alternatehistory.com

I've often pondered what the election map would look like if there was no Falklands War and the SDP-Liberal Alliance had had a significant breakthrough at the 1983 election* but not to the point where they actually achieve a majority. Which is so improbable it might as well be ASB anyway just because of the mountain they had to climb. Even this is probably pushing it--some of the seats here only got like 20% for the Alliance candidate in OTL. On the other hand, I was surprised to see how close some of the other OTL results were, especially those in what you'd think would be classic Thatcherite Tory heartlands like Essex--a couple of percentage points either way and the idea of 'Thatcher held power by keeping the favour of Essex Man' meme would never have existed in OTL even if Thatcher had won a majority overall.

I worked out these results with this very fine election calculator someone posted elsewhere. I admit I manipulated the percentages to get the kind of seat distribution I wanted to see rather than trying to think what percentages would be plausible. However, I swear I did not intend for the Liberals and SDP to come out with exactly equal seat numbers (which I only realised after making the map, as this site doesn't distinguish the two), that's the sort of perverse coincidence you usually only expect from OTL...

The political dynamic here is basically that a large bloc of Tory voters abandon Thatcher after a series of disasters and go over to the Alliance, whereas very few more Labour voters than OTL do so (my reasoning is that if you were going to abandon Labour and go over to the Alliance, most people who would have been willing to be persuaded had been driven over to them in OTL anyway). This actually means, although Labour loses seats overall, they actually gain some seats from the Tories due to the vagaries of FPTP and the assumption of a uniform national swing.

First, here is the data I put into the calculator and what I got out...



*You will see the map is actually labelled 1984. People often seem to ignore the fact that Margaret Thatcher is hardly going to call an early election like OTL if the polls say she can't win--she's going to wait till the last minute in the hope that things improve, and so let the parliament elected in 1979 run out its full five-year term. Hence, a 1984 election.

alt-1983 3.png
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