The story of the 2024 general election is of voters turning away from a deeply unpopular governing party. What parties they turned to and how that interacted with the electoral system is a more complex story that may take some time to fully grasp.
Turnout
Turnout is often misinterpreted. Nevertheless, 2024 was undoubtedly a low-turnout election.
After 648 results it stands at 60%, only just above the low point of the 2001 election. Many factors could be behind this. New voter ID rules may have made a small difference, the talk of a large Labour majority – especially in the last week of the campaign where the Conservatives introduced the term “supermajority” – may have meant voters thought there was little point voting and the widespread mood of disillusionment that politics can ever deliver positive change in people’s lives. We will not know who, if anyone, benefitted from low turnout for some time, when the data becomes available from the British Election Study.
Electoral system
The relationship between the number of seats won by the parties and their vote shares was one of the most disproportionate ever. The Liberal Democrats won 71 seats (at the time of writing) on a 12.2% share of the vote, Reform UK four seats on 14.3%. And Labour won a huge majority and more than 200 additional seats on a vote share hardly increased from 2019.
Why is this more marked now than in recent elections? The Lib Dems had a highly targeted campaign. They focused on seats where they were in second place to the Conservatives in 2019. This means the party’s vote share is concentrated and highly effective in those seats. At the same time Labour made its vote much more efficient. It is much more effective to win just enough votes in each seat, as Labour did last night, rather than have the same total number of votes but piled up to produce large majorities but far fewer seats. This is called vote efficiency and Labour mastered it this time around.
Of course, smaller majorities in a similar but more efficient vote share may be more vulnerable in future elections. That remains to be seen. Though the net effect may be to produce far more seats that are seen as marginal in 2028-29.
The new political map
The 2019 election was dominated by discussion of the “red wall” of seats from north-east England through to the Midlands that Labour lost to the Conservatives. In 2024 focus turned to the “blue wall” that the Lib Dems hoped to take from the Conservatives.
While the blue wall is not a well-grounded analytical construct, there is now a clear geographical heartland to the Lib Dem vote. Predominantly seats in the south-west and stretching eastwards to Oxfordshire, these are a combination of areas where the party had previous strengths in 2005 and 2010 and areas where there are relatively high proportions of affluent voters who voted remain in 2016.
They will pose the Lib Dems a challenge in the next parliament about how to position themselves relative to the other parties. The Conservatives may make this easier if they move further towards Reform UK’s territory, so the Lib Dems could continue to present themselves as a moderate alternative for Conservative voters. But if the Conservative election inquest realises the danger to the party’s left, it will be more difficult for the Lib Dems to hold on to all these seats.
Labour holds the largest number of seats in England, Scotland and Wales and has united voters from Battersea to Bassetlaw. Large voter coalitions are by their nature more difficult to keep together. The new Labour coalition is not much larger than in 2019 but it is more geographically and socially diverse. Many of the most left-leaning voters chose to vote for the Green party across the country, especially noticeable in urban seats with higher proportions of graduates. This could prove a challenge to Labour and is one many will point to, but equally Labour found itself under challenge from Reform UK in many seats where Ukip had been in second place in 2015.
Just as the Conservative party was caught between the Lib Dems and Reform UK with devastating consequence last night, so Labour may find itself similarly caught between the Greens and Reform in the future.
Fragmentation
The election had the lowest combined party share for Labour and the Conservatives since 1945. The combined effect of the Lib Dem recovery, the Reform UK vote share, and an increase for the Green party, as well as a higher than usual vote for independents of various kinds. This fragmentation has been a feature of British electoral politics for at least two decades but in earlier elections different parts were less successful, masking the overall impact. It is why the electoral system is creaking, as more parties gain moderate vote shares the winning post in a constituency can be quite low (Liz Truss lost her seat to Terry Jermy who won just 26.7% of the vote in the constituency) and why future elections may be even harder to call.
Whatever the next parliament brings, understanding the different party competitions happening within different geographic and demographic groups will be critical for when we do this all again.
Paula Surridge is a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol
