Dems are second with 20%; the former case will likely have a competitive second round, the latter is unlikely to).
As a consequence of this it occurred to me that I could use these same maps to show shifts in the OTL 2010 election based on something a bit more nuanced than the usual Uniform National Swing. It's still rather arbitrary and ignores things like seats that changed hands over individual issues like Montgomeryshire or Redcar, but I think the results might be interesting. The way this worked was:
1) IF the seat was won in OTL with less than 50% of the vote, and
2) IF the runner-up was within 10% of the winner in OTL, and
3) IF I have chosen the runner-up's party as the one to boost
then the seat is instead won by the runner-up rather than the OTL winner. This produces some interesting alternate election maps and numbers which I will now share with you. If you are in Firefox you can easily compare these maps by right-clicking on each image and middle-clicking View Image, or in Chrome right-clicking and then clicking Open Image in New Tab, then go back and forth between tabs.
On the ASB Electoral Systems thread in ASB I have been looking at what the UK political landscape might look like if we had the French-style system of a two-round election, where you get elected in your constituency in the first round if you gain more than 50% of the vote, but otherwise the top two vote-winners go forward to a second round runoff election. In the process of this I made a map sorting the OTL 2010 results by majority (i.e. win in first round) vs plurality (would go to second round). To better understand whether the second round would be competitive or not, I also made a map showing the OTL runners-up in each seat, sorted by whether the runner-up was within 10% of the winner or not (i.e. there is a difference between a seat where the Tories beat the Lib Dems with 35% to 34%, and one where Labour gets 49% and the Tories or Lib Dems are second with 20%; the former case will likely have a competitive second round, the latter is unlikely to).
As a consequence of this it occurred to me that I could use these same maps to show shifts in the OTL 2010 election based on something a bit more nuanced than the usual Uniform National Swing. It's still rather arbitrary and ignores things like seats that changed hands over individual issues like Montgomeryshire or Redcar, but I think the results might be interesting. The way this worked was:
1) IF the seat was won in OTL with less than 50% of the vote, and
2) IF the runner-up was within 10% of the winner in OTL, and
3) IF I have chosen the runner-up's party as the one to boost
then the seat is instead won by the runner-up rather than the OTL winner. This produces some interesting alternate election maps and numbers which I will now share with you. If you are in Firefox you can easily compare these maps by right-clicking on each image and middle-clicking View Image, or in Chrome right-clicking and then clicking Open Image in New Tab, then go back and forth between tabs.