Voters beat the system in Gorton and Denton - but next time?
Elections are increasingly a test of how well voters can navigate the First Past the Post voting system to stop the result most don’t want. For a time in Gorton and Denton, it seemed the voters might be defeated by the voting system: inconclusive polls and both Labour and the Greens’ insistence only they could beat Reform raised the prospect of a split anti-Reform vote handing victory to the party two-thirds of the voters didn’t want. As it was, enough managed to game the system to prevent that scenario. But that’s not what elections, even by-elections, should come down to.
From a democratic standpoint, there are two obvious, related problems with the ‘least worst’ elections that First Past the Post provokes. The first is what it does to voters in the moment. Winner-takes-all contests force voters to focus less on what they favour and more on what they fear. What should be a positive choice becomes an exercise in loss minimisation. Part of the Greens’ success in Gorton and Denton was their ability to convince enough voters that their candidate was best placed to challenge Reform - a point even Labour’s Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell, acknowledged.
This is election as horse race, without the consolation of place money. Robbed of a real chance to weigh competing programmes on their merits, voters must simply play the odds, gauging which of the runners - based on frequently dubious information - gives them the best shot at backing a winner.
The second problem only becomes fully visible when ‘least worst’ voting takes hold across the country, as we saw at the last general election. In 2024, the overriding objective of most voters was to ‘get the Tories out’. In most places, Labour was the best option to achieve that end, securing the party a commanding parliamentary majority. Yet in public opinion, Labour's position was anything but commanding - a record-low vote share for a party winning an outright majority. One major reason for Labour's governing woes is the lack of support it carried into office. And its poll numbers have only weakened since then.
So, as well as short-changing voters, ‘least worst’ elections are destabilising our politics. Add in genuine five-or six-party competition, and the result is political volatility on a whole new level. Gorton and Denton fits a pattern that, in the words of elections expert, Professor Rob Ford, could leave the electoral map of Britain looking like a “patchwork quilt of political fragmentation.”
This can only intensify the challenge for voters in a winner-takes-all system. Even in the full glare of the political press pack - the sort of seat-level attention largely impossible at a general election - the tactical picture in Gorton and Denton remained fuzzy throughout. Fast forward to the next general election: 650 seats shrouded in a fog of dodgy polls and contested claims about who ‘can win here’, all in a scenario in which four, five or even six parties might plausibly be in with a shout. Any semblance of clarity for voters disappears.
Precedent offers no guide: long-held assumptions grounded in electoral history are being shaken by today’s multi-party politics. In Caerphilly as in Gorton and Denton, voters identified a more plausible left-of-centre challenger to Reform than Labour. The latter’s decades-long dominance was not enough even to secure a top-two finish.
Politics and voters would both be better served if voting positively was much more likely to impact the result. Elections centred on blocking the ‘most bad’ option routinely leave a sour taste. They fuel the cynicism many voters feel toward politics, driving alienation and volatility. Parliaments that look stable on paper rest on shaky foundations.
The next general election should be an opportunity for voters to get their hopes represented in Parliament. Instead, unless we abandon First Past the Post, it will boil down to a series of high-stakes guessing games.