The Left Has Begun to Vote Tactically – if the Right Doesn’t Follow Suit it Will Lose the Next General Election

When Sir Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street in July 2024, the Labour Party had just won one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern history. It took 412 seats, yet only one in five eligible voters actually voted for the party.

That paradox sits at the heart of British democracy right now – and it is getting harder to ignore.

Labour’s landslide was not the product of a surge in support. It was the product of a split. While Labour held its coalition together, the Right-of-centre vote fractured badly between the Conservative Party and a surging Reform UK. Across the UK, the combined Conservative and Reform vote comfortably exceeded Labour’s total, but because those votes were divided, Labour won a landslide victory.

First-past-the-post has always had this weakness. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, even if the majority of voters prefer someone else. For most of the 20th century, that quirk was manageable because British politics was largely a two-party contest and first-past-the-post produced clear majorities even when a party polled less than 50% of the total votes cast. That world no longer exists.

That’s why we’ve created VotingRight.co.uk, a tactical voting website that advises UK citizens on the Right which Right-leaning candidate in their constituency is best placed to win the seat.

Five parties, one winner

Today, in a typical English constituency, five parties are in serious contention: Labour, the Conservatives, Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The vote is fragmenting in both directions – Left and Right – and first-past-the-post has no mechanism for dealing with it. A candidate can win a parliamentary seat with just over a fifth of the votes cast. The other four-fifths of votes count for nothing.

The Left has been quicker to adapt. Liberal Democrat and Green voters in Labour-held marginals have quietly learned to hold their noses and back Labour where it matters. Polling and observed voting patterns confirm this is a real and significant effect – Left-leaning tactical voting has been coordinated by Left-wing campaign groups for years. Makerfield proves this point: Andy Burnham’s vote share rose by nearly 10 points, while the Greens and the Liberal Democrats couldn’t even manage 1% of the vote.

What tactical voting could achieve

The arithmetic is striking. Analysis of every constituency in Great Britain shows that under current polling, the Right-of-centre bloc – Conservative, Reform UK and smaller parties like Restore Britain – would collectively outpoll Labour in a substantial number of seats that Labour is currently projected to hold. The votes are there. They are simply split.

If half of Right-of-centre voters in those seats backed whichever party was strongest locally – rather than their personal preference – dozens of seats would change hands. At full tactical coordination, the Right-of-centre bloc would become the largest group of MPs in parliament.

This is not a hypothetical. The Liberal Democrats demonstrated in 2024 exactly what disciplined tactical voting can achieve. They won 72 seats – their best result in over a century – not because their national vote share was remarkable, but because Remain-leaning and anti-Conservative voters in their target seats coordinated effectively around them. They turned a modest share of the national vote into a record parliamentary presence.

The lesson is clear: in first-past-the-post, how you vote matters as much as who you vote for.

How the recommendations work

Identifying which Right-of-centre party to back in any given seat requires more than a quick glance at the 2024 result. A lot has changed since then – in national polling, in local elections, in party membership and candidate quality – and the picture varies dramatically from constituency to constituency.

The model behind VotingRight.co.uk combines four sources of evidence for every one of Great Britain’s 632 mainland constituencies.

It starts with the actual 2024 General Election result as the baseline – the most reliable signal of how voters in that specific place actually behave. It then adjusts each party’s projected share in line with how national polling has shifted since the election, preserving the relative differences between constituencies rather than applying a uniform national swing.

The third layer is local election evidence. The 2026 council elections in England, the Senedd elections in Wales and the Scottish Parliament elections each provide a real, recent test of how parties are performing on the ground – not in polls, but in actual votes cast. Where local results suggest a party is meaningfully stronger or weaker than national trends imply, the model adjusts accordingly.

Finally, incumbency is factored in. Sitting MPs consistently outperform their party’s national numbers – voters are often willing to back a known local representative even when they are cooling on the party nationally. That well-documented personal vote advantage is built into every projection.

The result is a constituency-by-constituency recommendation: whichever Right-of-centre party the model identifies as best placed to win gets the vote. There is no editorial judgement. No party has any input. The data point, and the site follows.

The strain on the system

What makes this moment different from previous election cycles is the sheer number of seats where the outcome is genuinely in play – not because the parties are strong, but because the vote is split so many ways.

First-past-the-post was already creaking under three-party competition in the 1980s, when the SDP-Liberal Alliance briefly won a quarter of the votes cast and returned fewer than two dozen MPs. With five serious parties now competing across most of England, the distortions are more severe, and the gap between vote share and seat share more grotesque.

There is a broader democratic argument here that goes beyond Left or Right. A system that regularly produces governments with commanding majorities on a third of the votes cast – and that locks out parties with millions of supporters – is a system under strain. The 2024 election was not an anomaly. It was a symptom.

Whether that ultimately leads to electoral reform is a constitutional question that should probably be decided by a referendum. In the meantime, voters on the Right face a choice: continue splitting the vote and handing seats to parties they did not vote for, or coordinate – and make their combined numbers count.

The mechanism for doing that now exists. What remains is the willingness to use it.

The Voting Right team is a group of coders and political operatives on the Right of British politics. Voting Right provides free, data-driven tactical voting recommendations for every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales. Projections are updated as new polling and local election results become available. Visit VotingRight.co.uk.

Stop Press: A growing band of Conservatives believe a strategic pact with Reform is needed to prevent another general election wipeout, says the Telegraph.